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Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

> It's always nice seeing countries look to support their artists in building their cultural heritage.

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.

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> paying people for doing what they love even when you are going to, in effect, throw away whatever they produce is madness.

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.

Keynes was dreaming of a world where we figured out how to solve the liquidity preference problem. I.e. tax land value and tax cash. If we did that, then we would have so much free time, that we would be spending all our time on social/cultural activities.

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.

Art produces huge positive externalities. This is the reason artists are the pioneers of gentrified neighbourhoods. They arrive when rent is low (all they can afford) and their product increases the desirability of the area. The artists themselves capture none of this value and often have to leave when rents go up.

Is that sarcasm?

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.

It's also a positive externality for businesses (and by extension workers) in the area and for people who own their own homes (home ownership has historically been the predominant long-term living arrangement in Ireland).

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.

Art and cultural heritage may have worth outside that represented by short-term supply and demand?

I mean, OK, but one could also argue that the reason a given artist is struggling is because their work is not highly valued in the first place.

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.

> I mean, OK, but one could also argue that the reason a given artist is struggling is because their work is not highly valued in the first place.

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.

> It's subjective, which means criticism is subjective too

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.

Remember: van Gogh was undervalued while he was alive. I guess he should just have thrown his stuff away early and become a baker. Mozart had virtually non-stop money troubles, even before he started becoming a party animal, and died a pauper who was buried in a linen sack in a mass grave. Guess he would have had a better life being a potter.

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 get this with regards to Van Gogh, and I assume a thousand Van Gogh’s we never got to hear about or appreciate. I wasn’t suggesting at all that he should’ve given up if he wasn’t making money.

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).

> but it seems a poor place to start with any UBI scheme executed in good faith.

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-...

> Art and cultural heritage may have worth outside that represented by short-term supply and demand?

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.

Because not of bread alone you shalt live. You can't get to the moon without moonshots. There is a queue of people willing to fund for-profit moonshots, but when it comes to art and other non-monetizable human endeavours, in practice there is only the State.

What great works of art have ever come from the State?

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.

art is monetizable

Hardly.

In its current form art market is looking more like tax break/deductibles market.

Indeed, which is why, in my opinion, it is a reasonable thing for the government to fund. The government funding things which are of value but would not make economic sense in a free market economy is a good use of resources.

Art is a public good. It's not something that gets produced and then consumed. It gets produced, and that production costs time and resources. But it is not comsumed like cheesecake or natural gas.

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.

Not very many people believe that a market of individual capitalists responding to supply and demand creates the best outcomes. For example many people believe that state mandated healthcare creates better outcomes. For anyone willing to look beyond a simple model of supply and demand, a deep analysis of the effects is needed.

Yea this is just wrong.

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.

I only described what people believe, not what would be best.

I think that art is also about ideas and experiences that can stimulate another ideas. Can takes you out of your usual context of thinking. There is no demand for it. How can be there be demand for something that do not exist yet. But it can influence generations. Not every value can be directly purchased.

> What value is there in asking taxpayers to pay for an increase the supply when there's already too much supply?

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.

Come on, the alternative to taxpayers subsidising artists isn't that artists face a choice between death or revolt. It's that artists get a different source of income (which may require stopping being an artist).

> It's that artists get a different source of income (which may require stopping being an artist).

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.

Framing everything as a reflection of short-term capitalistic gain is a travesty. Culture transcends your lifetime and probably the lifetime of the people that you are a part of. You ask what value there is in that, but I am curious what value your believe there could be in anything else without it.

My point was not that there is no value in it, my point was that there is already a considerable oversupply of it, so why buy more of it?

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?

What's cultural and what's profitable don't always overlap, so the question is which you want to preserve.

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.

Maybe an artist’s output might be tainted and diminished by having to worry about money, and someone in a secure financial situation may produce qualitatively different art? Pure speculation, obviously.

We do so because money is artificially scarce. There are plenty of games (like minecraft or prosperous universe) where you have everything you could possibly want at the end which then marks the start of a sandbox mode within the survival mode. Humanity is kinda like that, but once we are in sandbox mode, we don't like it and destroy the sandbox. It's like starting a new game.

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