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Comment by wazoox | Hacker News Reader

Yup. And see the terrible situations is all and every vocational and artistic occupations. Competition is so fierce that almost everyone has to work basically for free and sustain themselves by doing menial job on the side. You could argue that most of them would be better finding a life occupation they're at least merely interested in instead, but providing decent living, and keeping their passion as a hobby. (I've been a professional musician many years ago, merely scraping by from gig to gig with some piano teaching).

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I can't help but wonder if a planned economy would be better, someone who said "you're good enough, pursue this we will support you economically", or said "sorry you didn't make the cut you'll have to develop a passion for something else".

Look at other planned economies. They're horrible. No single group can predict the future.

What people need to do is think like responsibly put limits on their adventures. These are grown ass men and women. They are responsible for themselves and if they choose to risk it all on a passion, they have nobody to blame, especially when the money is constantly telling to do something else.

I'm not necessarily an advocate of planned economy (or actually, economy in general; the system I'm looking for has been aptly described as "the end of economy") but what you're saying completely misses the point of what GP was trying to say.

These people are responsible for themselves, and they want to follow a passion, to pursue it, despite there not being very much money in it. The money is constantly telling them to do something else, you are correct. But do we really want a society structured around what money tells people to do? Doesn't that seem even a little dystopian? I heard the phrase a while ago: "a dystopia without a despot".

You say that they have nobody to blame - but that's exactly what's wrong. Why should they have to blame themselves for following their scientific, artistic, philosophical or religious passions? Should they have to "choose to risk it all"? These are the questions that need answering, because I'm not convinced that people need to be considering artistic passions as a risk at all.

I don't think there's a solution to this problem so long as the market decides whether your passion is worthy of you being allowed to survive or not.

Money is societies way of telling people what they want. A person need not serve society, and society need not always be rational. However just with personal transactions if you want something you have to give something in return.

A person can eschew the pursuit of money but aside from basic support I don't think society needs to reward them for expressly disavowing its desires.

Because then someone or group of someone has a bais towards what are good passions and what are bad passions.

Investors have a hard enough time guessing which ideas will work out, why would people with no skin in the game know any better?

But there is already a group of people with a bias holding the purse strings. Their bias is towards profitability in every single undertaking they support. If they were replaced with planners - and let's leave aside the question of whether this is practically achievable - we could dispense with that bias. The planners would have their own biases, of course, but it is not clear to me that their biases are worse than the current ones. I suspect they might be better.

You seem to be using the phrase "no skin in the game" to mean "no exposure to financial risk". I would argue for a more expansive definition. A planner, as a member of society, does have skin in the game, as they have in interest in the overall proper functioning of that society and the happiness of its members.

And by "work out" you seem to mean "generate a desired level of financial return". I'm sure you can see how once you free yourself from that definition, the range of things it might seem worthwhile taking a punt on grows much larger. If Johnny wants to spend his life building pasta looms for preparing elaborate lasagnes, the potential upside is probably not very apparent, but the downside is small too and can be justified as an investment in making the society a more interesting place where people can pursue their niche interests.

Isn’t this how seeking investment works?

Not at all, because you have to justify the financial upside of your venture and then the investors decide if the return they expect fits within the parameters they have already agreed on for managing their portfolio.

It is more akin to applying for a grant or residency as an artist or for research funding as a scientist. You still have to argue why there is some upside to the work you intend to undertake, but the upside may not be in the form of profit for the investor.

I completely disagree with this idea, but down-voting it is kinda lame. A little more openness to different ideas would be a good thing here (and everywhere).

This might start well, but what happens when the environment changes? Maybe that musicians music doesn't pan out, maybe we thought bread would be a more popular export so we have too many bakers. Are we going to jerk people around to follow the command economy, or are we going to simply get outcompeted by capitalism in the global market place?

What exactly do you mean by "outcompeted" here?

I mean, are we going to create suboptimal products and services, ceding economic growth to other nations.

Most nations are not optimal, and cede all kinds of economic growth to other nations. Why is this a problem?

It's not a problem until there are the equivalent of bread lines (relative difficulties in providing basic goods and services) or other countries get the equivalent of the iPhone (superior goods and services that are affordable for other countries' population but not ours). And yes, this is speaking from a patriotic/state-ist view point.

Would you like to be told to develop a passion for cleaning toilets?

Tax optimization works too: https://youtu.be/Bz2-49q6DOI

In my highly subjective view artists are expecting to get paid for something that most of us have the capability to participate in with reasonable results given a similar investment of effort; in other words, most artists differ from the general population not in artistic aptitude, but rather in the desire to be an artist. I would love to sit around and play with ideas for a living, but it doesn't pay the bills in my occupation.

Relatively speaking, the majority of people have the capability to do almost anything. It's only a matter of time and resources.

Natural abilities and genetics can accelerate the learning process, yes, but accelerated mastery is really only an advantage if you're trying to master as many things as possible within your lifespan, or you're working under some other deadline.

What I'm saying here is that artists can probably develop software just as well as anyone else here if they're willing to put in the time and resources.

This has been personally true for me; I began my career as an artist. I've known a few others to do similarly. Most of the people who do coding schools come from other backgrounds, and you can say what you want about coding school grads, but I've met very few who I felt could not become good programmers someday. As you say, some people have a longer, harder path than others, but at the end of the day, the brain is pretty plastic.

Here's where we perhaps differ - I don't think most art being made today passes the test of requiring skills that take significant time to develop. A load of bricks on the floor? A woman knitting using wool pulled from her vagina and dyed with her menstrual blood? When art is purely about crazy ideas then I don't think artists have any special monopoly. If we were talking about the type of artist that has honed their skills over thousands of hours of painting, for example, I would agree that significant investment of time develops tangible skills, but this type of approach is hugely unfashionable I believe, with practitioners viewed scornfully as technicians rather than 'proper' artists.

The scorn of traditional art from conceptual art even spawned a reactionary traditionalist movement, the Stuckists.

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