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 think “design” is the wrong word. Many systems are unjust by default, and that’s certainly true of hit-driven businesses like music. Justice doesn’t happen unless people make it happen, and often, most people don’t care.

For example, lotteries are inherently unjust, making random people wealthy for no reason, and hardly anyone cares. They just hope to win themselves.

Taylor Swift fans don’t care that she makes far more money than other talented musicians who languish in obscurity. They’re going to keep giving her more money. If you told them they shouldn’t because it perpetuates inequality, they wouldn’t get it.

How are lotteries inherently unjust? A bad idea maybe, but I see no reason that people shouldn't be allowed to gamble on a die roll or whatever...

Do you think inequality is unjust? They increase inequality, and there’s no possible argument that a lottery winner did anything to deserve their good fortune.

It’s the opposite effect of insurance, where society works to undo the results of bad luck.

Maybe that's what insurance should be. It doesn't seem to be that way now. People build large fancy homes or fancy cars and then off load the risk to insurance. The problem with this is that it tends to increase costs for other in the pool and disincentivizes risk mitigating behavior. If I know that insurance will pay out for my car, then I can drive more aggressively. I want my home to look fancy and be huge instead of being built to survive local natural disasters, but that preference might change if I didn't have insurance.

Consider life insurance. It's about providing for widows and orphans. Before there was insurance, there were mutual aid societies, because it was very important to society to hedge that risk so that people aren't destitute after an accident.