The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

> 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.

This isn't about any one industry failing, it's about a system designed to funnel value upwards while pretending the rest of us are just not hustling hard enough

I would argue the system is designed for efficiency. Economic solutions to this problem are about introducing legally-mandated inefficiencies, like limiting competition or artificially increasing labor costs

Efficiency for extracting money from poor people to mega corporations? Seems to me there isn't really a lot of competition left since theres a handful of main players that just buy out smaller competitors.

The poor are richer than ever under the system. They have clean running water and not just light but televisions.