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.

100% this. I don’t know how long we have to go on pushing at the “wealth will trickle down” door to discover it’s utter bullshit and always has been. The answer isn’t private companies, because they’re continuing to take the piss and make a small number of people incredibly wealthy at the expense of the majority.

It’s never a popular thing to say on HN but the country the typifies inequality most starkly is the US - and it’s also the one with the biggest set of problems: huge issues with drug use, obesity, widespread unhappiness, simmering resentment, a divided nation. The countries that are getting this right (and by right I mean GDP, happiness, heath, pretty much any meaningful index of “a good life”) are the ones that fund public services, healthcare, education, etc through higher taxes.

~ braces for downvotes ~