Ireland to launch basic income program for artists
artforum.com
artforum.com
The *whole point* is to *not* select based on who is more or less deserving, that exists already and is called welfare.
At best, this is a way to waste some political capital of UBI supporters, and at worst, will be used to push UBI back another decade in Ireland. For this reason I think any communists and socialists who support UBI should refuse to acknowledge this as UBI, and use the vulgarism "welfare" instead exactly as you suggest.
Would Banksy count as an artist from the beginning or just when he already sold stuff for millions?
Selling stuff for millions makes you businessman not an artist. He was recognized as an artist before that. But I guess that just confirms your point about occupation.
1. $12k / year to everyone
2. 50% flat tax (on non-UBI income)
3. Small federal land value tax on non-wilderness properties
4. Tax on non-resident property owners
5. UBI for citizens only (to mitigate people traveling here just to not work)
But try passing that ^ in any major democracy. You can't. The reason is that the winners of the current system (most seniors, top half of wage earners, the international elite) are the ones that either vote, or set political agendas. They like being able to hire [personal helpers, maids, warehouse workers] for $12 an hour.
For a true UBI we need to raise taxes and prices a lot and that will have downsides (at least in the short term) for probably 50 to 60% of the population. We will lose workers. Real output will fall. Taxes will have to go up and we will lose some people to other job markets.
So instead people nibble around the policy edges.
The governments can’t keep people out but also can’t make the new people citizens else it would instantly bankrupt UBI.
This seems like the Achilles heel of UBI.
In the end working must provide incentives for natives to work for any UBI system to exist and those same incentives would apply to immigrants.
Well, yes, and that's kind of an unsolved problem. The immigration issue doesn't help.
> It’s not a question of what a single immigrant does, but what all immigrants do as a group.
Agreed, but what kind of immigrants will a country with a UBI (available to immigrants) tend to attract, ones that want to work or ones that want to collect the UBI? The former group would be better served immigrating somewhere else with lower taxes and no UBI. Like-minded "natives" would most likely do the same, to some extent, though leaving one's birth country is not something undertaken lightly.
It’s likely that a country with a UBI will have better paying low level jobs even adjusting for tax action than a country without. That’s going to attract people who want to work. A tiny country implementing UBI may be swamped by people seeking UBI, but I doubt the global pool of people willing to move just to be very poor in some country and are willing to stay that way is all that large.
Put another way, many countries have a functioning social safety net. But immigrants tend to be seeking a better life which is generally why they became immigrants in the first place. It’s a massive filter on people willing to step up to new challenges which is why immigrant populations tend to be more economically mobile than native populations.
You think a UBI will increase total after-tax purchasing power for above-average earners (i.e. those paying more in taxes to support the UBI than they receive in UBI) compared to not having the UBI? I would be very interested to see how you came to that conclusion as it seems inherently contradictory.
> But immigrants tend to be seeking a better life which is generally why they became immigrants in the first place.
I'm not disagreeing with that at all. I'm just saying that I don't see countries with UBIs being very attractive to these kinds of immigrants. For the same amount of work they would be better off somewhere else where they can keep a larger share of the fruits of their labor rather than paying to support others who aren't as motivated.
Not will, can. Also, the comparison point is other countries not the same country before and after UBI.
UBI doesn’t exist in a vacuum, I doubt poor countries would set one up. A country could set one up specifically because the benefits in say reduced crime outweigh the tax burden. But the kind of country which is rich enough to make that choice is also the kind of country rich and stable enough to attract a highly skilled and motivated immigrants.
Or such a country could tightly control immigration, biasing it toward high incomes etc. In other words you can’t assume anything about such a system without knowing how and by whom it’s implemented.
It's equally hard if not harder to pass a well run progressive tax (e.g. a land value tax).
Instead we get a hodgepodge of progressive and regressive combined to reflect the power struggle between oligarchy and democracy that makes up most western power centers.
Also we get mollified with political pipe dreams designed to be easy to murder in their sleep (e.g. UBI) to take the heat off more "dangerous to profit" policies like minimum wage hikes.
Hell, why wouldn't I increase rent to the UBI amount?
America has very high marginal propensity to consume so most of this will be spent. An additional tax that redistributes primarily will also be spent much more because poor and middle class have higher MPC than rich.
Any changes will be very marginal. Fundamental demand isn't changing, it's just a redistribution of demand. Some prices will go up, some will go down, but neither will move much.
Unless of course UBI isn't fully costed. Then the money supply increases and we will likely see inflation.
Why constantly adjust the amount of money needed to buy essential items like say, toilet paper or menstrual products, when you can just print a voucher for said items?
Me as a toilet paper manufacturer would happily raise my prices and lower the quality when I know the state HAS to buy a certain number of sales units from me.
The idea of UBI without a massive increase in apartment/housing supply is frankly moronic. Even then though, it will all be captured. Being poor is still relative exactly like prices.
Ultimately, it will all pool upwards to the equity markets. All UBI will really end up being is a giant stimulus to the ultra rich.
You can use UBI as a democratic allocation mechanism for landownership or resource rights where the UBI is the carrot and the taxes are the stick.
The nibbling around the policy is because they know what you proposed would mean they get tared and feathered so they just use it as an excuse to buy votes.
But even some countries at certain brackets have the only income tax part over 50%.
So flat 50% of total tax burden would not be unheard of.
Because he chooses to trade his time and effort for it.
And if a lot of people felt like I did, society wouldn't be producing enough for me to actually live on the UBI, ...
The fact that inflation benefits the haves more than the have nots is… ignored.
Like I get the pessimism of taxes just disappearing to the ether but this whole idea is predicated about everyone getting something of tangible value that equalizes around the median income.
Like I also make good money but that makes me care less rather than more about my tax burden. Like I’m comfortable enough that I don’t really care than I’m putting in more than I get out.
Whereas 50% at all income levels is going to be very frustrating to someone earning $35k/year in addition to their UBI.
Paying $40k in taxes in exchange for a UBI of $35k is not "getting something of tangible value"—it's losing $5k. Those with low income (and thus low taxes) get something from UBI. Those with higher income do not. At the margin one might consider the difference to be something like a premium for unemployment insurance, but that only goes so far.
> Like I also make good money but that makes me care less rather than more about my tax burden.
If you really don't care about how much money you take home, why don't you switch to a lower-paying (but less stressful/demanding) job? Those taxes you claim you don't really care about represent unnecessary work put in relative to what you have to show for it at the end of the day.
> If you really don't care about how much money you take home, why don't you switch to a lower-paying (but less stressful/demanding) job?
Because I have a high-paying not very demanding low stress job. So on the theory that I could be making more in exchange for more stress I guess I already took your advice.
> Those taxes you claim you don't really care about represent unnecessary work
But that’s true of all taxes. I still make more money when I make more money. At that point we’re just arguing over the number. And I would kinda rather everyone have UBI and healthcare when it what it costs me is “a non-quality of life affecting amount” which is why progressive taxes work.
In that case I suppose congratulations are in order for winning the lottery.
> I still make more money when I make more money. At that point we’re just arguing over the number.
The number is important because at some point it's no longer worth the extra effort. People can almost always get more money by working more or putting in more effort, and yet it's rare for anyone to dedicate their entire life exclusively to their work. Reducing the reward from work shifts that balance point, even if you're not technically "working for free".
> And I would kinda rather everyone have UBI and healthcare when it what it costs me is “a non-quality of life affecting amount” which is why progressive taxes work.
Since we're talking about taxes here it's less about what you're willing to pay and more about what you're willing to make everyone else pay. If it were just about the cost to you there would be no need to make it compulsory—the government will be happy to accept your donation.
As to point 5, I would exclude citizens not living full time in the country and possibly include non-citizens who have qualified for permanent residency and have lived full time in the country for N years.
But not the high flat tax thing. For the income portion of my compensation, I pay around 50% and it's not bad. With a UBI and a flat tax we don't have to make exceptions for married couples or non-married couples. The marginal dollar is always taxed the same. And if you're making, say, $60k a year that would be $42k after the UBI so the effective tax rate is 30% which seems reasonable.
[0] There have been years where I was out of country for long enough to not have to pay taxes to Canada if I had been in one spot, but I'd moved around enough not to qualify to pay anywhere else so I was still paying taxes to Canada despite not being here for a while. Common enough digital nomad thing.
Case in point: give out $1000 dollars in UBI, expect rents increase by about that amount within the next 2 years as current leases expire.
To implement UBI you must first get of private taxes one by one, then reduce the public income and consumption taxes and then with much of the costs lifted up off the middle class you realize you have a society that is freed up of (feu)dal taxes again and doesn't need any welfare nor UBI anymore.
I see no evidence that this would be the case
3 years × 2,000 hours per year (estimate of full time employment) × €10.50 per hour × 2,000 people = €126 million, five times as much as is earmarked (even ignoring administrative costs). Perhaps it’s 400 rather than 2,000, perhaps it’s not full-time, perhaps the mention of the top recommendation of €10.50 is a red herring and not what’s being implemented (one must admit that €2/hour doesn’t sound so impressive), perhaps something else?
However, slapping the phrase UBI on your program while it’s trendy is a genius way to “rebrand” something most governments already do. Politicians are the best marketers.
There's statutes and case law that make it unwise for real marketers to make claims the way politicians do.
For a country that wants to start a similar program, mislabeling it (because of course it is not actually universal) as “UBI” could be strategic—make people comfortable with the term that could later be expanded to involve actual UBI with less controversy.
Or water it dowm so that people can't ask for actual UBI.
Note that the Irish government, which already has a bunch of other artists' grants and supports, is _not_ calling it "universal". That's a (mostly foreign) media thing.
> which already has a bunch of other artists' grants and supports
I imagine most governments do it to some degree, but the question is how straightforward those grants are to get by someone who legitimately warrants one. Is there a lot of bureaucracy to get through in Ireland? do you often meet creatives receiving such a grant? traveling on it abroad?
One must either already be successful and business-savvy enough to earn money from one’s art or have a job/a sponsor, which defeats the point to some degree.
I’m aware governments offer grants where they sponsor art, but from what I know the requirements and amounts of paperwork make it not really interesting to someone without established fame or connections.
They are certainly accomplished liars.
It is usually a flat rate for everyone, no matter the income. If you want more money, you sell your labor like normal
Selected is the key word. I imagine it would be only a handful that are paid to be full time artists, while the remainder might get funding for specific projects or periods of time.
Nonetheless when they appear their presence is typically (naively) chalked up to simple incompetence.
It's simpler than that. There's not even a need to speculate about outside meddling.
No bureaucrat or appointee ever got a promotion or got more resources at their disposal for getting people off of government services and shrinking the relevance of the program. If you start with the program serving 10k people budget negotiations, getting those job reqs, etc, etc. will be harder if the program is so good that next year there's only 9k people on it. There's a massive incentive to just not give a shit about giving people a bridge to actually get off of welfare because why would any organization actively give a shit about creating a pathway toward making itself less relevant.
This isnt complicated.
>No bureaucrat or appointee ever got a promotion or got more resources at their disposal for getting people off of government services and shrinking the relevance of the program.
I can remember a number of such examples where there were incentives this being just one: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/30/cruel-...
If business runs government then it's in their interests to keep benefits systems stingy, capricious, hard to navigate and unpredictable as it makes people more reliant on their employers.
Removing it altogether would probably trigger riots but the frog can certainly be boiled.
Here's an example showing how someone making 31k per year needs to find a job making 80k a year to increase their net income.
Regarding who this impacts:
Approximately 35% of Americans make <31k and would see their quality of life go down if they took a job paying >31k.
Another approximately 40% of Americans earn between 31-80K and would be better off financially if they took a pay cut to 30K (at least in the short term). They get to see those making less living better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap#/media/File:Welfa...
Not directly, at least not in most described implementations. Most implementations say that, if you qualify, you get 1000€/month every month no matter how much you earn. Now a lot of people add a secondary mechanism where some or all of that money gets clawed back, indirectly via increased income tax, if you earn 'too much', but the base idea is the 1000€ gets deposited into your account every month no matter how much or little you earn.
The rationale for this is a), not do disincentivize doing extra work and b) to simplify the system as much as possible and remove the need to spend a lot of extra time and effort on means testing, fraud detection, handling complaints etc.
Contrary to what everyone says in this thread, this is the crappy way welfare exists in the UK
I believe around 1,700 is the real average for all of EU, for instance. That is not enough of course to change the result much (at 1,700 hours they would need €107 or just above four times the earmarked amount), I just wanted to point it out.
52 weeks x 5 days/week= 260 working days
260 - 20 (minimum paid holydays) -20 (other reasons, national holidays, etc) = 220 working days
220 x 8 = 1760 hours/year, this could vary - maybe - up to 1800 hours depending on a number of factors, but not more.
Salary average is also misleading, there is a fair amount of inequality in European salaries and total compensation, a median would be better suited.
- Some beneficiaries would otherwise be on jobseekers' allowance (208 eur/week)
- Many beneficiaries would not be full-time, and might be mixing this with a part-time job
- Many beneficiaries will drop out of the programme and get a normal job
It's always nice seeing countries look to support their artists in building their cultural heritage.
These feel more like government artist in residence grants.
The gov itself seem to speak about a basic income. :) Media...
But, at the end of the day it's still worth close to nothing, right?
I enjoy art and music as much as anyone else but the reason those professions are so poorly paid is because the supply outstrips the demand considerably[1]. What value is there in asking taxpayers to pay for an increase the supply when there's already too much supply?
Sure, paying people for doing what they love even when you are going to, in effect, throw away whatever they produce is madness.
[1] I play guitar and sketch/paint. Of the other people (who do these things) that I have regular contact with, no one can make money of the things they produce. My rough guess is that for every 1000 musician/art supply, only 1 is demanded.
Or it may not. We can't tell objectively, because there is no metric to measure.
I suppose my point is, if you cannot tell that there is a benefit at all, why leap to the assumption that it's a large enough benefit to pay 25m euros for.
In its current form art market is looking more like tax break/deductibles market.
If anything, we need the ultra rich to fund this kind of thing based on their taste. That worked well in the past with the court musician/composer and patronage.
There are so many problems with this UBI idea. The medium is one that comes to mind. We have largely moved on from paint on canvas to video the way we moved on from sculpture in stone to paint on canvas.
Does the artist have the artistic freedom to start a youtube channel with the money? I would suspect not.
Most likely this goes to propping up outdated mediums of expression and will lack the complete freedom needed for a true artist to really express themselves.
Then of course you have to contend with those gaming the system to free roll by collecting old toilets from the trash to work on their homage to Duchamp masterpiece.
I suspect there is reason for the starving artist archetype.
Maybe the artist is making under-appreciated contributions, or maybe their work is just not good. It's subjective, which means criticism is subjective too, but it seems a poor place to start with any UBI scheme executed in good faith.
I would think it would have more value as an experiment to start with some of the poorest people in a society and then measure their quality of life and economic contribution throughout and after the programme. If you could show a net-positive economic contribution during the programme, and a net-negative contribution before and after (as unlikely as I suspect that is to achieve) it would make it substantially easier to get popular support for UBI.
Many artists that are highly valued today weren't in their times, with many dying destitute or never selling anything of note. Current valuation isn't a predictor on later appreciation.
But that's precisely the point of the subsidy. Society as a whole already expresses value judgements, every day, through money. If an artist is valued, he is successful and accumulates money, so he doesn't need subsidies; but the fact that an artist is valued or not-valued today, we know, is a poor indication of their overall value in the long run. Maybe their art will explode in value after death, maybe he will start a movement that will generate better artists and designers...
The point of universal income, surely, is exactly to remove the immediate value judgement from the equation. UBI is supposed to pay everyone, regardless of what they choose to do (except for raping and murdering, I guess; but ironically, convicts are among the first to actually "enjoy" an UBI of sorts already, although to the price of their liberty). In this sense, starting from art actually makes the most sense.
> it would have more value as an experiment to start with some of the poorest people in a society and then measure their quality of life and economic contribution
The minute you start measuring economic contribution, you are not really in UBI territory anymore - you are just subsidising the market at its fringes. That's already done in social democracies, in practice, through various means.
Art is something that may only be valued highly ex post facto, and which takes a long time of intensive training to get started...
I’m just saying that there are easily hundreds of creative activities people do every day just for the love of it. Each of them could be artistically appreciated later. Narrowing in on this one subset, especially with taxpayer funding, seems not only unfair but also uninformative at large (we learn little about the economic impact of UBI as the U is missing here).
As others have said though, this appears to actually be an artist’s grant labelled as UBI, which makes the whole thing moot (these have been around for a long time with allocated funding).
This isn't intended to start a UBI scheme, that's an embellishment from the article title. From the article text:
"The scheme [...] is meant to assist those working in the fields of arts [...] who suffered economically as the global Covid-19 crisis surged in-country."
From another source [0], it's also time-limited to 3 years.
I think the less hype reading of the news is that artists are struggling through COVID so the government is offering support to ensure they don't lose a good chunk of the industry.
> one could also argue that the reason a given artist is struggling is because their work is not highly valued in the first place.
Art that's not valuable now could very well be found to be valuable later. Van Gogh died broke and essentially unknown but now he's one of the world's most well-known artists.
[0]: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ireland-basic-income-arts-...
If we had a true healthcare free market starting from scratch right now the money would go into blood panel sampling and building massive data sets to use machine learning algorithms for classification.
If I had a full quarterly blood panel sample that went into a database in 5-10 years the most trivial random forest would crush my doctor as far as classification.
Pushing 50 my visits to the doctor are not going to look that much different than when I was a kid in 1980 for my entire life.
Instead, with this bullshit system my doctor doesn't even want to do a full panel once a year. The government is not going to pay for that.
Even better, imagine a $200 dollar home device to do a full blood sample once a month with a $20 subscription fee for analysis. 2-3 years from now would be incredible.
Just impossible to have happen with this wonderful healthcare system the collectivist love so much.
Those people who have already managed to turn it into a fulltime job are more than sufficient to ensure that arts and culture exist. What exactly do you expect to see when more f/time practitioners are added to the existing mix?
If I single out musicians - where I am on the west of Ireland, the cultural impact largely comes from street buskers and trad sessions in small pubs - not the profitable acts filling a stadium once every 5 years.
Given that the local scene is a honeypot for tourists, where as stage tours breezing through town probably extract more than they bring, it might actually be an overall profitable investment - even if the individual artists aren't.
No, it's hardcore keynesism. You're still sustaining demand in the market for all their necessities, from food and toilet paper to brushes and smart LEDs; and you are supporting the overall quality of life in the country, which passes also through people getting involved in art in various ways (as critics, consumers, etc). The fact that you may or may not get valuable output at the end is relatively irrelevant; in the end, a couple of resulting unicorns could probably repay the whole operation just by publicity and goodwill flowing to Ireland.
The inflation targeting thing was an attempt to solve the problem in a less micromanaged way. In practice you still got the usual wealth concentration cycle that everyone knows from history.
Taxes should be spent in a manner that serves society and its people. The sharing of art benefits everyone. Even art you don't like benefits you, because there is a good chance an artist you like will be influenced by it. If you want a thriving art scene you need people making art. Much of it might get thrown away and never reach an audience, but gems will emerge from it.
Even if one takes a completely selfish approach to art (ie, only art that I like is good art), there is benefit in having more artists making more art. As someone who does not live in Ireland I enjoy some art made in Ireland. So even I benefit from Ireland supporting its artists.
This is a positive externality for landlords and a negative one for tenant. It's a zero-sum game between the two groups.
And rent-seeking is a net negative for society.
Even for tenants, it's not as simple as you suggest; most renters would rather live in a gentrified area than a run-down, crime-ridden one (which is exactly why rents are higher). Arguably the only category of people who definitely lose out are long-term, low-income renters with no protections, but they are relatively rare in Ireland.
Gentrification has its problems for sure but I know several people who grew up in formerly run-down areas that are now gentrified, and they would never want to go back to the way things were.
When "taxpayers" refuse to subsidize non-taxpayers, they run the risk of those non-taxpayers murdering them; the "value" is that it directly prevents death and revolt.
Some people just simply don't agree that people should have to die simply because there are too many people, either because they're (directly or indirectly) worried about revolt or because they're "good people" who think people have a right to life, dignity, and happiness.
But some people don't: either because they lie to themselves about what the ramifications of their decisions will be (or are simply ignorant to it), or because they believe in destiny -- that god, for example, wants some people to live and others to die.
What a peculiar thought: Is an artist still an artist if they stop being an artist?
> Come on, the alternative to taxpayers subsidising artists isn't that artists face a choice between death or revolt.
No of course not, yet artists committing suicide for being unable to create their art isn't exactly unheard of. And what I said is exactly true if you maybe think about things a little differently.
The reason for that is of course the impossibility of objectively judging the value of a work of art. It's all subjective, and hence "emperor's new clothes" kinds of situation are commonplace. Also, subjectivity heavily supports no-skill fields like conceptual or performance art - why work 10+ years to learn how to paint properly, when you can do abstract paint splatters, and instead work on marketing it, building a clique (an "art movement") with like-minded allied "artists" instead?
IMO it's all fair game until taxpayer's money are involved. I for one don't want my taxes to be paying a small fortune for an empty piece of canvas, the "artist"'s canned shit or a "performance" of an "artist" sitting on a stool and peeling potatoes.
we are all artists in that way.
I don't play or paint, but in my country I take care of some vineyard a couple of centuries old, at my expenses.
Of course I also enjoy the wine made from them and make no money out of it, I lose a little bit every year.
Should I be included in those that "build the cultural heritage" of my country, given that my country is the world's largest producer of wine?
Or am I simply adding a few thousand liters of wine to an already massive production, basically adding almost nothing to our "cultural heritage"?
What about the work of health workers, delivery people, drivers, employees in supermarkets, cleaners, constructions workers, etc.?
Live music and theatres in particular have been almost totally shut down here since March 2020. I'm struggling to think of any other sector that has been so badly hit during the pandemic.
health workers, delivery people, drivers, employees in supermarkets, cleaners, constructions workers
I think a good comparison might be home carers or stay at home parents. Very hard to have a regular income from these also
They're the ones paying taxes so that the government can then redistribute the money to unemployable artists.
They have salaries. The artists really didn't have a salary beyond the dole.
Well yeah obviously it was.
> Certainly better than tolerating the open secret that many of them weren't' "actively looking for work" when claiming the dole.
I agree there. The real move forward is the (re)acceptance that certain sectors of society are a poor fit for the salaried-work/commercial-enterprise model. It's the good part of socialism, which should be par for the course in an European social democracy - the fact that we don't expect it anymore is a very sad result of 30 years of political decline in the West.
Well, yeah. The community gets offered free money, and receives the news well. All others aren't so enthusiastic.
What were you expecting?
This is payment for contributing specifically to the cultural enrichment of the country while UBI as a system has no strings attached.
This sounds very similar, but I think they'll have the same problem; who decides what art is worthy of being supported?
If the number of entrants exceeds the number of allowances, they are randomly selected. It's written in the article.
Most governments (including the Irish government) have supported artists to some degree in the past, through grants, etc. I think the main difference is that this is intended to be broader support and not tied to specific projects.
This is wrong in so many ways. It will encourage people to basically pretend they're doing some kind of art even if they're not.
If someone is a real artist imo, they will manage. It will be part-time but eventually they will get better and can start making money out of it, and if not then well it can just be their hobby right? Why am I not supposed to be paid for making my own garden look good? Is it art or hobby?
Except that's not what actually happens. People working a full time job (or more than one job) don't have the time or energy to also be a part-time artist until they make it. This is especially true for people who have other responsibilities like raising children or caring for elderly relatives. Leaving it up to "the market" only works if a single part time job is enough to live on, and it isn't.
UBI for artists means they can work a little less to make time for making art. Society is essentially paying them to make art. That makes society better. Ireland has decided it's a worthwhile investment.
I'd love to live in a society where everyone is paid to do something they love, to make society better, but doing it for artists to start with is a great first step.
And giving a couple of bucks to individual artist will somehow make them able to go toe-to-toe with the Disney juggernaut how exactly?
If marketability is what's missing, then why not give free airtime to all artists on national radio/TV broadcasters instead, this way the whole county can hear/see them, and then the audience will decide if they like them or not.
You can apply your argument to european SW companies. Because local companies lacked "marketability" we are now all dependent on US tech for everything despite having some local alternatives. However, the governments giving free money to local tech companies (which many received through various EU grants) wouldn't have improved the outcome much as the customers voted with their wallets (or with their private data) to use those US tech products and not local alternatives (like how many now use iPhones and not Nokias, Blackberrys or Ericssons).
I feel it's the same with art. Consumers will vote with their wallet or their attention and consume content that they enjoy or gives them dopamine hits regardless of its origin or financial backing. So if no consumers and no patrons like your art, why should the government just give you free money except for reasons of national pride and sovereignty maybe?
Handing out a few bucks to artists will not fix the main issues of why artists and all low wage workers can't survive anymore in today's cities, namely, unaffordable housing.
Europe's biggest cultural centers (London, Paris, Amsterdam, etc.) have turned into the playground of foreign billionaires, real estate speculators and >six-figure income law-, management-consulting-, finance- and tech- bros, with rents skyrocketing, so how are artists or anyone else low on funds supposed to survive in these environments?
This artist-grant money will not fix the core issue as it's like trying to stop a flood with a paper tissue.
You're representing this as a dichotomy. It's not though. Governments have enough resources to do more than one thing at a time.
They have resources, but reality has show they lack the will to properly use them as those in charge are more concerned about winning these popularity contests called "elections" rather than taking radical actions to do any meaningful change. So it's a lot less riskier for their careers to sit back and kick the can down the road while starting projects that sound good on paper and wins them sympathy ("new law wants to help struggling artists") but accomplish nothing meaningful in the end (CoL, inflation and wealth inequality will keep rising, wages will stagnate). Rinse and repeat.
Lots of things that society has collectively decided are they would like to have aren't possible in a free market. Roads are a good example. If people had to buy their own roads you might have freeways but towns would be dirt tracks. Roads would be wildly different around the country. Signs wouldn't be unified by design. It'd be awful. The military is another example. If people actually had to buy military things in a free market you'd have a fragmented market of tiny militias and absolutely no national defence infrastructure. The list of things that are only possible to pay for in a socialized way is very long.
There's no reason why increasing the supply of art beyond the limited amount that the free market will provide isn't another thing that would make society better.
Don't get me wrong, I'm an art enthusiast myself but I think that if someone is really passionate, they will go out and look for a sponsor themselves that's how it worked over the ages and our cultural heritage as a civilization is quite rich I'd say.
This is especially true for people who have other responsibilities like raising children or caring for elderly relatives.
But that's how every side hustle works, you have to get organized and manage your time well, having children is not an excuse.
Art is almost always exclusively used for consumption. That doesn't make it worthless: it has value to the people who enjoy consuming that kind of art. But when an artist creates a work of art, that's the end of the chain – there's typically nothing that can build on that work, no other work that is enabled by this work.
The case is different for open source software, for example. Not all OSS is used productively by other people, but some of it is, enabling other work in sometimes completely different fields. For example, the Linux kernel and other OSS components which provide a versatile and free (as in free beer) operating system, have facilitated the creation of an incredible amount of value all over the world, in many different domains. Many of those thus facilitated works have themselves enabled other works, and so on. It's a source of value creation chains, not the end of one.
So, why start a grant program *cough cough* "UBI" for artists, but not for open source developers?
If anything it's the opposite: there is more demand for software than art.
True, for most niche single-developer OSS projects is very difficult to gain an user community. But for a random musician/sculptor/painter it's even worse.
With a basic income for artists, everyone profits:
- Artists can be more creative and independent, because they don't need to monetize their work. - People can enjoy art regardless of their social status and the money in their pocket. - Society has a richer, more diverse and creative culture.
https://www.superhibasicincome.com/
Super hi basic income 1,000 US dollars per month apply by January 21st 2022
I do think it'd be a great idea to have grants / subsidies / UBI for FOSS developers. The EU is slowly walking in that direction with donations and funding a big bounty programme for FOSS they directly use.
Unless you’re talking about very specific art and very specific software, I don’t think universality is a strong argument.
Linux and thus Android would like to have a word with you.
And i say this with an Ubuntu daily driver.
The unsaid part: "recipients are supposed to publicly laud the government": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_painter
Ireland has the sanest political system I've ever seen in person.
Norway has had a stipend programme for writers for some time.
Interesting question: how does not "prove" to be an artist, and a needy one at that? At the moment it's a lottery.
We spend much more money on art than in 1920, yet the art quality does not seem to have improved proportionately, indeed it possibly went down. That might or might not be causal (possibly talented people do not choose to be artists anymore), but it is still worrying.
There is a lot of gatekeeping around art and professionals tend to declare opinions of amateurs for null and void, but as a reader I still miss a new Oscar Wilde.
I think it's hard to say because there's so much art above a basic quality bar now that it's next to impossible to experience, curate or judge a significant amount of it, even within a category.
We are so overwhelmed with creative output that even watching every "highly recommended" TV show or movie we're recommended on Netflix would be a fulltime job, let alone the hidden gems, or the millions of books published each year. You'd hope that someone would find the next Oscar Wilde and shout about it, but I don't like the odds.. especially as the gamut of what is considered good literature is now broader than ever before.
I frequently find some amazing new music that isn't popular and shout about it a bit but no-one really cares. There's too much music, tastes vary too much (what I find amazing could well seem like total crud to everyone else), and most people prefer to listen to what they already know over and over rather than keep digging for something new.
How can something that only a single occupation receives, at random, be called "universal"? Do words even mean anything anymore?
We know what it means. Ireland will suddenly have a lot of "artists".
Also, who is going to decide what is and what is not art?
> selection will be randomized
Now I'm confused, do you mean artists should be counting on luck to be paid? Isn't that what they have already been doing?
How is something that depends on luck called basic?
Do words even mean anything anymore?
While you are at it, can you buy lotto tickets for the homeless? Because that will solve the problem.
Ireland, you are doing it wrong...
We have basic income programs for the elderly (state pensions). For children (child care money). For students. For veterans. And for unemployed people. The only people not receiving anything are the employed. And for those people we have tax thresholds, minimum wages, sick leave, etc.
Basic income doesn't have to be that complicated. Most countries end up choosing to not let people starve on the streets. That means that there's a minimum cost per individual that is covered one way or another. In most countries that means a combination of free health care, food stamps, housing and typically at least some benefits (though usually with lots of strings attached) for the most poor in society and a lot of complex programs for everybody else. Of course some countries really do dump their problems on the street, which creates its own set of problems in terms of crime, poverty, etc.
If you just accept that there's an X cost per citizen in terms of them not starving, having shelter, etc. there are multiple ways of getting organized on that front. The way most countries ended up doing that (i.e. with a lot of bureaucracy, tax complexity, and a very hard to navigate program of benefits, rules and exceptions) is not cheap.
The main issue with basic income is not that it is hard but that it is controversial. Basically, it flows from a value system that dictates that people must pretend to be useful (by having a job). Never mind that many of those jobs are bullshit and make people miserable. Even though everybody ultimately gets what they need, we'd like to have lots of strings attached to that privilege. When you hear unemployment statistics that are ridiculously low (like 4%), just think for a second which people are not part of those statistics. That's a rather large group. In many countries that is close to or actually more than half of the population. It's not a problem. These people are being taken care off already. We don't call it basic income but these people are not working and they are definitely not poor.
Basic income just formalizes that status quo.
If you're thinking of going to Dublin, I can highly recommend People's Art [1], which is an outdoors gallery (literally) around St Stephen's Green on weekends with good weather in August. Great variety and talent showing off. Sadly, it's been cancelled for CoVID. Hopefully they can get it going again.
[1] http://peoplesart.ie/ (not updated since 2020)
Given that royalty rates are set by quasi-governmental organizations (BMI, ASCAP) I'd love to see music royalties be "fairer".
In other words, Spotify, Youtube et al should pay more per play at the lowest levels and less at the higher levels. Essentially the rich artists end up subsidizing the poor artists a little bit. Given that most rich artists were poor artists once, hopefully most of them would be supportive of such a scheme.
"Our survey says that shouting inanities in a regional accent is valuable to culture" - Singing of the Bonesaws
I am a doctor and I hate it. Please fund my passion, so I can stop doing that and bring positive externalities to society.
This is a false dilemma. We obviously should do both.
As someone who lives in Ireland and who pays taxes a lot of people on HN would say are outrageous, I support this wholeheartedly and would gladly pay even more taxes if such a program were extended and become truly universal.
I would, of course, continue to do what I do because I love it.
Of course just raining money on (some of) them requires way less effort, but it makes it seem like art is just a money sink and cannot create tangible value (spoiler: it can).
"Funded by the Arts Council" is a phrase commonly seen on posters for all sorts of artistic endeavours. "Funding Opportunities" is front and centre on their website too:
Because they have collected many paintings, the city has an Artothek, similar to a library, where you can step by, borrow ant take with you any painting for a nominal price (3 EUR / period of time).
> how are they gonna define who is an artist and who is not?
They won't.
> Why taxpayers (who may not care about art at all) should pay for this?
Who would? Would you?
> Why a government can define that this specific group of people should get some grants
Because that's what governments do.
> but not for example teachers
Teachers have regular incomes.
> or Uber drivers?
The hurdles to be a taxi driver and an Uber driver are mostly the same, so we mostly don't have Uber drivers. We have taxi drivers instead, who also answer Uber calls when they want to get exploited while they enrich someone else.
It's a stupendously bad idea. There are already hints of this:
> Currently at issue are eligibility and the process by which recipients will be selected.
If you allow politics to finance the arts, then soon the only art you have is the one preferred by the ruling politicians.
If your political option is ruling at the moment, this may not seem that bad - as happened in Slovenia, where the "left-ish" options rule for the most part.
The problem is when "the others" take over the government, as has happened in Slovenia. Then, suddenly, everyone looses their funding while it's being redirected to the groups preferred by the new government. And the longer since the last change, the more dependent everyone is on the "government handout" and the bigger the effect.
> The ministry has said there will be no means test and that the process will be noncompetitive. If the number of applicants exceeds the number of income awards available, selection will be randomized.
You may say, "but the system that they propose solves this problem". Yeah, sure. For now. Soon after implementation, the policitcal debate about "real artist" and "fake artists stealing money" will start, just like the one we have here. Rules will be amended to "stop people from stealing money with fake art" and BAM, you have politically set standards for what constitutes "art".
Don't get me wrong - I'm in the very small minority in Slovenia who does not support the system we have. But this may, or may not, have something to do with the fact that the only financing for arts (and NGOs!) are government grants, so those who do not agree with the system (and the people enforcing it) never even have a chance to get started. The fact that we've not known a different system for generations (since Yugoslavia, being a communist dictatorship, also had "systemic financing") does not help.
Just to add regarding the NGOs I mentioned: officially, 0.6% of the population is employed in the NGO sector. European average is ~6%. But our number includes ALL government established and funded art and science institutions (like museums and the like). We have no NGO sector. Which, by extension, also means we do not have non-establishment politics.
In short: don't do government guided systemic financing. Does not mean it's not a good idea in any form, but please do in a way that the population (via tax credits, tokens etc.) decides who to award the majority of the money to, not the politicians.
This feels like the government employing 2000 people and telling them to do nothing in particular.
Also it seems the payment is set to the Irish minimum wage of €10.50 p/h. I would love to know what an actual minimum wage worker thinks of this scheme.
Are we still doing coffee and subway artists?
Nobody told them anything close to that. Any research towards basic income tells us that people continue working close to as much as before. So this seems like a really unnecessary combative comment.
Regarding minimum wage workers, one thing can be bad, while the other is also bad. So not really an argument.
As in not being given a task or directive for their income.
I'm not saying they're told to literally do nothing.
I am curious about the research in this field. Living in Israel I see the Ultra-Orthodox being payed for studying the scriptures and they work much less than their secular peers. Knowing corrupt countries, I know of tons of people employed by the state and local authorities just to give them jobs - it is a sign of malfunctioning and corruption usually - and they often do nothing in their job.
What those examples have in common is that they create a class of people dependent on a party or on some politician to eat their meal. This entrenches tribalism and corruption.
Also there is a very big difference between "universal basic income" - which would be an extension of human rights accorded to all, and paying some "artists" money. The former may be the evolution of the latter but there is no way to be certain. I am not familiar with Ireland but I suspect it is a trick of some party to secure thousands of certain votes, and probably even to use them for propaganda (I want to see those artists expose critical views of the party that gives them money..).
> Multiple studies of where basic income was tried in the real world found it to reduce work.
> For example, "Manitoba, Canada experimented with Mincome, a basic guaranteed income, in the 1970s. In the town of Dauphin, Manitoba, labor only decreased by 13%, much less than expected" [1]. There are plenty of others.
So not "any research". The research you think of are probably academic and/or pilot studies, which is absolutely not UBI.
But I think the parent wrote in a hurry. It should probably have said "without demands or restrictions".