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.

> [...] 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.)

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

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.

You can of course create wealth in such a way that inequality stays the same. Not all types of wealth are finite for practical purposes.

But, if empirically our current system for net wealth creation tends to also produce wealth concentration, it makes sense to consider ways of modifying the system to mitigate some of the wealth concentration while maintaining as much of the wealth creation as possible.

The target you should look for is how much wealth gets created for the least well-off (or for some low percentile representative person). Just don't worry about what the rich people doing at all. No need to punish them.

You clearly believe you're very objective and applying very "rational" thinking to the problem. It's about the dollar value of the income of the least well-off, so what are these stupid people even talking about inequality? Don't they realise making a poor person 10% worse off and Bezos 11% worse off reduces inequality but lowers the floor (the pedestrian argument you've made several times in this thread)?

But please consider that the problem is slightly (i.e. a lot) more complicated than you think. Economics is a very very hard discipline and perhaps more closely related to philosophy than the natural sciences. There have been countless books written on the topic of inequality by people smarter than you or me, so it's highly it's all so simple as your dismissive "just do X" line imagines it to be.

A simple, almost trivial observation: very high inequality of wealth also means very high inequality of power, meaning the rich elite can and will influence the political process to enrich themselves further at the expense of the "low percentile" less well-off, which will be denied political power. This is one example of why you should care about inequality.