I used to go to comic book, sci-fi and horror conventions and I met people who work in Hollywood and also hobbyists who manufacture and sell props used in various movies like the Star Trek communicators, and Batman batarangs, etc. People get engineering specs and plug them into computer programs and the lathes do all the work fabricating the toys and props.
When it comes to playing the guitar, I used to play a mix of soft rock (Paul Simon for example), hard rock and heavy metal. I played the music of bands like Hendrix, Van Halen, Ozzie Osbourne, the Scorpions, Clapton, etc.
I bought books and audio and video tapes to lean how to play what I couldn't figure out myself. I wrote a paper for Economic Decision Analysis (Managerial Economics with Calculus) about how there was a big market for transcriptions of guitar music as the new styles in music in the "80 (that"s when I was in grad school) were too difficult for most people to figure out. I did this paper just as those types of music were being transcribed for the very first time.
Supposedly, the number of companies doing the transcriptions would increase and then the people who own the copyrights to the songs would get involved and either sue the companies who did not have the rights or they would buy them out. This did happen actually. But I had predicted a saving being passed on to the consumer of the transcriptions and that never happened. Why it didn't happen revolves around entropy.
I drew all sorts of diagrams showing the changing slopes relating the various elasticities of supply and demand but in the final analysis there was no savings passed on.
Similarly, there is the debate between Keynesian and Monetarist economists. The monetarists claim that in the very long run, the supply is totally vertical or inelastic. So the government really can't do anything to help the economy out in the longest time frame.
Therefore, anything the government attempts to do aid the economy based on doctoring the economy's demand is doomed to failure. Very dismal indeed but that is a reason why economics is called the dismal science.
When I was working for AT&T, one of the District Managers was complaining about how little money there was in the budget one year and how he hoped it would be better next year. By the time the new budgets were made up, AT&T was in the middle of downsizing thousands of people. It is really a cruel world. Those who have the power live indoors and those who don't live in the streets.
