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.

>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.

The cost of living is correlated to the high cost of housing, competitive job market and high cost of labor in basic services such as infrastructure development. How exactly does "reducing inequality" address all of this? Taxing a bunch of billionaires isn't going to magically increase the number of well-paid jobs, and the guys quoting $5,000 for your AC installation aren't anywhere near the 1% either. Even with stuff like crime and homelessness, just look at Bloomberg's tenure of NYC or Hong Kong when the businesses have a say, they do manage cleaning up cities quite well! If anything, it's the billionares providing the cheap goods you do like to consume so much like Amazon or new Iphones each year.

The funny thing is that back in March we already had this conversation with the whole tariff and manufacturing debacle, no matter how stupid Trump's execution was in reality, this board or really progressives are essentially shooting themselves in the foot in adamantally claiming that "manufacturing will never return" and wanting to continue the status quo of cheap exports but expensive domestic labour. Yeah well, that's what exactly leads to the situation you're in today. You might point to nominally higher salaries, but truth be told, do you feel particularly more civilized in the Bay Area than in Shenzhen or Tokyo?