The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

It's weird to call it dead because I'm not sure it was ever truly alive.

Should we stop thinking about music as a job and start thinking about it as a hobbyist art form? Nobody is out there lamenting that you can’t make a living off of landscape painting. It’s a fun form of self expression that people will do regardless of the economics, so maybe the problem was ever thinking you could make a profession out of it?

At one point there were several million "MySpace Bands". That's music as a hobbyist art form. Some of them might even have been good.

Completely different markets, though: how much time per day do you spend looking at landscape paintings vs. listening to music?

Some are already worried: https://fortune.com/europe/2025/06/09/bnpl-loans-klarna-ceo-...

"How many jobs there should be for X" is not a question that can be answered by people whose main intent in the last few years has been to put others out of a job while claiming they're making the world a better place. Aka, us in tech.

Meanwhile, outside of museums most landscape art is also advertising. But I’ll spend two or three hours at an art museum when I get the chance.

It’s not really The Sims. You don’t usually go stand in front of one of your paintings and emote a bunch. It’s just there breathing life into a space.

I’ve played many gigs for $20-100, which is once a month or week and tough work relative to typing some code from home. I played for 25 mins in front of 1000 people and spent 8+ hours total all-in to make 200 bucks. Way harder money than coding.

Really, think back through history. Musicians were needed for dance, parties, all occasions. Now hit play on your phone connected to a speaker, GG musicians.

I like art but I cannot remember the last time I went to an exhibition. Certainly not since my wife and I became parents.

If musicians can't make a living, then both the quantity and quality of our musical options go down. Yes, hobbyists will always make music for themselves, but hobbyists won't necessarily record music for us or tour around the country for us to see in live venues. The issue is not that musicians inherently deserve to make a living; the issue is, what kind of musical market is available for consumers?

The problem with this as a framing device is that it doesn't describe very many working musical acts. 360 deals are probably generally gross? But Pemberton's situation is weird. In most cases, labels are in fact going to lose money from midlist acts.

The more you look at these kinds of businesses the more striking the pattern is. It's true of most media, it's true of startups, it's true for pharmaceuticals. The winners pay for the losers; in fact, the winners are usually the only thing that matter, the high-order bit of returns.

What's challenging about this is that you can't squeeze blood from a stone. The package offered to a midlist act might in fact be a loss leader; incentive to improve dealflow and optionality for the label, to get a better shot at the tiny number of acts whose returns will keep the label afloat. There may not be much more to offer to acts that aren't going to generate revenue.

David Lowery (a mathematician and the founder/lead vocalist of Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker) had an article about this years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3850935

It's worth a read (though things have probably changed in a number of ways since then). It's an interesting counterpoint to the automatic cite to Albini's piece that comes up in these discussions. Not that you should have sympathy for labels, just it's useful to have a clearer idea of what the deal was. The classic label deal with a mid-sized advance that never recouped (and which the labels never came back looking for when it didn't) was basically the driver for "middle-class" rock lifestyles; it's dead now.

Like, I see where you're going with this but music is one of those things that's actually the whole point of being alive. If all we ever do is do "useful" things ($$$) we lose our chance to actually live our lives.

Plenty are. But your experience in landscape painting transfers to other professional crafts, so the loss is mitigated. What does a skilled musician have to tranfer to if the industry falls apart? Teaching music?

I also really don't like reinforcing the idea that "the arts aren't meant to be a career". One of the biggest turnabouts in the 20th century is that you don't need to already be set for life in order to spend your days training your passions. The arts are (or were) no longer this "high class" means to distinguish yourself from the working class.

Meanwhile so much of society is built upon and weathered against destruction over such artisans. Are you really going to have a healthy society if all kids see growing up are pencil pushers, hard physical labor, managing retail, or hyper-specializing after 20+ years of schooling? What's all that work building up to? To serve billionaires?

That seems like a weird angle to take it, no? I know it's just an example but there is more than one type of artist, just as there's more than one type of musician. As simple as it is, someone needed to design the YCombinator logo. Art is everywhere as well, even on a site like this that doesn't host much visual media.

(P.S. I do remember the last time I went to a concert. October).

In some regards, the ZIRP era ending was needed; companies can't just make money by relying on hype for years, even decades before the piper needs to be paid. But of course it couldn't have ended in a worst time.

we absolutely should be pursing things that are creative, beautiful, and transcendental. but.. should we expect the pursuit of the creative, beautiful, and transcendental to be a career? we should encourage everybody to do because it is inherently valuable instead of pursuing it because its a job.

nobody is out there lamenting that we're not supporting a 'middle class' of baseball players.

the top 0.001% get to the big leagues and make bank. the top 0.01% scrape by in the minors. nobody else makes a dime. yet... plenty of people are still passionate about the game and play it for free. the guys playing in an adult rec leauge aren't thinking "there's a career in this I can put together a good highlight reel this season". they're playing because they find it fun and fulfilling.

so maybe musicians should view music like professional sports? do it because you love it. start a band with your friends. play gigs at your local bar every friday. but don't kid yourself that it's a career.

I think most artists would tell you that if people couldn't make a living as visual artists, the quality of new art in the world would decrease tremendously. Painting is a craft - it takes a lot of training to develop the skills. It also takes a ton of work to develop one's own style. Then there's the whole business part of marketing the work.

Very few great artists would have been able to reach their level of quality just doing it as a hobby.

That's not contrary to what I said, which was "hobbyists won't necessarily [emphasis added] record music for us". And of course you didn't respond to my point about touring.

In any case, the music and recordings of hobbyists are likely to be inferior to the music and recordings of professionals, because in general, professionals are better than hobbyists at almost everything, music being only one example.

> A lot of the music I listen to is from youtubers with a handful of views.

If that's the future you want, then I guess you're in luck.

Maybe that is why lots of people are struggling more now while the economy numbers say things are better than ever.

We do spend a lot of time looking at photos!

I was very aware that I was lucky. You can be the best, you can have a great network, but (in my experience), luck is the main factor. and the "luck" window in the music space is more and more narrow currently.

The future feudal lords will just sell to each other and ignore the jobless, moneyless masses. We don’t like to hear this, but normal people will likely become less and less economically relevant, to the point where their total economic activity will one day be a rounding error next to the economic activity of the top 0.0N%.

I worked with a founder who dealt with only a small number of very rich customers. He would say “We only sell to the rich because they have the money.” The future looks like a more extreme version of this.

recording also works to give a 'real job' to those who insist on making music for a living.

Only a few have ever made a job of performing. The midevil bard was often a second son of a nobel supported as a way to ensure they kill the older brother for the throne. Everyone else music was a hobby they did after farming was done.

In the absence of that, neurosis is certain to flourish.

So, it is not an economic matter but a matter of the psychodynamics of society. For the sake of the health of the whole, some members of the whole must be able to bring in certain vibes, patterns, states of mind, ideas, etc. And without the ability to pursue that and only that skillset, they won't be able to succeed at that. And it is required for the functioning of the whole.

It's a bit akin to the way the entire body depends on the cells that process ATP. If you eliminate all cells that serve that role, the entire body dies, even though they are a miniscule aspect of the entire operation. That is where the animating spirit comes from.

Seems to me that music has an additional challenge which is most revenue channels requires middlemen: streaming infrastructure, merch factories, venues owners, technicians, etc which artist can't/won't replace.

At some point musicians - as product creators - need to have a clear biz model for their enterprise and passion to try it. Not just passion to create, passion to sell.

Now, with AI, all signs seem to indicate that the industry will finally reset to what was the norm for hundreds of years : Artists would be supported on their craft by patrons and benefactors. Most didn't make it to be wealthy, but at least, they got to enjoy time in their craft.

I sell you stuff worth 5 billion, you give me 5 billion. Nothing happened. Maybe you even consume the product so there is less wealth.

Only labor can generate value. Work is what transforms a thing into another thing that has more value than before. Machines and AI do not create value.

You might wonder what would happen if they had an general AI, maybe actual autonomous robots? Would those create value? Well, at first whoever got the first AGI would get incredibly rich but if everyone had access to that tech, the prices for everything that can produced with it would plummet down until they are the cost of running the AI.

Rich people get richer by employing poor people. So they can extract the value they produce. If they don't employ anyone, they are not making any profit. (Well for actual free markets, you can of course make profit being a monopolist and stuff or just do crime.)

So yes, rich people are screwed. That is why they buy bunkers in New Zealand. That is why we see the rise of fascism, because they will have to tighten the screws to keep the ship running a little while longer.

I will cheekily argue that the "transferable skill" of failed athletes is charisma. It's pretty clear that being able to talk about sports is a cheat code for upwards mobility (no matter the industry) and the mentality it builds is of high social value (you'll never find trouble finding a local court or field to make a pickup game with. An artists Meetup, a bit harder to arrange). Certainly more than 99% of artists.

But to properly answer your point, I don't have the full answer of how to balance "necessary careers" with "dream careers". If you want to maintain a satisfied populace (aka, prevent a violent coup by people who feel they have nothing to lose), they need to feel their dreams are reachable. Emphasis on "feel".

You don't even need to make money off your dreams per se. But you need time for it, and basics safeties taken care of. the current atmosphere offers neither.

That depends, how much do you value culture (and, my extension: cultural power)? If it's a take-it-or-leave-it kind of thing, then whatever the market will bear.

Once, when criticising the toxic effects of advertising, I got a response to the effect of 'but how will streamers be able to support themselves?!'. Which I was really struck by, because it presumes that streamers should be able to support themselves by streaming. Should they? Is this actually a desirable outcome? Yes, the financial viability probably leads to more streaming, but what about the quality of the overall streaming? And what about the opportunity cost when someone gives up their job and puts their labours into the business of streaming?

There will always be some level of cultural output, since there will always be passionate people. But has making the arts an industry (through an ever expanding artifice of 'intellectual property', and the ever expanding criminalisation of its subversion) actually led to better arts? Would this be a better or worse world if people built bridges in their day job and played rock gigs at night, solely for the love of it?

I'm not trying to do a Socratic dialogue here, I genuinely don't know. But I suspect the answer is much more nuanced than 'more money = better art', and I am sceptical of certain legal or economic distortions based on that assumption (e.g. life + 70 copyright terms, surveillance advertising, surveillance DRM software, billion-dollar industries that subsist solely on 'IP', fines and prison terms for unauthorised sharing, or the reversing or bypassing of DRM, etc).

Many musicians teach others. Without them how will we learn one of the most beautiful / coolest things to ever exist?

I’ve tried learning from an app and it’s not the same as spending an hour with my guitar teacher. It’s not even close. I wish he were paid more given how talented he is and how hard he works.

I found very little actual insight in this article. I think musicians have been struggling for decades and the parents have known for at least as long to tell their kids to get a degree regardless of their talents. Schools like Berklee are… questionable at best. Lots off nepo babies just taking a few years to fuck about, basically.

Now someone with a $400 controller, pirated music, and some free time can do it. Loads of people willing to play at venues for free just for the fun of it have crushed the viability of doing it as an actual job.

Anyone who could live on this planet without music is a psycopath.

So you worked with someone who you claim to be a direct -knowing even- participant in this trend. You presumably benefited from this work too. No?

It's impressive how many people bemoan the dangers they see in a thing, while continuing to contribute to its growth, again and again and again, as long as the personal benefit keeps working their way.

Maybe you don't value music or live music, but there are a lot of people out there that do. You not caring much for it doesn't change the fact or make it ok that they're getting stiffed by those with the upper hand in the relationship.

I venture that live music has suffered because of it.

He's your guitar teacher. It would be difficult for you to state a wish that was more completely under your own control.

It reminds me of ex-Soviet chess players. The emigration of so many good grandmaster-level players diluted the market, and unless you were in the absolute upper echelons (like Kramnik, Karpov, or Kasparov), you pretty much had to supplement your income by teaching on the side.

Among other things, I play large-ensemble jazz. Over the years, I've played in a number of bands, and the level of quality and variety achieved by players with professional training is a noticeable step above amateur players. The material that my current band plays is unplayable without training. About half of the band members have music degrees (many teach music in the public schools) and the other half are dedicated amateurs with past training like myself.

Other styles, like folk music, are essentially sustained by amateurs.

Some things can only be done by amateurs, or professionals who also have a musical hobby, such as playing experimental, obscure, or historical music. Amateur musicians also support the professional scene by attending performances, taking lessons, buying instruments (resulting in economies of scale), etc.

I can keep playing this game, as can others. Why do we need all that money invested in data collection and disseminating cat videos, political unrest, etc.

But how are you going to get good if you don't get any practice and feedback?

I remember someone lamenting people videoing comedians in small venues and posting the fails, that follow you forever. How are you going to get good at stand up if you can't fail and learn?

Not everyone can be Steven King and get an advance worth 3 years salary for their first book.

Well, you know, it is kinda like how companies are replacing all the juniors with AI. It's cheap, for now. But then comes the question of what do you do in 5-10 years when you need some seniors with actual experience?

Let’s say your child wants to be an actor. One way to make this happen is to be a successful actor yourself - require your children to be cast in the film in return for you starring. This is how famous acting families pushed their kids forwards, including Nicholas Cage (Coppola) and Jeff Bridges.

More relevant for HN is rich people. So you are tech rich and your kid wants to act. Fund the movie on the condition your child acts in it. That is the way since movies began.

There's lots of value in amateur engineering. What if we deprofessionalized engineering via making it difficult for anyone to make a living doing it? Some people would no doubt still continue to do it, to scratch their itches and exercise their minds. But they would spend less time doing it, less time sudying how to do it, more time doing whatever it takes to pay the bills and claw out some semblance of security. We certainly wouldn't fall into technical poverty immediately, and maybe we wouldn't miss what we don't quite invent / develop, but both the people who actually love it enough to pay attention and the professionals would know the difference between what isn't getting done.

(And in fact, the US is standing on the precipice of a FAFO event with research here, having just made it more difficult to make a living focusing on it.)

What happens to a field that can only be engaged as a dilettante, never as a committed investor?

*Realizing this might be confusing in context. I meant e.g. navigational instruments

Not really comparable experience though.

When the state dictates artistic content, that is socialism.

when you think about it

Oddly enough Berklee is considered to be a jazz school, but the players from there who I consider to be real stand-outs (performing at an international level, or well on their way to doing so) have chosen to earn their livings outside of mainstream jazz.

For a band, it's virtually impossible to find work outside the weekend. If a region had a few restaurants that were known for year round "live music Mondays", "live music lunches", etc, it would increase the number of hours that a musician could work during the week, and make full time performance viable for more musicians. Of course, people would also need to support these performances by patronizing the venues that host them.

But until a working musician can fill their weekday calendar with paying gigs without excessive travel/lodging costs, you'll continue to see talented musicians drop out and do something else.

80s entry level coder

90s team lead

00s manager

10s cto

20s cto with help from parents

Wage stagnation and inflation and asset inflation.

I'd look at NFTs for similar market dynamics. Some big winners but mostly people not making a dime.

Damn, people somehow made art in 10000BC, when everyone was a hunter-gatherer by necessity.

This comment makes the same point, better than I did:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44410292

If we're looking at extremes, I don't think the ultra rich are in as bad a position as you want them to be.

Before that, I mostly gravitated to 'blockbuster musicians', old classics, 1970s psychedelic rock. Today I buy some unknown musician's album every few days (and I pay what I'd pay for a 'proper' album, even if it is pay what you want).

Part of that is simply availability. The old record stores of old were often just "what's popular" with a side dish of "what the owner likes". Today? I found some Touareg rock band the other day. In the 1990s, that was virtually impossible even for music lovers.

Part of it is that today, I pay for what I like. Radio sucks, the classics are oversaturated, and often enough new releases are just qualitatively worse - both in composition as well as remasters which tend to sacrifice nuance for loudness. But indy bands? I don't expect perfection, but often enough find it.

Now, I understand I am a rare breed. In a Spotify world, the one buying FLACs is exotic. I do understand that the mid-range musician is not going to become a millionaire - but who ever did?

The example in the article sounds a lot like the artist has been bent over a barrel by the record company - a pattern even "successful" musicians have experienced. Maybe instead of chasing fame, the solution is to do your own marketing.

The musical middle class wasn’t thinned out by the audience, but by labels and streaming models. If you’re not topping the charts, you vanish between promotion costs and algorithmic obscurity - unless you go directly to the listener.

We decimated recordings as a revenue stream (and literal decimation might be wildly generous, given that stream payouts frequently never add up to a single sale for many artists). We let people peddle the lie that artists can just find some other revenue source like merchandising or another job or anything else rather than paying for the thing people ostensibly value.

Minor league success was never an easy proposition but we had a chance to give it better margins. And we let Spotify and others eat those, and let too many people tell comforting lies to consumers along the way.

And without a major cultural shift, we will do the same thing for everyone eventually.

1. Any of the creative professions have way more applicants than positions so nepotism dominates. It's almost shocking how many nepo babies there are in Hollywood. It infects every level. It could be that some rich person will fund your indie movie as long as you give a major role to their child. It can be family connections to studio decision-makers,. It can be currying favor with Hollywood heavyweights. Whatever. Either way, getting in as a nobody is increasingly difficult;

2. Education. First, you have legacies. Roughly a third of Harvard's undergrad class are legacies ie the children of wealthy donors. That's the real DEI. But also it's the cost. The wealthy can absorb the cost of an elite education.

This is a real issue with medical school. Someone can often graduate with $300-600k in student loan debt. By the time they finish residency they may owe $500k-1M. The wealthy can absorb this. There are a few medical schools now that offer free tuition thanks to some large endowments. Many medical schools try and have people from more diverse economic backgrounds but it's difficult. Not having to worry about money means you caa afford to spend a year doing unpaid research to pad your resume. The free tuition schools seem to have skewed more to students from wealthier backgrounds because they're simply better connected and better able to game getting into such schools;

3. Housing costs specifically and the cost of living generally. 30 years ago if you were trying to make it as a musician in LA you could rent an apartment for $300-400/month. You could live cheaply. You could chase that dream. Now? The average apartment seems to be near or over $2000/month.;

4. The disappearance of third spaces. Higher housing costs mean the higher cost of businesses. If a bar or a coffee shop needs now absorb rent of $200,000/year where once it was $10-20k, that affects what busineses are viable and for those that are, it's an input to the cost of everything. Well, those were performance spaces for up and coming acts. You see this in the UK, for example, where the number of pubs just keeps going down as they sold and converted into apartments. Community spaces just cannot survive with the high cost of property; and

5. The freedom to fail. I saw a clip of Allison Williams recently who acknowledge this. For those that don't know, she was one of the main cast of HBO's Girls. She's the daughter of Brian Williams, a long-time news anchor. Fun fact: the entire main cast of this show were all nepo babies. It cannot be overstated what relieving the fear of becoming homeless can do to your opportunities.

Now some, particularly here, have long pointed to tech as their key to social mobility. That's been true for a long time but I suspect many here are in for a rude shock. We're already seeing it with the layoffs and how many people apply for any given job. AI will make this worse.

And who do you think will get positions in this shirnking pool of opportunities? It'll be the same children of wealthy people. It'll be connections, access to funding and other factors that give you opportunities.

* Is the amount of music listened to in a day down? * Is the rate of music creation down? * Given some metric of diversity is music diversity down? * Given some metric of quality is music quality down? * Are there fewer artists per capita / in total? * Has the Gini coefficient really shifted?

I assume that for almost all of these, the answer is actually no. Presumably, technology has made making more higher quality music easier and cheaper than ever, and people are listening to more than ever.

If hundreds of millions of people decide to use Spotify and Youtube to obtain their music, and if that means most artists are shafted in the process, no secret organization enacted some conspiracy to achieve that. Instead, technology enabled a new form of consumption, and producers faced a new level of competition.

The "live from Emmet's place" series that you can find on youtube has some of the best jazz players today playing mainstream jazz.

Well you don’t need to. The answer is ”as many as the market will support”, as it is with any other product. However, your rhetorical question misses the point completely. The question is not should a person just make thing x as a hobby, but that this global multi-billion dollar industry shares very little of it’s revenue to the people who make thump thump and bum bum that get’s asses on the floor and people to move. All of the examples in this article are clearly quite successful acts that people are willing to pay to listen to and are quite integral part of the economy as a whole (not to mention softer values such as cultural enrichment of all human life), but are struggling to make the ends meet. Why.

Because some else literally takes the money people pay to listen to them. If I want to listen rapper Yakkedi Yap’s new single Xingabow and give him money, I would be better off to sending them money in an envelope than listening them from any streaming app (maybe Bandcamp is an exception), or even going to their concert or buying their merch. Because someone literally steals the money.

At least if you buy a landscape painting from a gallery the gallery takes just 20-40% and artist gets the rest minus materials and taxes. They don’t take 60%, then minus every possible cost from the artist, then take what is left and give it to Drake.

The Beatles and Van Halen did the same.

Same thing with music. Streaming pays so little compared to physical media now that artists never make up the difference.

spotify in particular cemented a payment structure that disadvantages any “serious” music versus endless repeat pop songs, while also being completely corrupted by conflict of interest from record labels with an ownership stake. now they manufacture their own muzak and steer your playlist to it, draining the last bits of revenue possibility away from these “middle class musicians.”

youtube streamed music for free for years, paying no artists, and it was one of its core growth engines. completely asymmetrical outcome.

the whole thing denigrated musicians, and music itself. hordes of early online young tech professionals making great money at their office jobs poo pooing the concerns of an entire industry which previously enabled some of the most sophisticated artistic endeavors our culture ever attempted.

just dumb. a complete victory of lowbrow values.

baffling someone is writing this article in 2025. at every fork in the road, the path was taken that would give less revenue to the musicians. and ~no one in tech felt it was a problem.

talking about it like there is a revelation or an emerging phenomenon here mystifies, while rubbing salt in the wound.

Not sure what the problem is, the streams will pay the budget of the movie, just like the old movie studios did. So where is the difference? Do they pay much less and no royalties?

More reliable, no divas, no drunk musicians, always on time, the repertoire is literally unlimited.

Literally everyone is an artist, even if their art consists of bad doodles and singing in the shower. Sure, some people are more talented than that, but expecting to make a living with art? Nah...

The customer of such a movie isn’t the audience but the wealthy patron sponsoring the movie. I suspect this self-promotion motivation is a large reason why so many movies are so bad.

Until we start viewing "fanciful" ideas as realistic, our problems will persist. This article is another in the long series of observations of seemingly distinct problems which are actually facets of a larger problem, namely that overall economic inequality is way too high. It's not just that musicians, or actors, or grocery store baggers, or taxi drivers, or whatever, can't make a living, it's that the set of things you can do to make a living is narrowing more and more. Broad-based solutions like basic income, wealth taxes, breaking up large market players, etc., will do far more for us than attempting piecemeal tweaks to this or that industry.

Universal basic income is impossible to justify morally.

On top of that come the contacts and being rich. But the contacts are not a thing other people couldn't make as well, especially if they are good. One of the somewhat hidden benefits of higher education are the contacts you will make. Maybe you're not rich and your parents are roofers while you want to become an actor, but if you're good and well connected you might benefit from other peoples connections. This is how I started to make my living in a foreign country with two parents without any shared background: There were people who had those contacts and I benefitted of them simply by being the one they chose because I am accurate, reliable, on time, knowledgeable, patient and good at what I do.

But

It’s funny whenever there is a comment like “hey, maybe we shouldn’t let individual people get so rich they can basically become thier own country.” Always get called socialists/communists. You can be capitalist while also having some care and protection for the little people.

We can only speculate about the future having more AI-code or the repercussions thereof (as many do).

Lots and lots of people can create arts. In old era when people would just gather together and sing. Nobody would make a living off that. Very very few people were making a living by performing to nobility.

Modern recording industry with specialized instruments distorted this by allowing more talented people make a living. Yet it destroyed a lot of community singing by not-highly-talented people. On one hand more people could make a living, on the other hand much much less people were creating arts.

Nowadays it feels like we’re returning back to the natural flow. More people are creating arts since modern instruments are widely accessible. But fewer people can make a living.

Overall, I’d say more people creating arts is preferable outcome. And best art is created for the sake of it as a hobby.

  - making movies is hard. A lot of things that require years to master need to go right. A *ton* of tech is involved. 
  
  - making movies is expensive. Money alone won't make you a good movie, but many productions are so on the edge that some choice they had to make for monetary reason will cause the bad. 
  
  - making movies is complex, that means making a masterful one requires multiple botched attempts and experiences by all people involved. These botched attempts are also what you see.  
  

UBIs don't have these problems (or, rather, they'd have some of them in different ways, but in ways that are closer to market capitalism than socialism).

And for me with musicians the number is zero.

Your morals are very strange if they don't include care for others.

You're correct in that UBI is something different than socialism.

What economic inequality would you deem small enough?

And why do you care about inequality, and not eg the absolute livings standards of the least well off? We can 'solve' inequality by just destroying everything the rich have, but that won't make anyone better off.

Btw, the absolute living standards of all members of society, including the least well off, have never been better. And that's true for almost any society you care to look at on our globe. (Removing eg those currently at war, that weren't at war earlier.)

It's pretty easy to justify morally. I mean at least as easy as any other welfare.

The net payments for UBI plus (income) taxes don't have to look to different from what many countries already do today. It's just the accounting that looks a bit different.

I don't want to abolish all taxes, I'm not a libertarian. But giving away the money you took from somebody else needs a justification (for example to pay for the roads). And I find "income redistribution" for the sake of it not an acceptable goal.

If there was a button that I could press that would double the wealth of the 99% of people and quadruple the wealth of the top 1%, I would keep pressing it, even though it technically makes inequality worse and worse every time.

It would be morally reprehensible not to press that button.

EDIT: just be clear, I am talking about real (i.e. inflation adjusted) wealth. I am not talking about how many zeros we add to all dollar amounts.

So I am talking about the number of houses and shoes and cars we have, and the amount of ice cream and education we can enjoy.

Economic inequality small enough to not be the root cause of the particular problem you are interested in.

The problems of inequality go well beyond living standards. E.g. political control in a very unequal society gets concentrated in a few people.

Connect with fans, treat them well and stay creative - and they'll buy your stuff. Often a lot of it.

It is maybe time for people like you to realize that the current crisis in the US is a direct result of this zero-sum worldview, where you think you can only win if someone else loses. Some turned that around and infer someone else losing will make them win, which is where a lot of the worse-than-soviet cruelty in US society comes from. Where producing win-win outcomes should be prefered, part of the US seems to be craving for lose-lose.

It is hard for the fish to perceive the nature of the water they have been swimming in their whole lives, but trust me: from an European standpoint the frequency soviet-style stories emerging from the US is rising.

People don’t call ambulances because they’re afraid of the cost, they die in the back of rideshares or sit bleeding out waiting for someone to Google the cheapest ER.

People drink poisoned water in one of the richest countries in the world, not as a one-time scandal but as a structural outcome, in Flint, in Jackson, in places the cameras moved on from.

Housing is a market, not a right, and so entire cities now feature tent villages under highways while luxury units sit empty, protected not by need but by capital.

In parts of Louisiana, California and Iowa, the air you breathe and the water you touch can kill you, but only if you’re poor enough or Black or unlucky enough to live near a chemical plant, a battery smelter, a lake no one bothers to save. In these sacrifice zones, life expectancy drops like it’s wartime. In urban centres people film others burning alive on the subway (NYC) and call it content.

There are cemeteries of Black Americans being paved over for parking garages, with courts hesitating to intervene. These aren’t edge cases—they’re the shape of the thing. This is not the freedom that was promised. This is the bureaucracy of cruelty operating not as failure, but as design. And the worst part is: many still think this is the price of success.

Let's have a look at Scandinavia or Germany. They have reasonably generous welfare systems, but they are means tested. So for the sake of argument, declare them to be 'truly livable'. Especially by global standards.

Now I claim, that you can get pretty much the same net payments (of means tested welfare - taxes) that these countries have today with a system of (UBI - taxes). Basically, at the moment both taxes and welfare are means tested; you could move to UBI by moving all the means testing from welfare to taxes.

Because net payments would be pretty much the same, all incentives would stay pretty much the same as today.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax which is one way to implement something like a UBI.

Of course, if you want to go much beyond what Germany and Scandinavia are already paying, you'd need even higher taxes or a stranger economy.

Btw, per capita the US is one of the world leaders of social welfare spending. They spend more than France. (Mostly because while France spends a higher proportion of GDP, American GDP per capita is much higher.)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/01/writers-recall...

Homelessness in the west is mostly not because people can't afford a house but because they'd rather spend their money on other things (drugs) or don't want a house at any price, or can't avoid losing their house because of their behavior.

a) just a theory not a proven thing and

b) based on flawed assumptions that were quickly disproven. See the 2008 paper "Should You Invest in the Long Tail?" finding that consumers don't like niche products and the bottom 80% sold $0, contrary to the theory's prediction.

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=32337

Had nothing to do with merchandising or whatever. The Long Tail was never correct.

Software development will go this way, too, as we are all starting to learn.

The problem is people are ok with corporate, mass-produced slop—whether it be music, furniture, or (soon) software. Fewer and fewer people are willing to pay for human craftsman-produced product.

I'd like the one small enough that I won't die from my (treatable) first major medical event due to being unable to fund 100% of treatment costs.

I'd also like one small enough that me and the kids didn't spend most of the 2010s in hunger-level poverty.

That'd be a start.

Ironically, our society is basically continuously pushing that button today, much to the glee of the 1%.

To be clear: I was talking about real prosperity.

You are talking about nominal prosperity. And I agree: just adding a zero at the end of all dollar amounts wouldn't make anyone better off.

That stopped when we started to play from record.

Whether UBI would make the problem quantitatively worse depends on the exact design of the UBI system you have in mind and the current system you want to compare it with.

We did this during Covid as furlough payments, and the result was high inflation. Wages didn’t significantly increase to match, so in my country anyway people feel that the cost if living is significantly worse post-Covid.

Anywhere that implemented UBI would also have to implement rent controls, otherwise Landlords would just see it as money on the table. But you couldn’t have controls for all prices, so inflation would still result.

Nope, in Germany you are required to work. If you can't find a job, you still have to try (and prove that), you need to stay at home / be available (and notify the state about your vacation or you might be punished by receiving less welfare) and of course you have to use up all money or wealth you have and state, in written, that you have no other sources of wealth.

So UBI would absolutely change incentives here.

So if everyone got 10x richer overnight, but the top 1% got 1000x richer, that would increase inequality by any reasonable metric, but it would help with the benchmarks you mentioned.

Though in practice it's fairly easy to put in a token effort so your welfare won't be cut, but avoid actually getting hired.

But you are very right that the token effort is still effort.

> [...] and of course you have to use up all money or wealth you have and state, in written, that you have no other sources of wealth.

That is similar to taxing that money and wealth. But you are right.

Nice trick if you can pull it off.

So for the 1GBP you print, you recoup up to 20p in VAT, or less for foodstuffs.

And more money chasing the same goods and services means…?

Rapid release schedule (except the last year or so), inconsistent genre choices, questionable aesthetic choices, not much marketing, and just some generally goofy stuff and it just works. I think part of it is folks just tired of the packaged crap and see it for what it is. Pure authentic stuff.

If velocity speeds up and inflation goes up, the central bank will remove money from circulation to hit their target. If velocity goes down, the central bank will inject money into circulation.

The fiscal multiplier is zero.

(Or rather, any deviation of the fiscal multiplier from zero is evidence of an incompetent central bank.)

No. The high inflation was a result of Fed policy, not fiscal tricks like furlough payments.

> Anywhere that implemented UBI would also have to implement rent controls, otherwise Landlords would just see it as money on the table. But you couldn’t have controls for all prices, so inflation would still result.

You are right that UBI can lead to higher relative prices for rent.

And that's why you would want to pair UBI with land value taxes, not rent control.

(UBI would not lead to inflation, and would not necessarily lead to higher absolute rents. The overall level of inflation is something an inflation targeting central bank, like the Fed or ECB, controls.)

Especially the failures to replicate.

I don't think that's how people commonly understand how UBI should be financed.

In the last place I rented (London), the private landlords were unlikely to own the land. Fixed term leasehold was overwhelming common, not freehold.

But again: providing universal healthcare is all about giving (poor) people more prosperity. It has nothing to do with inequality by itself.

If tomorrow Mr Zuckerberg got 100x better healthcare, but everyone else only got 10x better healthcare, that would fix the problem you mentioned, but would technically make inequality worse.

Bandcamp is chock full of bands, from home produced stuff, to bands spending saved money on a cheap studio. It's enough that even in the sub-niches I like, I can listen to 10-20 newly released albums every week.

I doubt more than a small single digit percentage of them make money that way, but they very often really enjoy what they are doing.

For any meaningful scheme, you would be talking about hundreds of billions.

There’s no way taxing super-rich-only would cover fair UBI. It’ll have to be much much wider. Unless 99% of jobs would become automatized.

Or, instead of handing out more and more money from the state, try to introduce dynamism again. Try to reduce the amount of times that YouTube takes videos or accounts down for example.

In euro style systems very few people receive welfare at a given time. Many people may receive it at some point in lifetime, but not at the same time. UBI would completely change the picture.

On top of that, salaries for basic jobs would need to get much higher to incentivize people to work. Thus UBI would have to be much higher as current welfare. Unless you expect citizens to live on UBI but keep services cheap with cheap migrant labor.

You may say that people just care about the music and not the musician, and that thus an AI-generated track is as good as any. Perhaps. But when I was a kid, all my pals developed their musical taste by word-of-mouth and I-want-to-be-cool-like-you-and-listen-to-Rammstein. Can't imagine all edgy teenagers will fall in love with an AI model.

I'm not arguing in favour, I'm noting the deep historical social worth of a musician. It's classic veblen goods for a few, and serfdom for the rest.

Composers had ambiguous social standing. Virtuosi were superstars, but you didn't want your daughter to marry one.

What if the underlying relative value of music was returning to its organic roots? Maybe this is a version of the burger index and their labour value has been overweight for 50 or more years?

The cost in time and effort to become a musician is comparable to an apprenticeship or a surgeon. That cost isn't reflected in their value in the market.

It’s never a popular thing to say on HN but the country the typifies inequality most starkly is the US - and it’s also the one with the biggest set of problems: huge issues with drug use, obesity, widespread unhappiness, simmering resentment, a divided nation. The countries that are getting this right (and by right I mean GDP, happiness, heath, pretty much any meaningful index of “a good life”) are the ones that fund public services, healthcare, education, etc through higher taxes.

~ braces for downvotes ~

When they are younger they could pay for acting classes, acting camps and help them get into local productions.

Out of school they pay for livings costs, education and any additional classes. Living in New York or LA and being able to concentrate on getting parts of training rather than having to make money would be a huge boast.

Maybe at the next stage getting their kid an agent or manager who has contacts and experience to get their kid the roles.

Perhaps you mean throwing a few thousand dollars at student-level films to ensure their kid gets an important part. I guess maybe some will write 6 (7?) figure cheques to get their kid a part, but that probably doesn't happen often.

This is almost certainly the case. The music business is the economics of superstars. see: Rosen, Sherwin. “The Economics of Superstars.” The American Economic Review 71, no. 5 (1981): 845–58.

Small personal difference translate into enormous differences in earnings. The income curve has only small area for middle incomes. Either you are below middle, or you quickly get into upper middle class or higher incomes. It's not a market failure but a predictable dynamics of this particular field.

Artists low pay is driven by two things:

First, an oversupply of talent willing to work below a living wage keeps incomes low.

Second, promotion and marketing are the primary drivers of an artist's financial outome, leading to uneven deals where labels handle the heavy lifting and deserve larger piece of the cake. Once an artist's career reaches a certain scale, their earnings can grow to outweigh their direct creative input.

One thing that could help is transparency, but in a way the lack of transparency is a good part of what keeps the system going. Most people would not agree if they knew how little they would keep if they were successful; "what do you mean I have to pay for the losers?". They would just want to pay for what was necessary for their success, ignoring every expense that didn't work as a "stupid label decision". The thing is that nobody has a true recipe for success, you can just get reasonable estimates on your bets, but each bet will always be a biased coin flip.

You see, I firmly believe that music, itself, is a form of currency.

So exchanging that currency for another is the problem.

However, I can say with a great deal of certainty - having observed musicians for decades - musicians make money when they make live music.

Not all music can be played live.

But live musicians are the future of music.

It’s one thing to be able to conjure up whatever you want with AI.

But, do it live, in front of 1000 people.

Or, even 10.

I can walk through my city today and encounter 100 (easily) musicians making money every hour, plying their wares into the stones of the streets and pedestrian bubbles.

But yeah, it’s hard work. Why not make an AI do it?

You could theoretically have market socialism, where the only difference from market capitalism would be the lack of distinction between workers and owners. Gig economy would be its kryptonite, though: if allow it you are back to exploiting workers, if you ban it you will also ban a whole lot of actual self-employed professionals.

I guess busking has existed in many societies, but that's hardly making a living, and certainly not middle class.

Weddings, funerals and birthdays, that's where i see community contribution, not full time professionals. Perhaps community contribution involving a little side income, but chances are, in pre-recording days, not even that. Not much other entertainment possibilities to spend your Sunday on other than being part of the band.

(it's funny how middle class is often portaied as a modern achievement, when the past is so full of examples of population that isn't the ruling elite, but economically still far above another layer of dropouts that would just move from opportunity to opportunity until an early death, at least unless they end up at some form of monastery)

Of course there's no silver bullet and high progressive taxes for the mega-wealthy do have other negative effects. Like people being less motivated to strive. Less capital to invest and less competitive companies born.

But billionaires paying less taxes than the guy sweeping floors at the local mall is absurd. Once you reach a certain threshold of wealth, your taxes actually start going down.

Until they are dying on the streets, they are actually make a living.

If they cannot make a decent living with their low income - UBI wouldn't help. UBI is a safety net, a minimal salary payment. You are never going to have a decent life on minimal salary.

The two are connected. You can either transfer more wealth to the poorer people without taxing the rich (lets say by helicopter money), or transfer it from the rich to the poor. In both cases the rich become less rich in relative terms. It should also make intuitive sense - if the rich (lets say top 5%) hold 95% of wealth it means there is less for everyone else - less wealth that is because the resources like land, apartments and good education are finite and not abundant.

2. From Wikipedia it appears they responded to all the substantial criticism. It also mentions an independent study largely agreeing with the results.

3. This is one book amongst a mountain of research, and there are problems with inequality that go beyond those the book mentions.

The top 1% getting 1000x richer is a problem, because trickle down economics is bullshit. Money that exists as part of a pile of gold in a dragon's den does not move the economy.

Not true. The 'B' in UBI means 'Basic'. UBI wil pay your rent, utilities, and food, but not much else. Now, there are some people that are willing to just exist on only the bare minimum, but that's a significant minority. The vast majority of people want more. There will be plenty of people willing to do minimum wage jobs to top-up their UBI so they can afford extras like holidays, nicer phones, meals out, etc...

The main difference would be that the security of UBI would give them more power to distch a job if they were being abused in some way, rather than being so desperate that even if their employer is abusing them they are forced to take it because they need the job to survive.

I feel like too much discussion on UBI is poisoned by the idea that the vast majority of people are bone idle and are willing to just sit at home doing nothing and just existing with the bare minumum required to live. It's just not true

Although it functioned better than centrally planned socialism, it still had lots of issues related to prices, particularly of capital. Who provides capital for enterprise? In practice, the state. And this ran into the same political economy issues with centrally planned economies. What happens when a company is about to go under? Unemployment is bad, so the worker-owned company gets a bail out. Who can start a firm? Well, better make sure your company satisfies the objectives of your local government.

The money that just sits untaxed on the vaults of the extremely wealthy should be taxed to finance this.

This is trickle down economics done right. Remove money from the wealthy and redistribute it to benefit society.

* The Death of the Middle-Class

There I fixed their title

That's why poor people pay the highest percentage of their income: they have no choice, no ways to do tax evasion.

The extremely wealthy will also have an army of lawyers and accountants to mitigate against this, not to mention trusts and holding companies.

It’s a nice idea, but the implementation is tricky.

I’m not arguing for them, just being realistic.

Getting this and that cert. is costly, but even things like hands-om experience in new domains is inaccessible if you don't have the cash flow.

Now how to finance a UBI is a good question.

A land value tax would be an interesting choice. Especially since a UBI will probably lead to higher rents.

No, because we outnumber Mark Zuckerberg by more than 10 fold

Anyway, I would argue that having guaranteed healthcare is 10293762397697x better than not having guaranteed healthcare

Approximately no one has vaults of gold like Scrooge McDuck. The richest people largely hold their wealth in company shares.

So you are suggesting to raise the cost of capital for companies?

But to make LVT simpler to understand (and economically equivalent): you can imagine the government owns all the land, and rents out plots for eg 20 years at a time to the highest bidder. To help people plan better, the auctions can be done 5 years ahead of time. So leases for 2036 - 2056 will be auctioned off in 2031.

You can stagger the auctions, so a few leases get auctioned off every week.

It is indeed noble that the authors responded to the criticism, but unlike what Wikipedia seems to imply, they didn't manage to rescue their argument.

See https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/03/th... from another comment.

No army of lawyers would save them from actually effective regulation.

Yeah, I also like to be pedantically literal when I don't have good counter arguments. I feel your pain, brother.

You can replace my "vaults of gold" analogy for propety, yachts, real estate, company shares, etc. Whatever someone holds in their own name that constitutes wealth above a certain threshold should be taxed.

> So you are suggesting to raise the cost of capital for companies?

Corporations also should contribute to society, as they also benefit from the common infrastructure.

There's this pervasive idea that "if we tax the rich they will stop investing in companies and us filthy peasants will be out of jobs" which is the bullshit of the ages. If there is demand for goods and services, there will be those that supply them.

And in any case, I'm saying absolute prosperity of individual people matters. Not the average per capita absolute prosperity of a country.

So people who go into medical bankruptcy in the US are obviously not individually rich. And I hope you and me agree, that if you could find a way to make them better off, that would be a good thing?

Whereas if you found a way to make them worse off by 20%, but make Mr Zuckerberg worse off by 50%, that would not be advisable, even if it technically decreases inequality.

The current world we live in doesn't care enough about creativity. I find it a bleak thought, but here I am. Feel free to try to talk me out of it, because it does feel kind of depressing. Or feel free to validate it. I want to see the world for what it is, not what I like it to be.

The price level is driven by what the central bank does with the money printer. UBI wouldn't raise prices, if the central bank does their job even halfway competently. (Even the mediocre real world performance of the Fed or ECB would suffice to _not_ have prices raise by 10x in eg a year of UBI.)

> And that's not how UBI works, no one is some multiplier richer because it exists.

I was not meaning to imply that UBI would make people richer on average. My comment was purely about inequality being a bad measure.

UBI plus the taxes that finance it are a redistribution scheme. It doesn't make people richer on average. At best you can hope that the tax is very efficient and has low or no deadweight losses (like land value taxes), so that on average UBI doesn't make your society worse off.

> The top 1% getting 1000x richer is a problem, because trickle down economics is bullshit. Money that exists as part of a pile of gold in a dragon's den does not move the economy.

Huh? If what you said were true, the top 1% getting 1000x richer would merely not do anything, but it wouldn't be a problem per se.

Btw, it's not a problem if someone just hoard some money: the central bank will notice that inflation is below target, and print more. (Later, when you spend from your hoard, the central bank will notice that, and correspondingly shrink the money supply.) Sticking money in a hoard is equivalent to giving an interest free loan to the central bank, because they can temporarily emit more money, while yours is out of circulation.

However, rich people don't tend to keep cash in a vault. Most of them own companies or land etc.

There is almost certainly a choir near you that would love to have more singers, especially if they're male. (Membership skews female and geriatric.)

Sure, healthcare is nice. I see no disagreement.

> > If tomorrow Mr Zuckerberg got 100x better healthcare, but everyone else only got 10x better healthcare, that would fix the problem you mentioned, but would technically make inequality worse.

> No, because we outnumber Mark Zuckerberg by more than 10 fold

Well, fix the numbers any way you feel like. Eg say Mr Zuckerberg gets better off by whatever amount the rest of us together get better (eg in terms of healthcare) plus 10% extra.

I really am missing some context here.

I haven't read the article yet but I suspected as much that there is not much money in music, not even a livable wage. That's not why I'm doing it though. I have a few tracks in my mind since childhood (and a few more recent ones) that I want to get out. Also it's a fun thing to learn about marketing while I'm at it.

My point: I think that should be enough. Not everything we do has to make enough money.

It's finally time to put that perfect pitch and subconscious OCD style melody generation to use!

Minimum wage hourly jobs like grocery baggers need to be able to survive off a 40-hour week, and it's a societal problem if they can't.

Taxi drivers are essentially sole proprietors who set their own hours and accept higher risk for a higher payoff. Demand and supply will calibrate themselves unless the government distorts the market (eg. taxi medallions).

Musicians and actors are and have always been in a brutal power law market where all the wealth accrues to the 0.1% at the top of the heap. This drives exploitation since people will do anything to get to the top, but at the end of the day society does not need them the way it needs taxi drivers or grocery baggers and there is no economic rationale for subsidizing them.

Of course, if you want to do business in country X, you are subject to the laws of that country X.

But otherwise, you can leave that country and settle down elsewhere and do your business there. No matter how 'actually effective' that regulation is. (Unless you do an 'East Germany' and don't allow people to leave.)

Interesting take! I can see the value/process you're describing, never thought of it that way.

Helicopter money transfers real wealth from the people who previously held cash.

It creates nominal wealth, but not real wealth.

> It should also make intuitive sense - if the rich (lets say top 5%) hold 95% of wealth it means there is less for everyone else - less wealth that is because the resources like land, apartments and good education are finite and not abundant.

Let's invert that: if I make everyone's lives 10% more miserable, but the lives of the richest 1% a whopping 20% more miserable, that will have decreased inequality. But it's not a good idea.

That's basically just the idea from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44411538 inverted. Many people have a hard time seeing that wealth can increase, but it's pretty easy to see that total wealth can decrease: I can set fire to my piano, and no one else gets any better because of it.

those responsible for advancement of musical boundaries rarely are recognized or rewarded in kind, at least since the dawn of the recorded music mafia.

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." Hunter S. Thompson

My answer is no not necessarily. One can pursue it in their free time. Whether it should be a career or not is honestly an invisible hand question (aka capitalism). I'm normally not pro invisible hand such as in the case of healthcare, but when it comes to stuff like this, I totally am.

It might be beneficial to have dedicated people to do this, but a lot can be accomplished by free time.

When you do a hobby you can get practice and feedback in. It depends on their situation.

Someone is a kid? A lot

Someone is single? 4 hours per evening and 6 hours per weekend day. That's still a lot.

Someone has kids? Don't know but doesn't seem like a lot

silicone valley is grifting its own rich people with paper bomb shelters.

I want to "move up" in my career, but I simply don't see the (performative) art of data science and data engineering. It feels too narrow. Music and data analysis feels broad. I could take a higher paycheck but it'd cost of a lot of fun.

It probably helps that I on top of that get to integrate LLMs and create LLM flows, basically n8n but then programming it using the APIs of an LLM. So I'm still actually programming as well.

It's fun being a generalist.

Or are you proposing State confiscation and management of the land? I can’t quite tell from your post.

silence is golden and allows for reflection upon what we heard

It has been a double (triple, even) whammy for musicians, compared to mid 90s and back. There used to be a time where you could play in a band, not a huge signed one, and still make a living. Just off playing the door, on the regular bar / club circuit.

People went out much more back in the day. A regular weekday gig could bring you more money than a weekend gig does today. Unless you play in the most tourist-y hot spots, in the largest cities (think Nashville Broadway), you're not going to find places that play music all days. Not even 3-4 days a week. If you're lucky, it is going to be live music a couple of days, and almost only during weekends. Assuming you're paid $70 - $200 pr. gig, calculate how many gigs you need to play a year to not live in poverty.

Pay hasn't really changed much, either - for the musicians that play for a flat fee, that figure has been standing still for decades.

Almost every professional musician I know will have a battery of side hustles, these days. They will take every gig they can find, they will give lessons, they will do studio work, they will work as techs, become niche influencers, they will do whatever it takes.

But more often than not, they will have abandoned music as their main revenue stream, and rather pick up regular job that generates a steady paycheck, and gig during the weekends.

I can count on one hand the musicians / artists that have managed to make it "big", as in being C- or D-lister artists, and thus making a living off their recorded and touring music. They still spend equally much time on their social media, as that is what gets your name out. There is an immense pressure to play the algorithm, because that could make your tune blow up and become viral.

In fact, that is often how musicians become "famous" these days. Suddenly their tune becomes viral in tiktok vids, and that's how they manage to get millions of listeners...doesn't actually pay much, but it puts a big spotlight on your name.

I don't know anyone who really thinks that absolute inequality is the problem. people need a high floor - there is no inherent reason to want to lower the ceiling of wealth/benefits. but since there's no such thing as free lunch, we need to calculate by how much each % of ceiling that is lowered raises the floor. If we can reduce the ceiling by 10% and raise the floor by 100%, then that's worthwhile.

The hard part is calculating the benefits. There are non-linear effects when you try to predict the benefits of having a healthy and educated population, although the benefit should be enormous.

On the other hand it is very easy to calculate the downside of people not being wage-slaves: not needing to accept bottom wages, having time to understand what's actually going on in the world, organizing for or against particular causes, etc..

I like how you're turning the article around a bit. So many voices you hear these days are saying thing like, "My father was a [x]. I've been an [x] all my life. Since [y] it's been harder than ever to make a living. I've always looked up to successful [x]s as more able or refined in some way, but now I have stratification on the brain and I start to think that those [x]s are taking too big a piece of the pie, and they should give me some."

If you approached a club owner in 1960 and said "Look, you don't have to hire a band. I'll set you up with one of those open reel mag tape gizmos and you can spend $300 on a tape library and spend hours nursing it." They'd look at you and reply "That's a crazy joke. I'll hire a band."

Then in 1990 the club owner doesn't even participate in the music, and expects the bartender to keep the CD/cassette deck loaded. Or they play the radio. In 1960 that would result in jibes about the club owner promoting the radio station. In 1990 it just happens and goes unnoticed.

The problem is there has never really been a mass expectation of original live music in all these drinking-places. There has only been a social demand that music be present, which can be fulfilled in so many other ways now. It's sad that it can be stated in such a simple way that is an assault to the ego.

But it probably helps if you can allude to society changing in undesirable ways despite your best efforts, class struggles, or bad government.

But, if your central moral argument about the subject does revolve around thinking such a scenario is likely and being disgusted by it, then being paid by the people supposedly promoting this kind of economic inequality and working with them while they do it is pretty goddam hypocritical.

And you'd be locked to only playing certain types of music (country, classic rock, singer songwriter), doing multiple gigs a day.

Truth be told, most musicians would be better off by picking a job, any job really, and treating music as a side hustle. And that really pains me, as I started out as a musician.

If you're going to make a living off music, it's going to be a never-ending marathon of hustles and uncertainty. Cover bands, church bands, wedding bands, session work, lessons, roadie work, instrument tech, and half (of not two thirds) of that work is based on sheer luck, depending on what people you cross paths with.

As inequality increases at scale it means that an increasingly concentrated group has more and more capital. What do they do with that capital? They buy assets, they are basically forced to do so by design.

What happens when they buy assets? They capitalize those assets. An apartment unit now becomes a home others can rent but not purchase.

Rinse and repeat until eventually wealth is so concentrated that the ability for any other individuals to access assets is basically zero. This means those individuals cannot build capital or ultimately wealth and it also means that, even if more resource become readily available, more people cannot afford them. They have to do 2x today what they did yesterday to an achieve the same amount of stability even if their "standard of living" has increased because of a wider swath of goods and services.

Honestly at this point I think that anyone who doesn't see inequality as a major driver of contemporary problems is simply not paying attention to the USA or must not live there. Countries in which it is less of a problem basically only mitigate it by having a state that can provide essentials to effectively prevent the capitaled class from taking them away from people (eg healthcare, as you mention).

Economics is all about the balance of who has access to what resources. We cannot just generate resources and capital out of thin air. One person getting more necessarily means another gets less. Period.

Want to work for the most prestigious fashion brands? You start with unpaid (or very low pay) internships in some of the most expensive cities in the world. Same goes for record labels. Art. Literature publishing.

And these days, some of the above will filter out applicants that don't have big enough social media accounts.

You are conflating two different things, wealth and misery.

Wealth is about material resources not misery or happiness. This is about giving more people access to more material resources by taking away some of the exclusive access to those resource by the rich. Will preventing the uber rich families from buying their seventeenth fleet of housing complexes and their twentieth estate make them "more miserable" sure, probably, but it also secures the independence of the people you make that house available to (rather than make them permanent wage slaves to the landed class that just scoops up homes that they don't materially need need to extract rents etc).

As a side note, it really shouldn't be possible to edit comments two hours after they've been posted and after they've had replies. Particularly without showing any indication of that.

The inequality problem is about access to material resources. Money is just an abstraction. No one is seriously suggesting to refuse zuckerberg access to good things on principle or to just diminish and not redistribute his wealth, that's preposterous.

The point is that access to capital is access to resources. The people that hoard capital necessarily end up hoarding important resources and they use this imbalance to then extract further capital from others and further their position, thus in turn gives them power. The problem is all about bringing more balance to this situation so that we avoid a return to feudalism in which a handful of people have control over all the resources and power and everyone is is basically just beholden to their whims.

Necessarily, that must be wealth that did' go to the rich instead (it could have!). So, necessarily, you are "punishing" them by doing so.

You mainly seem to be against some kind of hypothetical robinhoodesque style redistribution because you worry it's unfair to the rich. Any solution, though, will have to take this shape, whether it targets the existing wealth or wealth generated going forward. It's all about redistribution of access no matter how you slice

You don't need to be so protective of the rich. They are doing just fine and they have plenty of resource and mechanisms in place to protect themselves. If the world's wealthiest people were made even just a tiny bit less wealth by redistribution of assets they would still be living like absolute kings.

You realize most of this wealth is tied up in stocks and other assets that anyone can purchase, right?

> Will preventing the uber rich families from buying their seventeenth fleet of housing complexes

But ARE the likes of Bezos and Musk actually buying housing complexes in the first place, nevermind ones that anyone who isn’t already rich are able to afford?

> and their twentieth estate

And who but the extremely rich would be able to buy these estates in the first place?

exactly. Which is the problem. You seem to actually have all the ingredients to be able to understand why this is a problem, but some kind of sympathy for the rich (lol) seems to prevent you from actually using logic to see the problem.

You probably want digital payment systems like banking and warehouse management. But I am thinking those sort of areas are only fraction of modern software industry.

It doesn't matter that "anyone can purchase them". If you have N dollars and I have Nx1000I can buy more stock than you. I can also diversify better than you, I simply have more options, more power, etc. Unless I am a total idiot or you get absurdly lucky and effectively win the lotto, my greater amount of initial capital will go further than your small amount.

> But ARE the likes of Bezos and Musk actually buying housing complexes in the first place, nevermind ones that anyone who isn’t already rich are able to afford?

I didn't mention either of these people. There are plenty of people not in the limelight that do precisely the things I'm talking about, often through banks and companies that they run—I can have my investment firm buy property and increase my salary off the extracted rents and it achieves the same thing.

> And who but the extremely rich would be able to buy these estates in the first place?

Exactly. You just restated the problem with inequality. It gives a small class of people exclusive access to important material resources. Further they can they use this exclusivity to further entrench their positions.

One of the bigger ways this plays out as opposed to your example is: Tons of property is locked up as short term vacation rentals that are only used a tiny percent of the time and only by the rich. There's a spectrum of how rich but we know the bottom 50% almost never use them for example

Similarly the amount of resources locked up in industries that 99% of the time only cater to the very rich is quite a lot and more importantly the trajectory is going more and more that direction.

You could have a world where the work is done mostly by robots and a few million rich people use the world as their playground and then what happens to everyone else?

> And why do you care about inequality, and not eg the absolute livings standards of the least well off?

Answer to both those questions, simplifying massively: the most prosperous period of capitalism in the past 200 years was also that where there was the smallest levels of inequality.

The point of view that you must only look at the overall floor is terribly short-sighted (and even then, the lower and middle classes have become WORSE off in the past 40 years!). The massive increases in wealth have been going overwhelmingly to the pockets of the very rich; this is bad in itself, irrespective of the overall GDP growth or whatever.

Read Pikkety's books and you will understand.

Notice, how I used "attention" and not "money" or even "listens". Just look at the first and the main goalpost independent artist set for themselves. It's no longer "buy our music" or "come to our show", by now they strive to convince the audience to attempt to listen to their songs.

By this time I consider an artist that's only present in streaming services and lacks a visible way of direct distribution of their music (which includes such services as Bandcamp, for now) either an utterly mismanaged one or, again, a part of the problem†.

The only way for the artist to feel appreciated is building their loyal fan base, but if you don't want to wear the "entertainer" hat (which now equals becoming a circus monkey for the trending social media) this becomes harder and harder for a bunch of reasons:

1. Music is just not as culturally important as it was 50 years ago. 2. Live shows are in decline and dominated by cover/tribute acts. 3. As correctly mentioned in TFA, you're fighting with everything else plus everything that came before you. 4. The world is closing. Visas have always been a curse‡, but nowadays even if I jump through a myriad of hoops and get one, I can't even cross the border to the countries we usually started the tours from in a previous life. 5. The internet feels like a collapsing space too, though it's probably the most controversial opinion of mine.

There's also a problem of NNGC. At least the previous boom (blockchain) promised to make things better in some way (and it did, but underdelivered tenfold), but the current one ("AI") doesn't even do that — there's not even a positive scenario how the life of a common artist becomes better, unless "post-scarcity" truly happens (it won't).

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†: To clarify, this is about modern artists, things are a bit different when we speak about "legacy" acts that jump started their careers in a different era.

‡: Even though in case of EU most artists entering didn't care and used their tourist visas because they did not make any money anyway.

For example, you could do more or less the same thing that the UK did to abolish slavery: buy out all the existing land owners / lease holders.

I suggested 20 years as a reasonable time frame for leases. In principle, 100 years might would also work. 999 years is probably far too long.

Now, instead of auctioning off the leases, you can also have individuals officially owning the land, but instead you tax them a certain fraction of the market value of the land every year. Economically that's equivalent.

A 999 year lease is basically economically the same as owning the land. So you should more or less treat it the same.

You mean today? Today is the most prosperous period of all of world history. Or what period are you talking about?

Global inequality is also near all-time lows, thanks to China, India and the rest of Asia mostly catching up to the rich western countries. Alas, Africa is still quite poor, but they are working on it.

> The point of view that you must only look at the overall floor is terribly short-sighted (and even then, the lower and middle classes have become WORSE off in the past 40 years!).

In what sense?

> The massive increases in wealth have been going overwhelmingly to the pockets of the very rich; this is bad in itself, irrespective of the overall GDP growth or whatever.

Why?

> Read Pikkety's books and you will understand.

See eg https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/03/th...

The key word here is income. “Wealth” and “income” tend to be conflated by ostensibly intelligent people who should know better. If I’m granted a million dollars in stock but draw a $20K salary, I’m “wealthy” but not “paying my fair share” because I’ve hardly earned any income for the year.

Sources?

In any case, what you say seems to suggest that consumption taxes would be the way to go.

I didn't get your point, but we certainly need more competition, not less.

Well, mostly where everyone's wealth is coming from: from the fruits of their own labour.

> You mainly seem to be against some kind of hypothetical robinhoodesque style redistribution because you worry it's unfair to the rich.

No, I haven't started worrying about fairness, yet. No, I'm afraid that a tax system designed by what sounds good instead of what works will leave the poor even worse off.

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence for an example: who you officially levy the taxes on isn't necessarily the person shouldering the economic burden.