The Historic Reversal of Cultural Affordability
This article appears in the December 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
“Everyone is a V.I.P.” was the motto of the Disney theme parks for decades after the opening of Disneyland in 1955. A broad middle class could afford a trip to a Disney park, and visitors had equal access to the attractions once they were there. Unfortunately, America is a long way from that middle-class ideal today. Disney and other companies now make more money from people with high incomes, and they tailor their services accordingly. So much for the old Disney theme song: “When you wish upon a star / Makes no difference who you are.”
The original Disney vision reflected a long history of popular cultural affordability that once set America apart. At the time of the American Revolution and during the first half of the 19th century, European countries levied stamp taxes on newspapers, to raise their prices and block the growth of a cheap working-class press that might cause trouble. In contrast, as I showed in my book The Creation of the Media, Americans didn’t just revolt against the British stamp taxes; their new government subsidized newspapers and later magazines through below-cost postal rates. (Low-cost “media mail” rates for books and periodicals exist to this day, though they are much less significant than they once were.) In the 1830s and 1840s, a revolution of cheap print brought a popularly oriented “penny press.” That development initially had more to do with the popular politics of Jacksonian America than with technological advances in printing technology. Entrepreneurs developed faster presses to satisfy a market the partisan papers pioneered.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a series of low-cost innovations in popular culture. As working people had more discretionary income and free time, showmen found they could make money based on what historian David Nasaw calls a “new calculus of public entertainment”—lower prices and larger audiences. The new venues had to be cheap but respectable. Like the penny papers, some were named for their low price, from dime museums and penny arcades to nickelodeons, the first popular venues for movies.
Free public elementary and secondary education, public libraries, land grant colleges with low tuition, and the 20th century’s mass media—including free, over-the-air radio and television—all fit into this tradition. New Deal programs supported artists, musicians, writers, and actors and left cultural legacies across the country. Public broadcasting and the early vision of the internet as a cornucopia of free culture also aimed to fulfill the old ideals that originally motivated cheap postal rates for publications.
The economist William Baumol raised a famous caution about cultural affordability. The costs of cultural production, according to “Baumol’s law,” necessarily rise relative to other goods because productivity in culture cannot keep pace. His illustration was a live musical performance, which will always take musicians the same time. That’s true but of limited relevance to what has been happening lately.
How commercially produced culture is designed and priced depends on the distribution of income. In a society where the top 5 or 10 percent have gotten richer and dominate consumer spending, many companies unsurprisingly have reoriented their business. Management consultant Daniel Currell wrote in The New York Times in August that “Disney’s ethos began to change in the 1990s as it increased its luxury offerings, but only after the economic shock of the pandemic did the company seem to more fully abandon any pretense of being a middle-class institution.” As a consultant, Currell says he saw “industry after industry” use data analytics “to shift their focus to the big spenders” in their customer base. “Whereas in the 1970s and before, the revenue driving corporate profits came from the middle class, by the 1990s it was clear that the big money was at the top.”
A different political leadership might resist these tendencies. Not only might it use taxes and other measures to ensure that the gains from economic growth are more widely shared; it might also find new ways to do what earlier generations did in making culture and education more affordable. Today, however, the Trump administration is not just cutting back but eliminating federal support of the arts and education, supposedly for populist reasons. It’s popular access that will suffer.
Americans don’t need to do anything unprecedented to respond to current trends and policies. They just need to remember a great American tradition of making culture affordable.
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