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The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

(thewalrus.ca)
300 points pseudolus | 4 comments | 28 Jun 25 22:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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BrenBarn ◴[29 Jun 25 06:43 UTC] No.44410806[source]▶
> I heard one answer more than any other: the government should introduce universal basic income. This would indeed afford artists the security to create art, but it’s also extremely fanciful.

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.

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eru ◴[29 Jun 25 07:11 UTC] No.44410916[source]▶
> [...] a larger problem, namely that overall economic inequality is way too high.

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.)

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pazimzadeh ◴[29 Jun 25 07:47 UTC] No.44411081[source]▶
the healthcare situation sucks. provide universal healthcare and you might have a point
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eru ◴[29 Jun 25 07:56 UTC] No.44411121[source]▶
I don't live in the US. We have a very different helthcare system where I live, and it's working well.

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.

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pazimzadeh ◴[29 Jun 25 09:43 UTC] No.44411670[source]▶
> 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

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

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1. eru ◴[29 Jun 25 10:01 UTC] No.44411763[source]▶
> Anyway, I would argue that having guaranteed healthcare is 10293762397697x better than not having guaranteed healthcare

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.

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2. pazimzadeh ◴[29 Jun 25 10:42 UTC] No.44411980[source]▶
Mark Zuckerberg would in fact need to have 8 billion times better healthcare than me for your argument to matter

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..

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3. eru ◴[29 Jun 25 11:54 UTC] No.44412364[source]▶
I'm saying that we need to be careful that our obsession to obstruct the rich doesn't leave the masses worse off.

> If we can reduce the ceiling by 10% and raise the floor by 100%, then that's worthwhile.

I'm afraid that lowering the ceiling by 10% might lower the floor by 10%, too.

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4. pazimzadeh ◴[29 Jun 25 21:38 UTC] No.44416658{3}[source]▶
> the absolute living standards of all members of society, including the least well off, have never been better

that is completely wrong. purchasing power is at an all time low in real dollar terms

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SA0R

> we need to be careful that our obsession to obstruct the rich doesn't leave the masses worse off

we need to be careful that the obsession with being mega rich doesn't leave the masses worse off

you're not proposing anything. you don't even seem to think there's a problem. let me guess, the best thing to do is just keep things the way they are? what are you talking about?