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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Artists amount to 1.8% of the American workforce

https://www.princeton.edu/culturalpolicy/quickfacts/artists/...

Farmers, 0.05%

http://infomory.com/numbers/number-of-farmers-in-us/

Not surprising that art is a bigger industry? Unsurprising, with ~40X the number of people involved, arts produced 4X the revenue.

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Can an artist draw 1000 paintings like a farmer can (automatically) milk 1000 cows per day?

I am under the impression that farmers have automated pretty much everything that is automatizeable in their workflow. Artists still have to put pen to (virtual nowadays) paper and spend time on each and every piece of work. Same for other forms of art (be it furnitures or scupltures or animations and video).

So yeah, I don't think you can compare easily.

> Can an artist draw 1000 paintings like a farmer can (automatically) milk 1000 cows per day?

Record artist can sell millions. Visual artist can sell copies of his works. Writer writes a book once and just copies.

It's seems that art scales and automates better than farmers.

Andy Warhol had an art factory. More modern artists dabble with machine learning. It makes one wonder how we will value the art when we get to a case where an artists trained avatar lives on beyond them.

I’m working on this very thing.

Art can be electronically and digitally reproduced and distributed. An artist today can have their work presented to literally billions of people in seconds, a distribution feat that physical goods can never hope to match.

There are more people involved in farming than farmers. I imagine that number does not include farm hands or laborers, who probably significantly outnumber their employers.

Bureau of labor statistics 2016 says 856,000 "agricultural workers" at a median pay of $11.41/hour.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/farming-fishing-and-forestry/mobile/...

That seems like a good way to look at it. However, the amount of people producing revenue in the arts sector is far greater than just the "artists". In addition, it isn't clear whether video games fit under the arts sector as reported in the OP.

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