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The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

(thewalrus.ca)
300 points pseudolus | 2 comments | 28 Jun 25 22:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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BrenBarn ◴[29 Jun 25 06:43 UTC] No.44410806[source]▶
> 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.

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GLdRH ◴[29 Jun 25 06:47 UTC] No.44410825[source]▶
Except that socialism has failed already.

Universal basic income is impossible to justify morally.

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yoyohello13 ◴[29 Jun 25 06:56 UTC] No.44410855[source]▶
The top 1% of people controlling more wealth and resources than the bottom 50% is mortally justifiable?

It’s funny whenever there is a comment like “hey, maybe we shouldn’t let individual people get so rich they can basically become thier own country.” Always get called socialists/communists. You can be capitalist while also having some care and protection for the little people.

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eru ◴[29 Jun 25 07:16 UTC] No.44410935[source]▶
'A' being morally unjustifiable (by some metric), doesn't mean that 'B' is morally justifiable.

If there was a button that I could press that would double the wealth of the 99% of people and quadruple the wealth of the top 1%, I would keep pressing it, even though it technically makes inequality worse and worse every time.

It would be morally reprehensible not to press that button.

EDIT: just be clear, I am talking about real (i.e. inflation adjusted) wealth. I am not talking about how many zeros we add to all dollar amounts.

So I am talking about the number of houses and shoes and cars we have, and the amount of ice cream and education we can enjoy.

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1. metabagel ◴[29 Jun 25 16:57 UTC] No.44414538[source]▶
If you could press another button which would shift some of the obscene wealth from the ultra-rich to people living at the margins of society, you should also be mashing that button over and over.
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2. eru ◴[30 Jun 25 00:29 UTC] No.44417949[source]▶
If you had such a button that had no other side effects, then, yes, go for it.

Alas, it's no clear that we have taxation and redistribution in the real world works like this or can even work like this: they typically don't just cleanly transfer wealth, but also destroy a lot of wealth.

To be clear: I don't say that my hypothetical button exists. This was just a Gedankenexperiment to show that increasing inequality by itself isn't all that relevant.

In reality, we observe that more business friendly places like Scandinavia or Singapore or even the US are a lot richer than places that strangle business.

Now this is partially about quantity of taxes, but even more about rules and regulations. Eg Scandinavian countries have fairly high taxes, but they are well run and business friendly.