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300 points pseudolus | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.018s | source
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BrenBarn ◴[] 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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giantg2 ◴[] No.44412810[source]
If you want to talk about the root of problems, it comes down to preferences. Income inequality in musicians? People prefer some musicians and songs over others. UBI and taxation isn't going to meaningfully change the income inequality between the median and top earners in entertainment fields due to social dynamics. Guess what the primary driver of the housing shortage is? Preference for larger homes and "better" locations. There are enough housing units nationally, but their distribution and charateristics don't match the preferences. You might be thinking about NIMBY, but guess what that is? The preferences of the people already there. Solutions like UBI or just building more skip a logical step of evaluating the true underlying causes and presume them instead. To solve a problem we must first understand it.
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tomgp ◴[] No.44414070[source]
In Britain it’s noticeable that as unemployment benefit and social housing has been stripped back the proportion of people from working class backgrounds with careers in the arts has declined. The most visible example of this is probably actors; pretty much all the current generation of British actors went to public school and were able to support themselves via family wealth as they became established. This wasn’t the case for the generation coming through in the 70s and 80s. The underlying cause is that if you can’t subsist as you learn your craft you can’t learn your craft, I don’t think this is mysterious.

This doesn’t just apply to the arts, if all junior dev roles are stripped away by llm’s where do the talented developers of tomorrow come from? Those who can learn the craft on their own time, those with independent wealth.

At a societal level there is a huge amount of potential talent being left on the table, and imo redistributive policies are the obvious fix. In think this is really important both from a mortal point of view and an economically pragmatic one.

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giantg2 ◴[] No.44414624[source]
This has nothing to do with subsisting while learning your craft. This is about a supply and demand difference and the inequality in entertainment roles. If you have too many actors, then the nobodies get paid next to nothing while the famous people get the lion's share. And many of those nobodies never make even close to earning a living because the supply side is saturated and the demand side doesn't want to pay for that art. You have to have buyers.
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MrJohz ◴[] No.44415002[source]
Class in this context is referring to the actors' backgrounds, i.e. parental incomes, rather than their own income. There is an issue if you have to be born to a rich family in order to take on a career like acting, and right now, at least based on the evidence, that appears to be true: you need a sufficient safety net to be able to survive for a long time on basically no income while you practice and work low-paying gigs until you finally break through. For some people that just isn't possible.

A social safety net means that more people have the ability to try out risky careers - not necessarily that more of them will succeed, but that the pool of applicants will be larger and include a wider proportion of the population.

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rahimnathwani ◴[] No.44415136[source]
Should we also subsidize lottery tickets?
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1. MrJohz ◴[] No.44415217{3}[source]
Does society benefit from there being lots of lottery winners from a variety of backgrounds? I think there is a big difference between having a thriving arts landscape and having a thriving landscape of people who won the lottery.
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2. rahimnathwani ◴[] No.44415300[source]
Why would your proposal result in a 'thriving arts landscape'?
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3. MrJohz ◴[] No.44416191[source]
It comes back to the Stephen Jay Gould quote:

> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

If you widen the pool of applicants, you've got a better chance of finding the best actors, musicians, writers, etc. And you also get a wider variety of stories to tell. Monocultures are dangerous, be that in the workplace, in politics, in academia, or in the arts. Ensuring that more people get a chance to enter these fields keeps them healthy and active, and prevents them from devolving into navel gazing.

It's the same way that if you want to see innovation in tech, you need to keep on funding startups and small companies. If instead you just constantly subsidise Google and friends, you'll never get that next great thing, you'll just get more of the same.

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4. rahimnathwani ◴[] No.44416250{3}[source]

  It's the same way that if you want to see innovation in tech, you need to keep on funding startups
Right, and there's a market mechanism for funding risky startups.

If there's such a benefit to finding additional folks with extreme acting talent/potential, why is a non-market solution required?

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5. MrJohz ◴[] No.44416636{4}[source]
It's not just market mechanisms that ensure risky startups get funded. It's also decisions in government about how to tax those sorts of companies and investments, what sort of writeoffs they have available to them, what safety nets are available for people investing, etc. It's not as simple as just having the government take its hands away and let private enterprise get on with things — the government needs to actively reward the behaviour it wants to see.

There is of course a market mechanism deciding which actors achieve success — the employment market. It doesn't make sense to get rid of that. But government interventions are what fuels innovation — otherwise the market will simply stagnate as the largest entities in it capture it and prevent any growth or change from happening.