The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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).

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?

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?