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The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

(thewalrus.ca)
300 points pseudolus | 3 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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1. voidhorse ◴[29 Jun 25 10:57 UTC] No.44412062[source]▶
The reason inequality is a problem is very simple.

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.

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2. eru ◴[29 Jun 25 11:53 UTC] No.44412357[source]▶
Compare and contrast https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/26/compound-interest-is-t...
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3. voidhorse ◴[29 Jun 25 17:28 UTC] No.44414779[source]▶
lol. Like many of Scott Alexander's essays, this is bad argumentation in nice window dressing, as well as a slight apologia for racism.

There are so many problems with this essay that it's hard to know where to begin, but two major ones are that (1) his reading comprehension sucks, (2) the major flaw in his line of argument is merely hand waved away—it relies on a fundamental premise that mobility of people in the south was zero after the civil war and that the civil war destroying an entire industry would have had zero effect (this is the part he hand waves away at the end of the article after making his idiotic apology for continued racism based on one solitary citation) As usual, it's an article making people unschooled in the actual practice of rigorous academic research to buy into bad ideas .

Anyway, that's all beside the point. A specific article countering a single claim against reparations has basically very little to do with the topic at hand unless you can prove the very specific set of dynamics that is analyzed in that case (a) applies globally, and (b) still applies today.

This style of argument is equivalent to saying "look i found one rock that was purple so all rocks must be purple". It has basically no relevance as far as I'm concerned.