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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Firebird" data-source="post: 9606797" data-attributes="member: 7015803">I think this 'the market will always ensure there is no discrimination' take is very naive given the history of discrimination. The market is not always right, and it can lock into certain preferences that are not the best for ideological reasons. This is most obvious in sport (because easiest to objectively measure), where whole leagues were not taking advantage of talent for decades on end. Eventually the market may win out, especially if the incentives become extreme, but this can take a long time. Not relying on the market to do this motivated all sorts of nondiscrimination law in the US.I was quite precise that I meant the sales of the median book, not the sales of the genre overall. You raise some good questions in this post, and yeah, I don't think we can really do them justice here. Yeah, it is hard to measure exactly what is going on, because we can't do a randomized trial of different practices. To what extent do publishers shape demand vs respond to it? How does marketing play a role? How does the greater cultural context? It isn't easy to point to a particular title and show evidence of discrimination. However: If we know how discrimination has manifested historically, no this doesn't fail a sniff test. See above. I want to be very precise about what I'm claiming here. I'm not saying that there is some big conspiracy against works of a certain valence. I haven't seen definitive positive evidence to that effect. There is some suggestive evidence both for and against. But the arguments that have been offered in this thread asserting that there is certainly not, and that there could not be such discrimination because of market mechanisms and because Correia is still getting published do not hold water.</blockquote>

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