The Death of the Middle-Class Musician
thewalrus.ca
thewalrus.ca
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.
Universal basic income is impossible to justify morally.
Let's have a look at Scandinavia or Germany. They have reasonably generous welfare systems, but they are means tested. So for the sake of argument, declare them to be 'truly livable'. Especially by global standards.
Now I claim, that you can get pretty much the same net payments (of means tested welfare - taxes) that these countries have today with a system of (UBI - taxes). Basically, at the moment both taxes and welfare are means tested; you could move to UBI by moving all the means testing from welfare to taxes.
Because net payments would be pretty much the same, all incentives would stay pretty much the same as today.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax which is one way to implement something like a UBI.
Of course, if you want to go much beyond what Germany and Scandinavia are already paying, you'd need even higher taxes or a stranger economy.
Btw, per capita the US is one of the world leaders of social welfare spending. They spend more than France. (Mostly because while France spends a higher proportion of GDP, American GDP per capita is much higher.)
Nope, in Germany you are required to work. If you can't find a job, you still have to try (and prove that), you need to stay at home / be available (and notify the state about your vacation or you might be punished by receiving less welfare) and of course you have to use up all money or wealth you have and state, in written, that you have no other sources of wealth.
So UBI would absolutely change incentives here.
Though in practice it's fairly easy to put in a token effort so your welfare won't be cut, but avoid actually getting hired.
But you are very right that the token effort is still effort.
> [...] and of course you have to use up all money or wealth you have and state, in written, that you have no other sources of wealth.
That is similar to taxing that money and wealth. But you are right.
With taxes, even crazy high, you can still accumulate wealth. Taxes slow you down, but it’s still possible.
With net-worth-ceiling to receive welfare, you’re forced you cannot accumulate wealth on welfare. And your previous wealth is gone before you get to earn welfare.
Got a nice house and BMW and decided to slow it down and live on welfare? Or, more likely, work under table and collect welfare too? Good luck with that :)
That's only true for income taxes, not for wealth taxes.
How are you going to pay those wealth taxes? (Assuming you have no income.)
Of course, same applies to welfare - you can only sell part of your stuff. But the caveat is you won't have access to welfare till you sell all of it AND spend the money you got.
Personally I like welfare-with-net-worth-threshold. Obviously it should not apply to unemployment insurance which is, well, insurance.
> Personally I like welfare-with-net-worth-threshold.
The only thing that really matters are net payments (and marginal net payments, ie how many cents can you keep from the next gross dollar you earn). It doesn't really matter whether the effective marginal tax rate is made up of income tax or a phasing out of welfare benefits or a combination of both (and throw in some other taxes etc, too).
In the name of simplicity, you might want to have a single government agency that assesses your income and net worth. Instead of having both the tax people and the welfare agencies do that and duplicate work.
(Though ideally, we'd use forms of taxation like land value tax where the government doesn't need to assess your income nor net worth in the first place.)
In euro style systems very few people receive welfare at a given time. Many people may receive it at some point in lifetime, but not at the same time. UBI would completely change the picture.
On top of that, salaries for basic jobs would need to get much higher to incentivize people to work. Thus UBI would have to be much higher as current welfare. Unless you expect citizens to live on UBI but keep services cheap with cheap migrant labor.
Not true. The 'B' in UBI means 'Basic'. UBI wil pay your rent, utilities, and food, but not much else. Now, there are some people that are willing to just exist on only the bare minimum, but that's a significant minority. The vast majority of people want more. There will be plenty of people willing to do minimum wage jobs to top-up their UBI so they can afford extras like holidays, nicer phones, meals out, etc...
The main difference would be that the security of UBI would give them more power to distch a job if they were being abused in some way, rather than being so desperate that even if their employer is abusing them they are forced to take it because they need the job to survive.
I feel like too much discussion on UBI is poisoned by the idea that the vast majority of people are bone idle and are willing to just sit at home doing nothing and just existing with the bare minumum required to live. It's just not true
No matter how you finance it, you can find other (better or worse) means to spend collected money.
In the name of simplicity, you might want to have a single government agency that assesses your income and net worth. Instead of having both the tax people and the welfare agencies do that and duplicate work.
So instead of having welfare payments phase out, you could just increase marginal income taxes by the same amount, and end up with exactly the same net payment structure.
There’s no way taxing super-rich-only would cover fair UBI. It’ll have to be much much wider. Unless 99% of jobs would become automatized.
It’s funny whenever there is a comment like “hey, maybe we shouldn’t let individual people get so rich they can basically become thier own country.” Always get called socialists/communists. You can be capitalist while also having some care and protection for the little people.
If there was a button that I could press that would double the wealth of the 99% of people and quadruple the wealth of the top 1%, I would keep pressing it, even though it technically makes inequality worse and worse every time.
It would be morally reprehensible not to press that button.
EDIT: just be clear, I am talking about real (i.e. inflation adjusted) wealth. I am not talking about how many zeros we add to all dollar amounts.
So I am talking about the number of houses and shoes and cars we have, and the amount of ice cream and education we can enjoy.
Ironically, our society is basically continuously pushing that button today, much to the glee of the 1%.
To be clear: I was talking about real prosperity.
You are talking about nominal prosperity. And I agree: just adding a zero at the end of all dollar amounts wouldn't make anyone better off.
Alas, it's no clear that we have taxation and redistribution in the real world works like this or can even work like this: they typically don't just cleanly transfer wealth, but also destroy a lot of wealth.
To be clear: I don't say that my hypothetical button exists. This was just a Gedankenexperiment to show that increasing inequality by itself isn't all that relevant.
In reality, we observe that more business friendly places like Scandinavia or Singapore or even the US are a lot richer than places that strangle business.
Now this is partially about quantity of taxes, but even more about rules and regulations. Eg Scandinavian countries have fairly high taxes, but they are well run and business friendly.
UBIs don't have these problems (or, rather, they'd have some of them in different ways, but in ways that are closer to market capitalism than socialism).
You're correct in that UBI is something different than socialism.
You could theoretically have market socialism, where the only difference from market capitalism would be the lack of distinction between workers and owners. Gig economy would be its kryptonite, though: if allow it you are back to exploiting workers, if you ban it you will also ban a whole lot of actual self-employed professionals.
Although it functioned better than centrally planned socialism, it still had lots of issues related to prices, particularly of capital. Who provides capital for enterprise? In practice, the state. And this ran into the same political economy issues with centrally planned economies. What happens when a company is about to go under? Unemployment is bad, so the worker-owned company gets a bail out. Who can start a firm? Well, better make sure your company satisfies the objectives of your local government.
Your morals are very strange if they don't include care for others.
I don't want to abolish all taxes, I'm not a libertarian. But giving away the money you took from somebody else needs a justification (for example to pay for the roads). And I find "income redistribution" for the sake of it not an acceptable goal.
There is some contingent of people who will just not participate in society no matter what. So the question becomes where do we set the bar - the lower this bar, the smaller that contingent.
It's pretty easy to justify morally. I mean at least as easy as any other welfare.
The net payments for UBI plus (income) taxes don't have to look to different from what many countries already do today. It's just the accounting that looks a bit different.
Whether UBI would make the problem quantitatively worse depends on the exact design of the UBI system you have in mind and the current system you want to compare it with.
We did this during Covid as furlough payments, and the result was high inflation. Wages didn’t significantly increase to match, so in my country anyway people feel that the cost if living is significantly worse post-Covid.
Anywhere that implemented UBI would also have to implement rent controls, otherwise Landlords would just see it as money on the table. But you couldn’t have controls for all prices, so inflation would still result.
Nice trick if you can pull it off.
So for the 1GBP you print, you recoup up to 20p in VAT, or less for foodstuffs.
And more money chasing the same goods and services means…?
I don't think that's how people commonly understand how UBI should be financed.
For any meaningful scheme, you would be talking about hundreds of billions.
The money that just sits untaxed on the vaults of the extremely wealthy should be taxed to finance this.
This is trickle down economics done right. Remove money from the wealthy and redistribute it to benefit society.
The extremely wealthy will also have an army of lawyers and accountants to mitigate against this, not to mention trusts and holding companies.
It’s a nice idea, but the implementation is tricky.
I’m not arguing for them, just being realistic.
No army of lawyers would save them from actually effective regulation.
Of course, if you want to do business in country X, you are subject to the laws of that country X.
But otherwise, you can leave that country and settle down elsewhere and do your business there. No matter how 'actually effective' that regulation is. (Unless you do an 'East Germany' and don't allow people to leave.)
When relevant countries act in tandem, it would work.
I would really like to see a billionaire vote with their feet to protect their wealth by moving ro Somalia or something like that.
A country can also limit their ability to operate from abroad when they move.
In real life, value producing is inherently tied to the society which allows value to be produced.
Approximately no one has vaults of gold like Scrooge McDuck. The richest people largely hold their wealth in company shares.
So you are suggesting to raise the cost of capital for companies?
Yeah, I also like to be pedantically literal when I don't have good counter arguments. I feel your pain, brother.
You can replace my "vaults of gold" analogy for propety, yachts, real estate, company shares, etc. Whatever someone holds in their own name that constitutes wealth above a certain threshold should be taxed.
> So you are suggesting to raise the cost of capital for companies?
Corporations also should contribute to society, as they also benefit from the common infrastructure.
There's this pervasive idea that "if we tax the rich they will stop investing in companies and us filthy peasants will be out of jobs" which is the bullshit of the ages. If there is demand for goods and services, there will be those that supply them.
Are you just being obtuse to deflect from the actual argument?
Basically, the people a tax is nominally levied upon don't necessarily bear the economic burden, and vice versa.
A silly example: do you think it makes a difference if your employer transfers your whole gross income into your account and you pay income taxes, or whether your employer pays the income tax first, and then transfers you the net amount?
They keep money in bonds (lending money to people, corps, govs that need it), stocks (raise the value of companies that are valuable thus letting them borrow more etc) or they consume which pays for all the poor peoples salaries
The immaturity of people when it comes to economics is a problem
That's wealth that should be taxed.
> The immaturity of people when it comes to economics is a problem
I agree. Just not in the way you imagine.
Wealth taxes are fairly controversial, and not very common around the world.
But they have been implemented in a few places, and we can look at what real world effects have been observed.
Don't let the uneducated messenger distract from UBI itself though. Proposed seriously, it's about reducing asset values and high incomes to redistribute that value to everyone who isn't losing more value than the UBI. The real argument is that it would mean short-term economic costs to build a more robust system with a bigger pool of people with the safety net and risk appetite to start/join companies.
You seem to have something very specific in mind?
I don't claim to have the answers. My point is just that there are interesting benefits that are worth weighing against those costs.
In the UK, council taxes also roughly have the right structure. Though the discount you get for unoccupied property is crazy. It's exactly the opposite of what you'd want to encourage.
Now how to finance a UBI is a good question.
A land value tax would be an interesting choice. Especially since a UBI will probably lead to higher rents.
If velocity speeds up and inflation goes up, the central bank will remove money from circulation to hit their target. If velocity goes down, the central bank will inject money into circulation.
The fiscal multiplier is zero.
(Or rather, any deviation of the fiscal multiplier from zero is evidence of an incompetent central bank.)
No. The high inflation was a result of Fed policy, not fiscal tricks like furlough payments.
> Anywhere that implemented UBI would also have to implement rent controls, otherwise Landlords would just see it as money on the table. But you couldn’t have controls for all prices, so inflation would still result.
You are right that UBI can lead to higher relative prices for rent.
And that's why you would want to pair UBI with land value taxes, not rent control.
(UBI would not lead to inflation, and would not necessarily lead to higher absolute rents. The overall level of inflation is something an inflation targeting central bank, like the Fed or ECB, controls.)
In the last place I rented (London), the private landlords were unlikely to own the land. Fixed term leasehold was overwhelming common, not freehold.
But to make LVT simpler to understand (and economically equivalent): you can imagine the government owns all the land, and rents out plots for eg 20 years at a time to the highest bidder. To help people plan better, the auctions can be done 5 years ahead of time. So leases for 2036 - 2056 will be auctioned off in 2031.
You can stagger the auctions, so a few leases get auctioned off every week.
Or are you proposing State confiscation and management of the land? I can’t quite tell from your post.
For example, you could do more or less the same thing that the UK did to abolish slavery: buy out all the existing land owners / lease holders.
I suggested 20 years as a reasonable time frame for leases. In principle, 100 years might would also work. 999 years is probably far too long.
Now, instead of auctioning off the leases, you can also have individuals officially owning the land, but instead you tax them a certain fraction of the market value of the land every year. Economically that's equivalent.
A 999 year lease is basically economically the same as owning the land. So you should more or less treat it the same.
Ask yourself when you have a normal working class person who roughly breaks even on their income vs. their spending where does all that money go?
They pay rent. And then what? They pay mortgage, they car insurance, they utilities.
One way or another the money ends up to the top of the pyramid, i.e. the wealthy individuals who own capital assets, properties, businesses etc.
You had high inflation because the government essentially printed money. But what if instead of printing that 1 trillion dollars (or however much it was), the state had actually taxed the that money off of the rich individuals and corporations and then handed that out.
The same money would again flow through the system back to the same rich people where it could be taxed again and handed out and put back into the circulation. This would not cause inflation by itself since the monetary value of the money would not be devalued.
It would require a government that actually gave a damn about its citizens and had balls to tax people and corporations and when the said corporations and individuals run the government its of course not going to happen.
Lots and lots of people can create arts. In old era when people would just gather together and sing. Nobody would make a living off that. Very very few people were making a living by performing to nobility.
Modern recording industry with specialized instruments distorted this by allowing more talented people make a living. Yet it destroyed a lot of community singing by not-highly-talented people. On one hand more people could make a living, on the other hand much much less people were creating arts.
Nowadays it feels like we’re returning back to the natural flow. More people are creating arts since modern instruments are widely accessible. But fewer people can make a living.
Overall, I’d say more people creating arts is preferable outcome. And best art is created for the sake of it as a hobby.
That stopped when we started to play from record.
I guess busking has existed in many societies, but that's hardly making a living, and certainly not middle class.
Weddings, funerals and birthdays, that's where i see community contribution, not full time professionals. Perhaps community contribution involving a little side income, but chances are, in pre-recording days, not even that. Not much other entertainment possibilities to spend your Sunday on other than being part of the band.
(it's funny how middle class is often portaied as a modern achievement, when the past is so full of examples of population that isn't the ruling elite, but economically still far above another layer of dropouts that would just move from opportunity to opportunity until an early death, at least unless they end up at some form of monastery)
> Weddings, funerals and birthdays, that's where i see community contribution, not full time professionals.
These were definitely professionals and these events were seen as important. Even if you was poor, you threw money on it. People in the past had ears just like we do. The amateur singing after 5th beer is fun for singers, but not fun for anyone else.
> Not much other entertainment possibilities to spend your Sunday on other than being part of the band.
They had plenty of opportunities, we did not invented fun. All generations before us had fun. Socializing and drinking would be the easy straightforward one. Listening to a professional band as you drink and chat.
I like how you're turning the article around a bit. So many voices you hear these days are saying thing like, "My father was a [x]. I've been an [x] all my life. Since [y] it's been harder than ever to make a living. I've always looked up to successful [x]s as more able or refined in some way, but now I have stratification on the brain and I start to think that those [x]s are taking too big a piece of the pie, and they should give me some."
If you approached a club owner in 1960 and said "Look, you don't have to hire a band. I'll set you up with one of those open reel mag tape gizmos and you can spend $300 on a tape library and spend hours nursing it." They'd look at you and reply "That's a crazy joke. I'll hire a band."
Then in 1990 the club owner doesn't even participate in the music, and expects the bartender to keep the CD/cassette deck loaded. Or they play the radio. In 1960 that would result in jibes about the club owner promoting the radio station. In 1990 it just happens and goes unnoticed.
The problem is there has never really been a mass expectation of original live music in all these drinking-places. There has only been a social demand that music be present, which can be fulfilled in so many other ways now. It's sad that it can be stated in such a simple way that is an assault to the ego.
But it probably helps if you can allude to society changing in undesirable ways despite your best efforts, class struggles, or bad government.
There is almost certainly a choir near you that would love to have more singers, especially if they're male. (Membership skews female and geriatric.)
The most economically productive nations on the planet are well outside any risk of starvation, by a huge margin. This line of thinking is not a part of serious economic theory, it just comes from an extremely primitive high school level understanding of economics.
It is maybe time for people like you to realize that the current crisis in the US is a direct result of this zero-sum worldview, where you think you can only win if someone else loses. Some turned that around and infer someone else losing will make them win, which is where a lot of the worse-than-soviet cruelty in US society comes from. Where producing win-win outcomes should be prefered, part of the US seems to be craving for lose-lose.
It is hard for the fish to perceive the nature of the water they have been swimming in their whole lives, but trust me: from an European standpoint the frequency soviet-style stories emerging from the US is rising.
People don’t call ambulances because they’re afraid of the cost, they die in the back of rideshares or sit bleeding out waiting for someone to Google the cheapest ER.
People drink poisoned water in one of the richest countries in the world, not as a one-time scandal but as a structural outcome, in Flint, in Jackson, in places the cameras moved on from.
Housing is a market, not a right, and so entire cities now feature tent villages under highways while luxury units sit empty, protected not by need but by capital.
In parts of Louisiana, California and Iowa, the air you breathe and the water you touch can kill you, but only if you’re poor enough or Black or unlucky enough to live near a chemical plant, a battery smelter, a lake no one bothers to save. In these sacrifice zones, life expectancy drops like it’s wartime. In urban centres people film others burning alive on the subway (NYC) and call it content.
There are cemeteries of Black Americans being paved over for parking garages, with courts hesitating to intervene. These aren’t edge cases—they’re the shape of the thing. This is not the freedom that was promised. This is the bureaucracy of cruelty operating not as failure, but as design. And the worst part is: many still think this is the price of success.
Homelessness in the west is mostly not because people can't afford a house but because they'd rather spend their money on other things (drugs) or don't want a house at any price, or can't avoid losing their house because of their behavior.
What economic inequality would you deem small enough?
And why do you care about inequality, and not eg the absolute livings standards of the least well off? We can 'solve' inequality by just destroying everything the rich have, but that won't make anyone better off.
Btw, the absolute living standards of all members of society, including the least well off, have never been better. And that's true for almost any society you care to look at on our globe. (Removing eg those currently at war, that weren't at war earlier.)
Economic inequality small enough to not be the root cause of the particular problem you are interested in.
The problems of inequality go well beyond living standards. E.g. political control in a very unequal society gets concentrated in a few people.
Especially the failures to replicate.
2. From Wikipedia it appears they responded to all the substantial criticism. It also mentions an independent study largely agreeing with the results.
3. This is one book amongst a mountain of research, and there are problems with inequality that go beyond those the book mentions.
It is indeed noble that the authors responded to the criticism, but unlike what Wikipedia seems to imply, they didn't manage to rescue their argument.
See https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/03/th... from another comment.
I'd like the one small enough that I won't die from my (treatable) first major medical event due to being unable to fund 100% of treatment costs.
I'd also like one small enough that me and the kids didn't spend most of the 2010s in hunger-level poverty.
That'd be a start.
So if everyone got 10x richer overnight, but the top 1% got 1000x richer, that would increase inequality by any reasonable metric, but it would help with the benchmarks you mentioned.
And in any case, I'm saying absolute prosperity of individual people matters. Not the average per capita absolute prosperity of a country.
So people who go into medical bankruptcy in the US are obviously not individually rich. And I hope you and me agree, that if you could find a way to make them better off, that would be a good thing?
Whereas if you found a way to make them worse off by 20%, but make Mr Zuckerberg worse off by 50%, that would not be advisable, even if it technically decreases inequality.
As a side note, it really shouldn't be possible to edit comments two hours after they've been posted and after they've had replies. Particularly without showing any indication of that.
The inequality problem is about access to material resources. Money is just an abstraction. No one is seriously suggesting to refuse zuckerberg access to good things on principle or to just diminish and not redistribute his wealth, that's preposterous.
The point is that access to capital is access to resources. The people that hoard capital necessarily end up hoarding important resources and they use this imbalance to then extract further capital from others and further their position, thus in turn gives them power. The problem is all about bringing more balance to this situation so that we avoid a return to feudalism in which a handful of people have control over all the resources and power and everyone is is basically just beholden to their whims.
Better to use the median, because the average is heavily skewed by the ultra-rich.
Because it is very expensive to live in America.
The alternative to the current situation in the US is not abject poverty.
[0] https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/household-debt.html [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30793926
The top 1% getting 1000x richer is a problem, because trickle down economics is bullshit. Money that exists as part of a pile of gold in a dragon's den does not move the economy.
The price level is driven by what the central bank does with the money printer. UBI wouldn't raise prices, if the central bank does their job even halfway competently. (Even the mediocre real world performance of the Fed or ECB would suffice to _not_ have prices raise by 10x in eg a year of UBI.)
> And that's not how UBI works, no one is some multiplier richer because it exists.
I was not meaning to imply that UBI would make people richer on average. My comment was purely about inequality being a bad measure.
UBI plus the taxes that finance it are a redistribution scheme. It doesn't make people richer on average. At best you can hope that the tax is very efficient and has low or no deadweight losses (like land value taxes), so that on average UBI doesn't make your society worse off.
> The top 1% getting 1000x richer is a problem, because trickle down economics is bullshit. Money that exists as part of a pile of gold in a dragon's den does not move the economy.
Huh? If what you said were true, the top 1% getting 1000x richer would merely not do anything, but it wouldn't be a problem per se.
Btw, it's not a problem if someone just hoard some money: the central bank will notice that inflation is below target, and print more. (Later, when you spend from your hoard, the central bank will notice that, and correspondingly shrink the money supply.) Sticking money in a hoard is equivalent to giving an interest free loan to the central bank, because they can temporarily emit more money, while yours is out of circulation.
However, rich people don't tend to keep cash in a vault. Most of them own companies or land etc.
exactly. Which is the problem. You seem to actually have all the ingredients to be able to understand why this is a problem, but some kind of sympathy for the rich (lol) seems to prevent you from actually using logic to see the problem.
Nobody is arguing that people shouldn't own stocks. People are arguing that asset concentration taken to extremes is like smoking too many cigs: so enough and you force bad outcomes on society and the economic system.
Is that a bad thing? It would obviously have some negative effects. We'd immediately see damage to luxury brands and yacht sales. The art markets would crash. Stock markets would feel some pain.
The upside though? My hunch is that making most people feel secure enough to risk starting/joining businesses is fuel for a strong and innovative economy. The fact that so few of us are able to take those risks is a constraint on growth.
How do you make these confident predictions?
I think it would depend a lot on how the UBI is, and exactly how you design the taxes to finance it (and how high those taxes are going to be).
Given that, it's pretty safe to assume markets that cater exclusively to the ultra-wealthy will be harmed by reduced demand as their customer base shrinks. Higher tax rates will also exert downward pressure ob stock values as companies make less profit and investors tighten their belts. (Especially if there's a wealth tax.)
Yes. That is desirable.
> However, rich people don't tend to keep cash in a vault. Most of them own companies or land etc.
And those too should be taxed. If it is wealth, it should be taxed.
How about taxing Brad Pitt for his good looks?
That wealth should also be taxed.
What makes stock ownership somehow holy that should be protected from taxation?
We should stop conflating what a company generates as a consequence of their activity with the glorified gambling of the stock market.
> We should stop conflating what a company generates as a consequence of their activity with the glorified gambling of the stock market.
Well, that might be a valid point for some people, but it's pointless for Zuckerberg or Bezos or Bill Gates or even Musk: those guys have been mostly holding their companies' stocks for ages. They don't buy and sell all the time. No 'glorified gambling the stock market' there.
In any case, I brought up stock ownership as a concrete example of wealth that doesn't just site 'idle' in a vault somewhere. It's a claim on a productive enterprise that is only worth something because it serves customers and employs people etc.
This company only exists because wealth is concentrated enough to support a market for it.
That company consumes about 4 million skilled-labor-hours a year to provide this service.
This means that skilled-labor-hours are more scarce/expensive for _everyone_, because the on any given year, there are only so many skilled-labor hours that exist. These labor hours require about three decades of investment from society to produce (public education/childcare/etc).
Bezos may not buy a super-yacht every year, but as a class, the super rich consume an insane labor hours.
Money isn't stuff. Yes, those craftsmen get paid, but when one of them has something he needs done, some service provided, or some physical resource, he ends up paying more for the labor, because he is competing in the same labor market as everyone else.
Don't you think spending the working time of 4 million labor hours a year, building megayachts, is perhaps not the most productive/ROI generating activity for society at large? You could for example, with ~4 million skilled labor hours a year, build a lot of housing. You could build factories that provide for the needs the people. Hell, you could just give people time-off to, y'know, live and enjoy life (and perhaps, uh, have _children_, which the current system seems to be very efficient at disincentivizing).
You'll have to explain that more. Ship builders aren't competing with plumbers.
>Don't you think spending the working time of 4 million labor hours a year, building megayachts, is perhaps not the most productive/ROI generating activity for society at large
Well, that's a drop in the bucket. But you could apply this reasoning to any form of luxury goods. Where do you draw the line? Nice clothes? Fancy watches? Sports cars? Five-star restaurants? Are any of these "the most productive/ROI generating activity for society at large?" Who decides what goods and services are worthy?
> and perhaps, uh, have _children_
You think people are having fewer children because luxury yachts are being built?
Sure, on any given year. But the current economic organization of society wasn't born yesterday. On a longer timescale? Absolutely are.
> Well, that's a drop in the bucket. But you could apply this reasoning to any form of luxury goods.
Yes.
> Where do you draw the line? Nice clothes? Fancy watches? Sports cars? Five-star restaurants? Are any of these "the most productive/ROI generating activity for society at large?" Who decides what goods and services are worthy?
The neat thing about market economies is that you don't actually have to draw a line anywhere. You can just reduce income & wealth inequality via taxes and markets will sort it out. If you had taxed capital gains such that Bezos would have had to liquidate 10x - 100x in Amazon stock to buy his yacht, he likely would have settled for a smaller, but still perfectly acceptable yacht, and so on down the wealth ladder.
> You think people are having fewer children because luxury yachts are being built?
Yes I think income/wealth inequality + the amount of labor hours demanded from people to just stay in place is why people are having fewer children.
The metrics are a problem when the result was my kids and I regularly having no food for most of a decade. During this time we contributed to society, performed civic duties and cared for others.
And we were just one hungry family of way too many to count. An ethical distribution model wouldn't be okay with that.
But again: providing universal healthcare is all about giving (poor) people more prosperity. It has nothing to do with inequality by itself.
If tomorrow Mr Zuckerberg got 100x better healthcare, but everyone else only got 10x better healthcare, that would fix the problem you mentioned, but would technically make inequality worse.
No, because we outnumber Mark Zuckerberg by more than 10 fold
Anyway, I would argue that having guaranteed healthcare is 10293762397697x better than not having guaranteed healthcare
Sure, healthcare is nice. I see no disagreement.
> > If tomorrow Mr Zuckerberg got 100x better healthcare, but everyone else only got 10x better healthcare, that would fix the problem you mentioned, but would technically make inequality worse.
> No, because we outnumber Mark Zuckerberg by more than 10 fold
Well, fix the numbers any way you feel like. Eg say Mr Zuckerberg gets better off by whatever amount the rest of us together get better (eg in terms of healthcare) plus 10% extra.
I don't know anyone who really thinks that absolute inequality is the problem. people need a high floor - there is no inherent reason to want to lower the ceiling of wealth/benefits. but since there's no such thing as free lunch, we need to calculate by how much each % of ceiling that is lowered raises the floor. If we can reduce the ceiling by 10% and raise the floor by 100%, then that's worthwhile.
The hard part is calculating the benefits. There are non-linear effects when you try to predict the benefits of having a healthy and educated population, although the benefit should be enormous.
On the other hand it is very easy to calculate the downside of people not being wage-slaves: not needing to accept bottom wages, having time to understand what's actually going on in the world, organizing for or against particular causes, etc..
> If we can reduce the ceiling by 10% and raise the floor by 100%, then that's worthwhile.
I'm afraid that lowering the ceiling by 10% might lower the floor by 10%, too.
that is completely wrong. purchasing power is at an all time low in real dollar terms
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SA0R
> we need to be careful that our obsession to obstruct the rich doesn't leave the masses worse off
we need to be careful that the obsession with being mega rich doesn't leave the masses worse off
you're not proposing anything. you don't even seem to think there's a problem. let me guess, the best thing to do is just keep things the way they are? what are you talking about?
The two are connected. You can either transfer more wealth to the poorer people without taxing the rich (lets say by helicopter money), or transfer it from the rich to the poor. In both cases the rich become less rich in relative terms. It should also make intuitive sense - if the rich (lets say top 5%) hold 95% of wealth it means there is less for everyone else - less wealth that is because the resources like land, apartments and good education are finite and not abundant.
Necessarily, that must be wealth that did' go to the rich instead (it could have!). So, necessarily, you are "punishing" them by doing so.
You mainly seem to be against some kind of hypothetical robinhoodesque style redistribution because you worry it's unfair to the rich. Any solution, though, will have to take this shape, whether it targets the existing wealth or wealth generated going forward. It's all about redistribution of access no matter how you slice
You don't need to be so protective of the rich. They are doing just fine and they have plenty of resource and mechanisms in place to protect themselves. If the world's wealthiest people were made even just a tiny bit less wealth by redistribution of assets they would still be living like absolute kings.
Well, mostly where everyone's wealth is coming from: from the fruits of their own labour.
> You mainly seem to be against some kind of hypothetical robinhoodesque style redistribution because you worry it's unfair to the rich.
No, I haven't started worrying about fairness, yet. No, I'm afraid that a tax system designed by what sounds good instead of what works will leave the poor even worse off.
Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence for an example: who you officially levy the taxes on isn't necessarily the person shouldering the economic burden.
Now, billionaires do supply a different key ingredient to the wealth creation - risk. Without investment and risk, wealth cannot be created. In terms of $ investment, billionaires take on the vast majority of the risk and deserve the bulk of the rewards, the argument goes. Workers take on far less risk with their guaranteed* paycheck .
But which is the bigger risk? A billionaire's $100,000,000? Or your home, your health, and your retirement savings were you to lose your job in a bad market?
I'm interested in company structures that incentivize distributing risk, profit, and power across a larger group than we tend to see in modern companies.
Please feel free to start your own company or cooperative.
This parallels the diminishing marginal utility of wealth, which states that with extreme wealth, you can't buy any more to get more utility or happiness.
In a way, the risk phenomenon picks up where that phenomenon leaves off, where the need for normal "utility" gives way to the desire for amassing power over society at large.
The mistake they make is not realizing how much of their wealth and welfare relies on the welfare of the masses.
> I'm interested in company structures that incentivize distributing risk, profit, and power across a larger group than we tend to see in modern companies.
Ironically this is a tiny bit of what we saw with employee stock options in the early days of the internet industry, reflected in the historically outsized power and voice of workers. Arguably, that is a part of the rationale behind the big tech layoffs - to put labor back in its place.
You can buy more. The utility just diminishes, but doesn't go to zero.
> Ironically this is a tiny bit of what we saw with employee stock options in the early days of the internet industry, reflected in the historically outsized power and voice of workers. Arguably, that is a part of the rationale behind the big tech layoffs - to put labor back in its place.
Compare and contrast https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/14/does-class-warfare-hav...
The relative value of money being lower is what enables riskier investments and essentially what 'justifies' inequality in a bloodless utilitarian sort of way. You know how in economics trades may be net positives due to different valuations between individuals? The same applies in current certain money vs future risky unbound returns. That taking such bets is consistently a successful strategy breeds inequity even without any winner-takes-all effects or high barriers to entry.
Hypothetically if the VCs kept on 'gambling' on failed start-ups and always losing without any offsetting huge wins, not quitting because they think a win is just around the corner, it would be a trend that reduces inequity. As it puts money into the pockets of employees and smaller suppliers of neccessary capital production goods.
I am afraid you would find it harder to get larger groups of people to agree to the high growth potential, high risk enterprises because they tend to lack the spare capital to be able to afford to risk it. I think ironically the most probable tolerable risk profile for larger groups (who are presumably more precarious) is something big and secure being sold out of by larger players. (Small traders panic buying and selling and doing worse is its own separate problem.)
One form of company structure that technically does paying labor well better are partnetships typically used by law firms. It works for them because they have no real capital requirements and have high per hour productivity and labor expenses as the lion’s share of profits go to the lawyers whose names are in the company name.
But please consider that the problem is slightly (i.e. a lot) more complicated than you think. Economics is a very very hard discipline and perhaps more closely related to philosophy than the natural sciences. There have been countless books written on the topic of inequality by people smarter than you or me, so it's highly it's all so simple as your dismissive "just do X" line imagines it to be.
A simple, almost trivial observation: very high inequality of wealth also means very high inequality of power, meaning the rich elite can and will influence the political process to enrich themselves further at the expense of the "low percentile" less well-off, which will be denied political power. This is one example of why you should care about inequality.
Yes, and that's why I am saying that it's far from an obvious conclusion that making rich people worse off is a good thing for poor people.
And once you admit that this ain't trivial, you can look at topics like deadweight losses or tax incidence.
Different tax and redistribution system have different effects. It's not just 'more tax = more revenue to redistribute'.
For example, I actually think you can drive overall tax rates (eg as percentage of GDP) a lot higher than they are today in most countries without harming the economy, _if_ you switch to something as efficient as land value taxes for the vast majority of your government revenue (and lower other taxes). Property taxes are a second best approximation.
In contrast, capital gains taxes and income taxes are less efficient. Tariffs are even worse (by a large margin!), even if they could theoretically raise some revenue. Stamp duties or other taxes on transactions are also pretty bad. And silly things like price controls just hurt the economy without raising any revenue at all.
But that's all vastly simplified. As you suggest, there's lots of theory and practice you can investigate for the actual effects. They might also differ in different times and places.
> There have been countless books written on the topic of inequality by people smarter than you or me, so it's highly it's all so simple as your dismissive "just do X" line imagines it to be.
That's why I'm saying exactly the opposite: I'm arguing against the naive 'just tax the rich'.
Wealth redistribution has this positive effect: If you take $1000 from a billionaire and give it to a very poor person, total happiness increases.
It also has a negative effect, high level of redistribution can inhibit production.
The optimal level of redistribution depends on what you're optimizing, it's usually a mix of societal happiness and some notion of fairness. (I personally would want to optimize happiness and prosperity.)
Helicopter money transfers real wealth from the people who previously held cash.
It creates nominal wealth, but not real wealth.
> It should also make intuitive sense - if the rich (lets say top 5%) hold 95% of wealth it means there is less for everyone else - less wealth that is because the resources like land, apartments and good education are finite and not abundant.
Let's invert that: if I make everyone's lives 10% more miserable, but the lives of the richest 1% a whopping 20% more miserable, that will have decreased inequality. But it's not a good idea.
That's basically just the idea from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44411538 inverted. Many people have a hard time seeing that wealth can increase, but it's pretty easy to see that total wealth can decrease: I can set fire to my piano, and no one else gets any better because of it.
You are conflating two different things, wealth and misery.
Wealth is about material resources not misery or happiness. This is about giving more people access to more material resources by taking away some of the exclusive access to those resource by the rich. Will preventing the uber rich families from buying their seventeenth fleet of housing complexes and their twentieth estate make them "more miserable" sure, probably, but it also secures the independence of the people you make that house available to (rather than make them permanent wage slaves to the landed class that just scoops up homes that they don't materially need need to extract rents etc).
You realize most of this wealth is tied up in stocks and other assets that anyone can purchase, right?
> Will preventing the uber rich families from buying their seventeenth fleet of housing complexes
But ARE the likes of Bezos and Musk actually buying housing complexes in the first place, nevermind ones that anyone who isn’t already rich are able to afford?
> and their twentieth estate
And who but the extremely rich would be able to buy these estates in the first place?
It doesn't matter that "anyone can purchase them". If you have N dollars and I have Nx1000I can buy more stock than you. I can also diversify better than you, I simply have more options, more power, etc. Unless I am a total idiot or you get absurdly lucky and effectively win the lotto, my greater amount of initial capital will go further than your small amount.
> But ARE the likes of Bezos and Musk actually buying housing complexes in the first place, nevermind ones that anyone who isn’t already rich are able to afford?
I didn't mention either of these people. There are plenty of people not in the limelight that do precisely the things I'm talking about, often through banks and companies that they run—I can have my investment firm buy property and increase my salary off the extracted rents and it achieves the same thing.
> And who but the extremely rich would be able to buy these estates in the first place?
Exactly. You just restated the problem with inequality. It gives a small class of people exclusive access to important material resources. Further they can they use this exclusivity to further entrench their positions.
And, so what? This just sounds like whining that people in this world who have more money than you exist. I'm sure there's a lot of people in this world who would hold this exactly same argument against you ("you have N dollars, but I have N/1000"). You're not denied the opportunity to build wealth with what money you DO have just because Bezos and Musk et al exist.
> Certain forms of stock are effectively liquid. This means that you can turn around and leverage them to buy material resources quite easily.
Sure, but this isn't the infinite money glitch people seem to think it is. The loan and its interest have to get repaid with... money! That's first taxed! And anything purchased is... subject to taxation!
> It gives a small class of people exclusive access to important material resources.
Look, no matter how little income inequality is, you're gonna have to be rich to say, buy a building in Manhattan or a house in some similarly coveted area.
> Sure, but this isn't the infinite money glitch people seem to think it is. The loan and its interest have to get repaid with... money! That's first taxed! And anything purchased is... subject to taxation!
Interestingly, my broker lets me just pile up the interest and doesn't expect me to pay anything back, but only as long as my overall portfolio is worth comfortably more than my debt.
Of course, if I ever want to actually get at all my money, I'll need to pay the debt off.
Btw, leveraging your stock portfolio isn't all that different from a mortgage on your house. But people seem to be much more confused about the effects of the former than the latter. It seems to be easier for people to understand that a mortgage ain't an infinite money machine.
I don't have a problem with differences in wealth. My problem is with (a) differences so extreme that they border on the inhumane (we arguably have enough resources amassed to end world hunger, yet people still starve. Why?) (b) People are fed the lie that this system is purely meritocratic. That is plainly untrue. That was my point about the relative "distance" your money can go. If you are born into a wealthy family, you can basically live a zero-labor life and continue to reap rewards, generate more income, gather more resources for yourself, concentrate capital. When your origin is the greatest determining factor in wealth, it's a gross lie to suggest to day laborers that if they just "work hard" they too can strike it rich.
Sure, I would agree that under the current system manhattan remains unaffordable. But this is not an essential property of manhattan, as you seem to think. It is a side effect of the current economic structure we have. Alternative structures would lead to significantly more affordable living in the city. In fact the NYC dems just voted for a mayoral candidate who wants to establish such an alternative. People who think like you are increasingly becoming the minority, and it's because it's glaringly and exceedingly obvious that there are massive problems of wealth distribution in the current system. You can honestly identify that there are issues and ask for solutions without being anti capitalist.
People get so caught up in morality when it comes to wealth, which is absurd. As if somehow wanting some of Bezos money to be redistributed so that it can feed people instead of paying for 500mil dollar yatchs is a moral affront. How about we instead focus on the moral affront of underpaying workers, having them the piss in bottles in warehouses, gaming the system by incorporating offshore, the list is endless. It's hilarious that anyone would defend the rights of these robber barons. You've got to be either seriously brainwashed or an extreme ideologue to think that there are no issues with inequality today. Even staunch capitalists are starting to admit there are problems. Its simple systems dynamics. Any system that maximizes singular variables is necessarily unstable and heading toward collapse.
One of the bigger ways this plays out as opposed to your example is: Tons of property is locked up as short term vacation rentals that are only used a tiny percent of the time and only by the rich. There's a spectrum of how rich but we know the bottom 50% almost never use them for example
Similarly the amount of resources locked up in industries that 99% of the time only cater to the very rich is quite a lot and more importantly the trajectory is going more and more that direction.
You could have a world where the work is done mostly by robots and a few million rich people use the world as their playground and then what happens to everyone else?
Sources?
In any case, what you say seems to suggest that consumption taxes would be the way to go.
You might not want to dig too closely into who exactly owns all these short term vacation rentals. There's a non-trivial number of people who aren't conventionally what we picture as being "wealthy" who own a lot of them. It was a very popular Covid-era life hack to buy a house at an absurdly low interest rate and rent it out. And that's not getting into people who just managed to buy a house at the right time. For example, I'm just a software engineer in a MCOL area but I bought my first house in the early 2000s and paid it off a little under 20 years later. I sold to fund the next house, but I could've easily bought something more modest and rented the old one out. This is not an uncommon occurrence.
> that are only used a tiny percent of the time and only by the rich. There's a spectrum of how rich but we know the bottom 50% almost never use them for example
Are you under the impression that you have to be fabulously wealthy to rent an AirBNB for the weekend?
Im guessing you don’t know how much property this is. It’s probably under 5% and so has very little effect on the market.
Here in my college town, the new townhouses in prestigious locations are dominated by football-game-day occupation by the rich. So there's that.
As inequality increases at scale it means that an increasingly concentrated group has more and more capital. What do they do with that capital? They buy assets, they are basically forced to do so by design.
What happens when they buy assets? They capitalize those assets. An apartment unit now becomes a home others can rent but not purchase.
Rinse and repeat until eventually wealth is so concentrated that the ability for any other individuals to access assets is basically zero. This means those individuals cannot build capital or ultimately wealth and it also means that, even if more resource become readily available, more people cannot afford them. They have to do 2x today what they did yesterday to an achieve the same amount of stability even if their "standard of living" has increased because of a wider swath of goods and services.
Honestly at this point I think that anyone who doesn't see inequality as a major driver of contemporary problems is simply not paying attention to the USA or must not live there. Countries in which it is less of a problem basically only mitigate it by having a state that can provide essentials to effectively prevent the capitaled class from taking them away from people (eg healthcare, as you mention).
Economics is all about the balance of who has access to what resources. We cannot just generate resources and capital out of thin air. One person getting more necessarily means another gets less. Period.
There are so many problems with this essay that it's hard to know where to begin, but two major ones are that (1) his reading comprehension sucks, (2) the major flaw in his line of argument is merely hand waved away—it relies on a fundamental premise that mobility of people in the south was zero after the civil war and that the civil war destroying an entire industry would have had zero effect (this is the part he hand waves away at the end of the article after making his idiotic apology for continued racism based on one solitary citation) As usual, it's an article making people unschooled in the actual practice of rigorous academic research to buy into bad ideas .
Anyway, that's all beside the point. A specific article countering a single claim against reparations has basically very little to do with the topic at hand unless you can prove the very specific set of dynamics that is analyzed in that case (a) applies globally, and (b) still applies today.
This style of argument is equivalent to saying "look i found one rock that was purple so all rocks must be purple". It has basically no relevance as far as I'm concerned.
If anything, I'd like rich people (in general) to play more of a role. I'd take Bloomberg or Romney over the popular candidates any day.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/04/weve-be...
> And why do you care about inequality, and not eg the absolute livings standards of the least well off?
Answer to both those questions, simplifying massively: the most prosperous period of capitalism in the past 200 years was also that where there was the smallest levels of inequality.
The point of view that you must only look at the overall floor is terribly short-sighted (and even then, the lower and middle classes have become WORSE off in the past 40 years!). The massive increases in wealth have been going overwhelmingly to the pockets of the very rich; this is bad in itself, irrespective of the overall GDP growth or whatever.
Read Pikkety's books and you will understand.
You mean today? Today is the most prosperous period of all of world history. Or what period are you talking about?
Global inequality is also near all-time lows, thanks to China, India and the rest of Asia mostly catching up to the rich western countries. Alas, Africa is still quite poor, but they are working on it.
> The point of view that you must only look at the overall floor is terribly short-sighted (and even then, the lower and middle classes have become WORSE off in the past 40 years!).
In what sense?
> The massive increases in wealth have been going overwhelmingly to the pockets of the very rich; this is bad in itself, irrespective of the overall GDP growth or whatever.
Why?
> Read Pikkety's books and you will understand.
See eg https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/03/th...
When wealth is concentrated, prices cease to aggregate information and preferences from across the whole society. Instead they represent whatever stupid whim some clique of investors has developed. As a result you get massive malinvestments in speculative bullshit while basic things decay. It's the Politburo but dumber.
This determines the physical environment you live in, the services offered on your street, and the stuff you do at your job.
This is "all or nothing" fallacy thinking.
Or, instead of handing out more and more money from the state, try to introduce dynamism again. Try to reduce the amount of times that YouTube takes videos or accounts down for example.
It’s never a popular thing to say on HN but the country the typifies inequality most starkly is the US - and it’s also the one with the biggest set of problems: huge issues with drug use, obesity, widespread unhappiness, simmering resentment, a divided nation. The countries that are getting this right (and by right I mean GDP, happiness, heath, pretty much any meaningful index of “a good life”) are the ones that fund public services, healthcare, education, etc through higher taxes.
~ braces for downvotes ~
Of course there's no silver bullet and high progressive taxes for the mega-wealthy do have other negative effects. Like people being less motivated to strive. Less capital to invest and less competitive companies born.
But billionaires paying less taxes than the guy sweeping floors at the local mall is absurd. Once you reach a certain threshold of wealth, your taxes actually start going down.
That's why poor people pay the highest percentage of their income: they have no choice, no ways to do tax evasion.
The key word here is income. “Wealth” and “income” tend to be conflated by ostensibly intelligent people who should know better. If I’m granted a million dollars in stock but draw a $20K salary, I’m “wealthy” but not “paying my fair share” because I’ve hardly earned any income for the year.
But I got your point. There are ways to be wealthy, have a rich lifestyle but report no taxable income/profit.
What you actually want is to have a wealth tax like in Switzerland. 0.05-0.3% annual tax based on net assets.
If you receive a stock as compensation - it is an income. If you sell them years later with profit - it is additional extra income.
Unless you have enough stock that you can take a zero or low interest loan against that stock as collateral and kick that can down the road until you die and there's a huge threshold for estate tax, that is if you've not got it structured so that the stock is owned by a trust.
Also you have no means to change the law. But ultra rich people can push/promote "correct" people to the government or to be elected. Like Musk did.
But I think you underestimate the possibilities. You can just design the law to make taxation a prerequisite for doing business. That's what the EU is (trying to) do, and it seems to work well.
Doing business in the EU and the US is a lot more profitable than not doing business there, even if you pay taxes. That's kind of the point.
"I hate Jeff Bezos, by I'll be damned if I have to give up same day delivery $6 Chinese mugs. The local made ones are $40!"
No, free markets work reasonably well. What doesn’t work is extremely disproportionate wealth, which is a result of neoliberal policies from the 80s. Revert those policies (i.e., actually tax the wealthy), and get back to medium healthy economy of the 60s and 70s.
Taxes always START by targeting the wealthy but have this funny habit of applying to more and more people as time goes on. The US income tax was a whopping 1% percent until you made the equivalent of $400K. How’d that work out?
Until they are dying on the streets, they are actually make a living.
If they cannot make a decent living with their low income - UBI wouldn't help. UBI is a safety net, a minimal salary payment. You are never going to have a decent life on minimal salary.
They actually don't. Water is contaminated at various levels in many places.
They have light and television because of the ordinary working people who work at and maintain electricity plants and design, sell, assemble electrical products.
These things exist despite the billionaire leeches not because of them.
I didn't get your point, but we certainly need more competition, not less.
For example, lotteries are inherently unjust, making random people wealthy for no reason, and hardly anyone cares. They just hope to win themselves.
Taylor Swift fans don’t care that she makes far more money than other talented musicians who languish in obscurity. They’re going to keep giving her more money. If you told them they shouldn’t because it perpetuates inequality, they wouldn’t get it.
It’s the opposite effect of insurance, where society works to undo the results of bad luck.
My point being, yes insurance obviously decreases risk for owners, but since insurance companies are the ones inheriting that financial risk, they also inherit the incentive to ensure that things are being done the right way.
They're very different visions of what "justice" means: one focused on snapshots of distribution, one focused on processes.
An example was that Miles Davis grew up in a middle class family -- his dad was a dentist -- who thought that becoming a musician was an OK career.
Sure, there were stars -- for instance in sheet music publishing -- but since then the working-class musician jobs have nearly vanished.
it's exactly the right word. Taylor Swift herself is a product. No less artificial than Boy bands and Kpop idol groups. These aren't hit or miss businesses, they're scientifically engineered performances, the music industry is literally that, an industry. Taylor Swift doesn't wake up in her bedroom with disheveled hair writing songs and people just flock around her, every piece of song writing, merch, marketing, and performance is micro-managed by an entire team of people.
And for that reason you can actually design the opposite. You can break up platforms that produce megastars, you can promote local music, local venues and artists, you can make people care and design what kind of artistic culture you want to be in.
It's true that when they find something that works, it will be exploited.
> every piece of song writing […] is micro-managed by an entire team of people
No doubt this is true for many many pop artists, where there are literally teams of people with song writing credits, but for Taylor Swift, it is almost always just her and Jack Antonoff credited with songwriting and composition, and not uncommonly just her alone. Say what you will about her, but she writes her own songs.
The subhed spells it out. It's a supply and demand world. If it's easy to do things, the supply increases. It's that simple.
That's not to say that the larger system isn't doing what you claim. Just that music is just too easy to make to be valuable.
The answer might be then to disallow capital from buying artists so easily. One option, which Canada does partially have on the books, is a concept of non-divestible "artist rights". If fully implemented, Taylor Swift would be incapable of selling away her works fully, always retaining a degree of control. This would no doubt reduce the value of art but would keep control in the hands of artists. So when the artist feels dissatisfied, they can always walk away no matter what contact they have signed earlier in their career.
NerdCubed did a video recently about similar experiences when publishing a book.
Why do so many rich people who could afford to retire work hard to make more? Why does hardly anyone on a high hourly rate work the minimum hours they need for an adequate income?
There have been numerous trials of UBI and I have yet to heard of one that showed people worked significantly less when given it.
The only way I could see it working is having a 2nd currency, comparable to SNAP benefits or housing vouchers, that is independent of the dollar (and not stigmatized either). Then let the dollar value of rents and food fluctuate as they may, but require that the UBI currency is accepted for some fraction of housing and food (and the minimum housing is sufficient to be covered 100% by UBI). Then cover the spread through taxing the corporations who wish to do business in that state. If the greedy Private-Equity owned corporation wants to jack up the rent, they can get their UBI tax jacked up also. If they want to quit the state, they can sell their assets to a local resident who wants to build a small business being a property manager.
Getting this and that cert. is costly, but even things like hands-om experience in new domains is inaccessible if you don't have the cash flow.
It would set a minimum income that everyone would know they had.
Whatever work people did would add to that. It would encourage the unemployed to start businesses, or do casual work as they would keep all the money (rather than having their benefits cut).
Minimum wage hourly jobs like grocery baggers need to be able to survive off a 40-hour week, and it's a societal problem if they can't.
Taxi drivers are essentially sole proprietors who set their own hours and accept higher risk for a higher payoff. Demand and supply will calibrate themselves unless the government distorts the market (eg. taxi medallions).
Musicians and actors are and have always been in a brutal power law market where all the wealth accrues to the 0.1% at the top of the heap. This drives exploitation since people will do anything to get to the top, but at the end of the day society does not need them the way it needs taxi drivers or grocery baggers and there is no economic rationale for subsidizing them.
This is absolutely true. In my country psychologists are complaining about "low" wages and tough conditions, and yet people go study psychology in droves because they "find it interesting." There's only so much demand for any one thing and if you decide because you enjoy something you want to make that your career well tough shit, there's thousands like yourself and nobody wants more of what you supply. So you can keep it as a hobby, but to make a living you have to provide something that people want and need, otherwise you're just a leech on society. It's funny that the ones complaining about these issues are usually the people who care about the social aspect of things, yet there's absolutely nothing social about demanding money without contributing anything that others actually need.
It seems like job location, compensation, average cost of living, and commute would play a fairly large role.
Are you saying these don't involve preferences?
And a web search will bring up tons of housing preference sources coming various aspects.
https://learn.upright.us/real-estate-investing-blog/a-housin...
You can get a decent, 3 bed, 2 bath house for 100k. Just move to some place like Tucumcari, NM. Why not? Oh...right...the same reasons no one else moves to places like that...
Instead walk around most expensive city’s and you see single family dwellings /row houses in sight of high rises / skyscrapers. That’s not economic efficiency that’s people who can afford high housing prices likening the system the way it is.
At the start you might be adding a few million in land costs and building taller, but that quickly deflates the housing market. Pushing people to sell before their homes become ever less valuable. Further cities outlive people, reluctant homeowners eventually die.
City infrastructure similarly has real costs, but an infrastructure tax on every net new unit isn’t going to see anywhere close to current prices.
It's about who gets to become a musician, because practicing the skill takes a lot of resources, and it seems the middle class can no longer afford that.
There are people you've never heard of earning six or seven figures a year from music for ads.
And so on.
The catch is these people are very, very good at what they do. They're not bedroom wannabes.
As for pop - that has always had a complex relationship with management and funding. Everyone assumes you join a band and get famous. But many bands/artists were treated more like investment vehicles or startups, with record companies and sometimes private individuals providing seed funding for careers.
It's a much riskier career than software, where you can be pretty mediocre and make a good living.
But impossible and nonexistent are both spectacularly wrong and absolutely detached from how the industry works.
Mainstream recording artists (pop, country, R&B, rock, etc.) represent the vast majority of industry revenues. My argument is that middle class musicians have effectively never existed in this space. Just like middle class professional basketball players effectively don't exist. You either win big or do something else.
There's no doubt that there are some middle class and higher earners. It seems that most are part time, don't make much and face higher unemployment than many other sectors. Sector growth is alaso very slow. There's a reason that most people's parents don't push them to pursue music careers unless it's as a teacher or if they're exceptional. Same thing for sports - you can make decent money as a college coach or gym teacher, but the proportion of people who play sports that go on to do anything professionally with it is extraordinary small. It's all supply and demand.
IME, the consolidation of radio, changes in taste around live music, and the dissolution of paying for recorded music all worked to get rid of that group of folks.
But that doesn't mean that I haven't played with a lot of folks who are now in their 70s and 80s who made a good living playing music for folks.
Perhaps the artist in the article could similarly pivot. At least, that seems to be the main way to stay in the industry if you are unable (for whatever reason) to attain commercial success.
Also, the comment you replied to said that those names he mentioned were the relatively famous ones. The ones who are less famous than that will not have the success you mentioned. They will simply be people who had mid-level success in an industry that could support them.
- Go on the wikipedia page for the notable alumni of Berklee College of Music[1]; - Sort by graduation years; - Notice the "early life" snippet on the bio of most musicians from the 1970-2000. - Compare those with the bio from artists from and before such interval. Bonus points for taking in consideration how many musicians past year 2000 come from a family with an already existing musical background.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Berklee_College_of_Mus...
I don't really know what the table of Berklee grads is pointing toward. Are you suggesting that this says it is now harder to become a middle class recording / touring artist today than it was in the past? If so, how?
The article is suggesting that there is a delta between the past and the present. My argument is there is no delta. There were always nearly zero people in this category.
My honest opinion, as a person who has gigged a lot for money, who has played a whole lot with folks who are now in their 70s and 80s, and who has retired from programming into a life where I can afford to just make music with folks is this:
a lot of folks on this thread have very little understanding of how the music industry has ever operated and almost no understanding of the material and historical situation of musicians working in the 20th C.
There is a whole technological progression proceeding backwards from streaming to the Clear Channel consolidation, to the rise of cheap DJ equipment going back at least as far as the the rise of mass sheet music production, and that procession has changed the music industry at every step.
While it's not some universally transcendent material praxis, there was indeed a time between the 1940s and the late 1990s when the market was much wider and more distributed in ways that made it possible for a pretty wide and diverse set of folks who aren't A-list national acts to develop functional careers as musicians.
If you're not aware of that situation, perhaps you don't have enough of a basis in the history of that industry to be commenting with the kind of certainty you're displaying.
Most of the middle class has lots of time to practice (just do that instead of watching TikTok). Practice can help you become a better musician, but cannot make you great - innate talent is needed for that. Being great is also no guarantee of success - luck and / or other forms of skill are needed (marketing capability, etc).
This is also only on the performance side of things. The real limiting factor in music for the most part is writing songs that people want to hear. If you can do that you will be successful almost immediately because supply and demand is so out of balance here and distribution is trivial.
It's also about having access to equipment that is available, clean, and in proper working order.
And it's about having access to educators who can teach you what you are doing right or wrong. And those educators having the time to be able to actually do so.
And it's about having the ability to attend performances or competitions so that you can learn to actually perform and to receive impartial critique to improve. That doesn't just mean having the option of attending these events but also being able to afford the fees associated with the events as well as being able to afford transportation (whether that's getting there yourself or having family being able to take time off from work to transport you there and back).
You don't need every one of these to be able to succeed but each one of these legs you take away is one less leg the next generation of lower and middle class musicians have to stand on.
And in general, musicians are rarely made by just practicing in one's room. Even your big successful musicians spend their middle and high schools in band classes where they learn a substantial portion of their technical skills. They may not be playing the same instruments that they become successful on but school concert, jazz, and marching bands are really the breeding grounds for musicians who eventually go out and pursue their passions in other genres. Likewise that's generally where they meet their band-mates or colleagues who spur them on to greater things.
A good voice seems very rare. Perhaps as rare as 1/10000 or so. Practicing voice is cheap of course.
This is especially obvious if you follow any content creators who after getting somewhat successful decide to try to learn to sing and watch how they improve year over year.
I'm in my late 20s so it's been a little while but in middle school band fees and instrument rentals (if you couldn't afford your own) were like 100-300USD per year. And in high school the cost of participating in the marching band was like 600-800USD (bus rentals, trailer rentals, uniforms, event fees, etc) for a single semester and then concert band was another ~200-300USD for the other semester and the jazz band was a similar ~300ish USD.
And if you can't afford those fees you either just sit in the back of the class doing nothing until you can find a way to make that money or you and/or your parents had to work concessions at the different sports teams games for essentially the entire year to cover the cost. Of course there's only a limited number of slots for that and a single person isn't going to cover that cost in a year, only like half of it. So now to be able to participate in band you depend on your parents being able to afford the energy and time to work in a kitchen or concessions stand for 5-10 hours a week.
And if all the spots are full for concessions and it doesn't look like you'll be able to pay? You get moved out of the band class and assigned to another "elective" course with a lower cost to participate in. All the other ones still of course cost ~150-400USD for the year with the exception of the "learn how to use microsoft office" class and gym. So the poor kids just got sent to those classes and took the them over and over again every year instead of participating in one of the arts classes.
So yes lots of kids take band class. But band class is expensive and it only gets more expensive as costs go up and funding goes down.
A cheap guitar + youtube to start is a lot cheaper than anything involving eg. CNC machining, where most people can't even think about starting the process, way before the "get good" phase. Just obtaining a mac + an iphone is hard to impossible in many places on earth, especially for younger people.
That of course applies across the board, not just to musicians but to any skilled field.
I want to hear something that is simultaneously good and also I have never heard before. Not an easy ask of course.
"In economics, and in other social sciences, preference refers to an order by which an agent, while in search of an 'optimal choice', ranks alternatives based on their respective utility." "Individual preferences are determined by taste, need, ..., as opposed to price, availability or personal income."
This doesn’t just apply to the arts, if all junior dev roles are stripped away by llm’s where do the talented developers of tomorrow come from? Those who can learn the craft on their own time, those with independent wealth.
At a societal level there is a huge amount of potential talent being left on the table, and imo redistributive policies are the obvious fix. In think this is really important both from a mortal point of view and an economically pragmatic one.
A social safety net means that more people have the ability to try out risky careers - not necessarily that more of them will succeed, but that the pool of applicants will be larger and include a wider proportion of the population.
> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
If you widen the pool of applicants, you've got a better chance of finding the best actors, musicians, writers, etc. And you also get a wider variety of stories to tell. Monocultures are dangerous, be that in the workplace, in politics, in academia, or in the arts. Ensuring that more people get a chance to enter these fields keeps them healthy and active, and prevents them from devolving into navel gazing.
It's the same way that if you want to see innovation in tech, you need to keep on funding startups and small companies. If instead you just constantly subsidise Google and friends, you'll never get that next great thing, you'll just get more of the same.
It's the same way that if you want to see innovation in tech, you need to keep on funding startups
If there's such a benefit to finding additional folks with extreme acting talent/potential, why is a non-market solution required?
There is of course a market mechanism deciding which actors achieve success — the employment market. It doesn't make sense to get rid of that. But government interventions are what fuels innovation — otherwise the market will simply stagnate as the largest entities in it capture it and prevent any growth or change from happening.
Clearly everyone can see that the system is "unfair" in almost every industry, so the question is why does everybody perpetuate this system. It seems to be that by and large, people are prepared to pay more to get more of whatever they consider "the best" and they care much less about everything else in that space.
But shift the focus away from people and to products - why are so many people willing to pay over $1000 for the latest iPhone, when they already have the previous year's phone, and a $100 phone probably does 90% of what they need.
Again, it's because people want the best they can afford, and so the market increases the price to the point that maximises the product of price and people prepared to pay that price. Sadly, for the aspiring musician that hasn't been scouted yet, the price is low and even then not many people are prepared to pay it. This is why we have record labels who scout for talent, front them some money up front, handle publicity and building an audience, hoping that one of their 100+ artists might make enough that they can pay for the rest and still make a profit.
We built a world for higher level thinking but ever since 2010, we’ve been failing to meet that standard.
Of course I'm sure there are a million laws against this at the state or federal level, but citizens could still band together to make them comply or else run them out of town. ie. the police could agree to stop responding to McDonalds, or courts could allow trial by jury for eviction cases, and simply have the jurors find them not guilty (for the case of corporate landlords). These would be elements of last resort. The first resort would be to require corporate owners to pay a lot more to do business. A second line would be to rescind a lot of the "tax cuts" given to companies to build there. Just say sorry, this is an emergency and we cannot afford to give you the cuts anymore.
It would be dangerous, no doubt, and ripe for abuse. But it's a tool that could be used at the local level to provide relief. Ultimately, I think certain sectors should be forbidden for corporations to operate, such as restaurants and landlording. These are entry-level small business opportunities for normal people to get involved in, and they do not deserve to be pushed out by wealthy corporations.
If you want to raise higher taxes across the board that's one thing, but becoming hostile is shooting yourself in the dick. An ultimate example of short term over long term thinking.
I would be fine with a small town lacking any chain restaurants or big box stores. Imagine that, small business owners could do commerce with each other and not have to have 7-figure sums as barriers of entry?
> or have the police stop responding (an open invite for consequence-free theft)
That's the point: a covert way for people to take back the power even if there is a foot-thick stack of UCC and other bullshit laws preventing them from fucking with Daddy Bezos. The business would have to shut down because it would be de-facto legal to steal from it.
Sorry you like simping for megacorps, but as the UHC shooting shows, people who have had every ounce of power stripped from them will find other means to be heard.
I wouldn't want to live in or near your community where crossing the invisible line between "small" and "large" business means it's open season on me. I prefer social contracts that prioritize stability and trust. Not envy and petulance.
If you're going to commit one of the seven deadly sins, choose a funner one!
By analogy, try playing a game of monopoly but enter the game after a few rounds have already been played. Exorbitant housing prices are an example.
Another problem is that while it is fine if hardworking people make more money, these people can use that money __against__ people who made different life choices, in various ways, consciously and unconsciously.
We have to acknowledge that the system is broken, and it is starting to show.
Since the beginning of society I imagine.
Even perfect equals can wreck each other’s lives completely, in legal ways too, if they commit their all to it.
If there is a large wealth inequality that means that the relatively poor will simply have a smaller piece of the cake and the wealthy growing their wealth will have a larger impact on the poor, percentage-wise. Now, if that growth is only due to hard work, then you can't really argue against that; however, if that growth is partially due to "wealth abuse", then that's a different matter.
You've conflated people busting ass who can't keep up with those following their passion in the arts voluntarily. Those don't feel anything like the same thing to me. I don't think I'm alone in a perspective that if you keep taking more from me I'll stop contributing all together, and we'll all fail. The ultra-rich and others with means to avoid picking up the tab have already done so.
Start traveling, talking to other cultures, and stop being dismissive and defensive.
Are you in the top 1%? If so, you can afford it. If not, then I don't think your taxes should go up - I think Bezos' taxes should go up, and there should be a wealth tax for high net worth individuals.
Of course people usually try to draw the UBI Venn diagram such that they are a net receiver of funds.
Equality to them means them getting more material goods, not them giving up more material goods.
What they are really saying is "I don't want anyone to be richer than I am but fine with people being poorer". So the default human position on things.
Are you suggesting the US should fund a global UBI?
The US has used cheap labor globally for decades, why would the blue collar worker in Indiana qualify more than the blue collar worker in Indonesia? Both are making goods for American billionaires and both are struggling.
To take a simple example: within a country, if you send the UBI money to a local government for disbursement and the local mayor/governor just pockets it, he's still ultimately subject to the legal system of that country and can be jailed, etc. There's no international equivalent of this. If you send some UBI money to Poor Country X for disbursement and the local governor pockets it, there's nothing you can do except not send any more money.
Humanity doesn’t really know how to do global policy, even if there are massive potential benefits.
You already are, it's just going to the ultra wealthy and pension fund kids, while you slave your life away making that stock go up because you believe there should be no other choice.
In my country, from the customer to the persons net paycheck, a bit over half goes to the government (vat, 2x different benefits, income tax).
Every time someone mentiones taxes, the rich and the poor over here, the average (ie. people earning around average income) get taxed more, the rich on paper earn nothing, and the poor get taxed the same (because there's nothing more to take).
I'd much prefer a system where an average joe would pay a lower percantage of taxes (ie. a tax break), and people like bezos would actually get taxed at the same rate instead of paying zero throug loopholes).
The US’s CGT base cost uplift on death is insane, and only does not get repealed because it enables the super rich to never pay tax via the ‘buy borrow die’ strategy.
The US’s carried interest rules for hedge funds and private equity partners are insane and only exist because the affected individuals bribe lawmakers and presidents.
Personally I think LTCG should be taxed as income and not at a flat 20%, but because that might actually work nobody proposes it and our lefties want a "wealth tax" instead.
To be specific: let's say that you own $1.1B worth of stock, $1B of which is unrealized long term capital gains. If you sold it all today, you'd owe $200M. Let's say that you're 40, you spend $5M a year, and you die at 80. So, you need $200M to finance your lifestyle, and then the remainder is a part of your estate. If you just sold $240M today, you'd pay $40M in tax, and had $200M after tax cash in your checking account to spend over the next 40 years. If you instead borrow $5M a year against your stock at very attractive terms like interest rate of 5%, and no payments until your death, you'll owe $200M on interest over these 40 years. Just paying the tax would have saved you $160M! It's even worse if you get more realistic terms, because 5% rate on a personal loan is too good to be true, and you'll need to borrow even more to make the regular payments.
What about the remainder of your estate? Depending on whether you just sell as you go, or borrow to finance your spending, your estate is left with something between $500M and $800M. Guess what, now they owe estate tax, which is 40% of this sum (minus $30M exemption). Oops!
You can avoid the estate tax, though, but the kicker is that all of the ways of doing that do not allow you to step up the basis upon death: they just allow you to avoid the gift tax, but they do little to escape the capital gains income tax. No free lunch here either.
So what does this have to do with income inequality? If you try to make a living from a business and the revenue you get from it is not enough to keep it afloat, what does it say about it's viability and income inequality?
> So why not have the worker get/keep more of his money, instead of giving it to a different group of "others"?
The quote is implying: "rather than tax people and give that money to others, just have people keep the money they make."
My point is that this would not necessarily help the taxi driver much, since he probably doesn't pay much in taxes anyway. His issue is that his wage is not high enough.
One could argue that taxi driving shouldn't exist or should be relegated to some impoverished underclass, or one could argue that the issue is with the taxi driver's lifestyle expectations and not with the low wage, or that taxi drivers should find other employment, thus reducing the supply of drivers and either raising wages or "rightsizing" the driver workforce.
In any case, I don't agree with the parent poster's implication that lowering taxes is a viable alternative to tax-funded universal basic income.
Lowering taxes benefits most those who pay a lot of taxes, and those are the people who are least directly affected by the removal of tax-funded welfare programs. Sending the money to "others" is the point.
Keep in mind that the taxi driver is just a made up example, and I myself am not sold on the idea of universal basic income.
The rich are able to keep larger portions of their income, and then eventually leverage that to be patrons of political power and set the rules for themselves.
You are also not in the same category as the super rich, so theres an unspoken blurring of the terms here as well - theres no sense in considering a normal perso, or a rich person against someone like Bezos, who has the wealth of several countries.
By definition, the median person only has a mediocre ability to “protect his interests”.
And the super rich simply can't consume that much. Bezons isn't eating a thousand times as much as a millionaire. If his kids spend their lives being unproductive, it's only a tiny handful of wastrels. Mansions, yachts and large private airplanes might be a bit of a resource sink I guess .... but how does paper wealth cost society real resources? It's like being made at someone with a rare monkey gif
So, if you believe consumption is the issue, rejoice! It seems to be a problem that will resolve itself in a generation or two.
A billionaire consumes less of their income and invests more than a regular person. Wealth is power, but virtually everyone would spend on the same things.
A billionaire has the power to affect policy in a way that the average consumer doesn't, and is more likely to use that influence to make themselves richer than to push policies that benefit everyone.
Velocity of money matters. Builds. Bezo's sucking up wealth instead of paying workers retards the economy.
There is a reason Smog the Dragon is 'villian' prototype told by humans since forever. I get modern American conservatives think it is a model to emulate and is actually the highest for of being, but it's not.
I advocated for workers to keep more of their money.
It's not about protecting interests, leverages, political powers, etc., it's just more net pay at the same gross pay for the workers. Why choose where the workers money goes, if they can keep more, and just pay the artists by visitng concerts or buying their music? Why does government have to be involved?
>Taxes
If you have taxes, you already have a system which redistributes wealth to places that society requires, so government is already involved.
So the question becomes how the government is involved.
In any system with competing interests, a no holds barred contest favors the most willing to maximize their advantages. Wealth even concentrates even in video games.
To ensure a system where there is some degree of fairness between humans, to ensure that your position in society is not locked in to your inherited fate, or even to ensure that fewer taxes are taken from workers, you need the power of a shared government.
Also: The American position is usually to have no trust in government, which is encouraged by having a right wing media sphere that is dedicated to inserting as much distrust into the system as possible.
So by default in an American context, it’s hard to conceive of a government with high trust, and the default is to never give money to it.
I don't trust the government. Why? Because they can't properly operate with the money they're given by us, the workers. Same goes for many recepients of that money, especially the ones outside of "social help".
Yes, we fund art, we have public tenders, artists apply, they get a few thousand euros, produce something to fit "the current political theme" (eg. everybody is talking about ecology, let's make a performance where they throw trash at eachother), 10, 20, maybe 30 people see that, mostly family and local homeless people coming for the free wine, papers are stamped, checkmarks on all the right places, and money has exchanged hands. I would much rather live in a system where workers get to keep that money and spend it for art in whatever way they want. Even in a "semi-mandated" way (eg. tax benefits if you spend X euros yearly on art stuff).
And that's just peanuts compared to other stuff our government spends money on, our healthcare system is beyond broken, forcing you to pay government healthcare insurance (deducted by your employer, at 14.92% of your gross pay + 37.5eur extra, around 5keur yearly per average worker) but when you need an ultrasound for possible kidney stones... well, the waiting times are 6 month, but if you pay out of your pocket for a private clinic, somewhere around 100 eur, you can get one today or at the latest, tomorrow. If you're sick for up to 28 days, your employer covers your sick pay (80% of normal pay), if longer than 28 days, the government pays for that... sounds ok, right? We have people on sick leave for two, three years (24-36months * 80% of ~2500eur average monthly gross) waiting for eg. a knee surgery, that costs 3-5k eur at a private clinic, even less at a government one, but because our government insurance decided to pay only for 20 such surgeries yearly, and the waiting line is 70 people, you're screwed.
So yeah, I don't trust the government. I trust an average homeless alcoholic more with money management, especially because he's operating with his own money for his own benefit, and he'll make sure to get the most booze for whatever he managed to gather and not spend more than he has.
You’re obviously educated and on HN, so you can appreciate how much harder showing causation is.
Sadly, that does mean, the citizens need to get together and make their system more trustworthy. Getting more money in the hands of workers will not result in a better overall system.
Or in simpler terms - Distrust in the government is the enemy, and all the factors that cause it, real and perceived. Corruption, weak information economies, weakened judiciaries, depleted citizen capacity to build consensus.
We need those systems to work.
The government has the monopoly on violence. We pay the government, we pay the people that should check that they didn't do anything bad/wrong (police, anti-corruption services, etc.), we pay the court system, but they don't do anything. Things that work in every corporation (eg. procurement offices and oversight over them) are broken in many if not all governments, including ours.
If the government wants trust, then they must earn it. So far they haven't. And I'm talking about the whole pyramid, from the top politicians, to the lowest traffic police officer not doing his/her job. And in the system where a politician steals money, the investigators dont investigate and the courts don't prosecute, we can reduce the money they get, because they obviously are not doing the jobs we are paying them for. Jail 10, 20 politicians, and I'll gladly support more investigators (paid by the taxpayers). If they don't, we don't need the ones we already have.
Either way, no one is coming to save you, other than your own ability to understand the system, its tolerances, and to effect change / build alliances.
You can even achieve this by doing something small, like cleaning up a local spot, or other parts of your daily routine.
We learn how to operate very complex systems regularly.
Americans also have never really lived under a heavy handed government, and that's reflected in the tone here of frustration of market failure. But when the government fails, it's not frustration that takes hold, it's fear. Are you willing to risk that?
Your reply was a strawman arguments, and fails to address OP's point. The point is quite simple and straight-forward: if your argument for UBI is that people could hypothetically pursue their interests, why should I have to be the one having to work to pay the taxes required to finance this income redistribution scheme only to have others, perhaps less talented and dedicated than me, pursue my interests at my expense?
Why are you pay for other people to use the roads or have their fires put out or have health care? Because society is more pleasant overall if everyone can assume a baseline availability for those things.
That's fantastic. So let's build upon your personal belief, and as the system is universal then your recommendation is extended to everyone subscribing to the service.
Now please explain how you expect to finance an income redistribution scheme where all participants do not contribute back and instead only expect to consume from it.
Some people think if you fund people's ability to live, so that they aren't killing themselves going to multiple jobs, not sleeping, not raising their kids, remove fears like 'insurance is tied to this job so I can't leave it', etc, you will encourage an economic renaissance, just like VC funding has created a renaissance for the pocketbooks of VC funders.
You're not talking about long-shot bets in a system where everyone is expected to produce. You're talking about income redistribution schemes. This means today's salary is used to finance today's benefits. Please explain who do you expect to foot the bill when the system pressures those who sustain it to abandon that and instead add to the pool of consumers.
Sure, some people waste it. Some are just passive consumers, even shopping around between multiple educations without ever completing a degree. Some drop out half-way. Some get impractical degrees with few real job opportunities.
But enough people go on to become doctors and engineers and software developers and so on, and then have long careers that ultimately pays back the venture capital to the state, in the form of taxes. Most also work a side-job while studying to supplement the "basic income" stipend.
I don't personally believe that the majority of people will become unproductive consumers with an UBI. I think that societal pressure to contribute, the wish to enjoy luxuries, and to get status is enough for the majority to still work. I think that the added safety net of the UBI will also allow more people to take a risk on a dream, and perhaps make it big in art, in inventing new stuff, in science or in politics. And, as in VC investments, the few big hits will hopefully pay for the failures.
Your example has absolutely nothing to do with UBI, other than the fact that a small minority gets paid a stipend. It's not universal as it's conditionally granted only to a very small subset of society (students) throughout a limited time (5 years). At best it's another social safety net that is granted to people who would otherwise have no access to higher education.
Yet, in your example you already acknowledge that even when granted to a very specific subset of society which is motivated and mobilized to seize that opportunity to fund personal growth, it is also abused in ways that go exactly against it's purpose as it provides perverse incentives that attack equity at it's core.
> I don't personally believe that the majority of people will become unproductive consumers with an UBI. I think that societal pressure to contribute, the wish to enjoy luxuries, and to get status is enough for the majority to still work.
I'm afraid your personal hopes are misguided and based only on wishful thinking. There are plenty of examples in areas such as social housing where benefits are linked with immunity to "societal pressure to contribute". Providing a resource unconditionally represents a clear incentive to eliminate whatever incentives there are to secure it.
Oh, I knew somebody would go there. My personal hopes are at least as valid as the blanket statement that everybody will automatically fall to the lowest denominator and contribute as little as possible given the chance. I'm just honest enough to prefix my predictions with "I believe."
And of course the Danish education stipend is not a real UBI. Nobody has implemented a real ubiquitous and unlimited UBI. But there have been trials, like the one in Finland involving 2000 people over two years. Compared to that, I think the Danish "trial" may be closer to the real thing. It has run since 1970 and involves all students of higher education in the country in that entire time frame.
If I was a researcher trying to figure out what happens if you give a group of people a monthly stipend with very few requirements and no stipulations about how the money are going to be used, then I at least would regard that as valid data.
That's where many of the practical issues come in of course.
I'm not going to personally argue they're not solvable, but many people will argue the requirements of basic shelter and sustenance being far higher than what they actually are, and in our current system, the landlords would take the cash anyways.
Of course, if we all end up jobless due to robotics and AI enhancement, which again isn't something that's necessarily going to happen, UBI or similar might be the only positive path out of that mess.
If "everyone" lives on $X - Y% * $X for an entire year the loans are fully repaid each year and the government isn't "losing money" on its "loan terms" and is meeting the subsidies people expect from their government. That's not a "losing" situation. (It's not a likely scenario either, because at least some people are always going to want more than $X - Y% * $X dollars a year for their lifestyle or their dreams or their investments or their philanthropy or their vices.)
(ETA: It's also not directly an assumption in every form of UBI that Y% is less than 100%. There are UBI schools of thought that because of the time value of money, some charged interest is not only possible, but potentially a good idea as an incentive to invest the UBI payment in more than just mortgage/rent/lifestyle, but also something that does appreciate you with interest, such as the opportunity cost of accepting a job or a basic savings account. I tend towards the Y% <= 100% feelings, but I understand the Y% > 100% crowd.)
In other words, they’ve outed themselves as a Randroid and their opinion on matters of economics and public policy is worth just as much as Ayn Rand’s: Nothing, or even less.
why should I have to be the one having to work to pay the taxes required
You're not. You are not the only person paying tax. And far more of your tax bill is going toward subsidizing people and industries who are already rolling in money than helping relieve the burden on the poor.
I'm not saying you should pay more tax, you should probably be paying less. But we should reorganize the economy away from rewarding ownership of property as if it were productive economic economy activity in and of itself.
No. I'm not sure if you failed to understand the question or you tried to avoid it. My question refers to the core argument involving any economic system: fairness and equity. Why are you trying to avoid touching on the topic?
> You're not. You are not the only person paying tax.
Yes, I am. Everyone is forced to pay taxes, and I am no different. In income redistribution schemes such as UBI you get a chunk of your salary taken straight from your pay check to finance other paychecks. So far this sort of scheme is used to cover salaries representing social safety nets such as pensions, disability, and temporarily for unemployed. UBI radically changes that, as it goes well beyond the role of social safety net and unconditionally extends this to everyone. So now you are faced with a scenario where you have two classes of people: those who sustain the scheme and make it possible, and those who only consume it's resources.
Even if you try to argue there's a net benefit to society, you must face the problem of lack of equity. For instance, how do you justify to people like OP that they should continue working at their jobs so that others can have the privilege of pursuing their personal interests? If you argue that OP is also free to quit his job to pursue his interests then you're advocating for an income redistribution scheme that presssures participants to not contribute to it and instead consume the resources it manages to mobilize.
It’s a common framing, but UBI does not have to be that. Another may be that of a just compensation for giving up access to land.
> Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds
Do you understand your comment is a textbook example of moving the goalpost?
I am not "framing" anything. I am describing to you exactly how a universal basic income scheme works. Even the argument presented by UBI proponents to counter the problems with equity and perverse incentives is that the net benefit comes from eliminating all other types of incentives and the overhead they require to validate and prevent fraud.
> Another may be that of a just compensation for giving up access to land.
I don't think you read the source you're citing. It proposed inheritance tax that funded only a very basic social safety net program that at best covered retirement pensions only to those who outlived life expectancy and only around 1/3 of the income of an average agricultural labourer. That is very far from what any UBI proposal required in terms of the sheer volume of income that has to be redistributed.
So even in your example you are faced with the challenges of math and budgeting. Where does the money come from? Apparently income redistribution and the fundamental problems of equity and fairness is not it, and the alternative you proposed would come very short of even covering a pensioner's basic needs. So where do you think the money comes from?
The point of my source was not so much the economic argument, which, after all, talks about a reality several hundred years ago. Perhaps I should have linked to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism instead, to focus on the moral side of it.
I do think however that a modern take, especially if it turns out that recent AI developments will have sizable impact on the demand for human labor, could very well turn out to result in a dividend that is actually livable. Paine talks about land, but we should really consider all commons: Land, carbon emission rights, patents, copyright, trademark protections, electromagnetic spectrum, ip4 address space, dns names, the list can be made pretty extensive.
Perhaps it should end there. We could establish the idea of cooperatively owned legal entities representing various commons. These entities can collect rent in exchange for allocating parts of the commons to private use. I have a feeling it would make sense to take it a step further though, even if the details are probably over my head at the moment. It's already the case that pension funds function as a cooperative ownership of a part of all capital assets. And then there is home ownership and its connection to loans and wages. There probably will need to be some creative restructuring of this situation.
Your comment would only make sense if somehow you failed to understand the basics of the issue and fooled yourself into believing the system would only feature consumers and there were no producers at all. Everyone receives free money from the state, and thus it's all good. Right?
But think about it for a second. That money that everyone consumed, where do you expect it to come from? Who pays the bill? It's an income redistribution scheme, but whose income is subtracted do that there is money to pay someone else's income?
Once you figure that out, you will them be in a position to actually start thinking about the actual problem of equity and fairness: what incentive is there for anyone to generate the income that others require?
Yes, I am.
OK buddy
No. Your argument is that other people exist. That's great, everyone had the right to exist. But in the meantime, why do you think that just because someone else exists that means I am obliged to work a job to pay off their bills? And if you answer with a puerile and superficial "but you can also quit your job" then who exactly do you expect to foot the bill? Age you envisioning a society where no one contributes to it?
No, it's quite the opposite actually: you clearly do not care about society if you see it as an ATM to unconditionally fund your whims and cravings all while rejecting any need to contribute back.
I'm asking s very simple question you are trying to avoid answering: why is it fair for those who actually sacrifice themselves to work to fund those who opt to not work. Explain exactly what is fair in having workers support actual freeloaders in society? I mean, you are not talking about social safety nets. You're talking about unconfitional basic incomes. You do nothing, and you get a salary in return. Explain in clear terms how is it fair to those who actual work to see their labor appropriated by those who choose not to work, which might very well be their own colleagues. Explain where is the fairness and equity in this.
You'd still be getting a lot more than the ones that do nothing. I doubt you'd stop working just because 5% of your income gets given away if the option is to live on 10% of what you're getting by working.
Society can make you go to war and die, which is way more unfair. Society can do anything up to and including that.
Therefore the government can tax the office worker and use the proceeds to buy the artists paintings and utopia is here!
Yet that doesn’t mean I want to see other people making less art. On the contrary: I wish other people could create more great stuff that makes me happy, and I’m also happy if my tax euros (and my private consumption) help pay for that.
What I’m trying to say is that this idea of “I don’t get to do it, so nobody else should either” seems completely foreign to creativity. It’s not a zero-sum game.
That's not it at all. There are already tons of people doing it, so many that the incremental value of one more person is small. The low pay reflects that; it's a signal that you should consider other jobs that are more in demand.
One invented means of propping up art isn't necessarily especially legitimate or natural compared to others.
Taxes are a great way to fund culture, sort of like an index fund: I don’t have to try to pick winners now, I’ll get the accumulated benefit eventually.
It's when you start making fabulous amounts of money, and can park it in all sorts of shelters, whether that's straightforward things like real estate or, as HN commenters point out every time this comes up, by not ever even earning income or investment gains and so you can drive your tax towards zero (by doing things like taking out loans against your assets for money to live on).
I'm not sure what the answer is, but a North Star, in my mind, would be that as you have more you pay more, a truly progressive scheme, because every additional dollar you earn (through income or investment gains, realized or unrealized), as you get richer, actually is less critical to your livelihood. Who am I to say that? I'm not talking about some nebulous concept. I'm saying that if you make $1 million dollars per year, in total, a dollar extra matters less to you than it does to someone making $100,000 so I'm purely speaking on a relative basis (cue someone saying "how do you know it matters less? That person could live in a HCOL location, or have 12 kids or..." Hopefully we can avoid that because it misses the point; those things are choices people make. How much you're taxed is not a choice for the most part though can be to some extent (move from a high-tax state to a low one, etc.).
Also, all the people who cant do what you do, should they just curl up and do fentanyl? What do you propose they should do?
Besides, why do you want to live in a world with less artists and full of people who hate their jobs?
Why would I ever want to let others decide for me if I get art or food today?
I do not like the proposed system where people chose what they produce, and I am compelled to pay for it whether I want it or not.
Consider two toy economies: One in which purchasing power is fairly evenly distributed among the population, and one in which it's concentrated via a power-law distribution into the top 1%, and 0.1%, etc.
In the first case, the quantities of mass-market products demanded will be much larger, because more people can afford to purchase them. This means demand for things like cameras, cell phones, breakfast cereals, movies, video games software, etc, go up. However most of these are also things where economies of scale makes production more efficient as order quantities increase. Factories can invest in jigs, automation, and high-throughput lines to make enough quantity for everyone. The jobs that produce these goods also become better-paid, and easier to secure investment for, because order quantities are higher and less volatile. And doubly so for intangible goods like software, ebooks, music, and video games: production can scale to infinite demand, so there can never be a production shortage, but people who work in these industries can be better rewarded for their efforts because a bigger audience can afford to pay more.
So order quantities grow, and so do incomes, but inflation is relatively low because of the increasing efficiency of production. This means real GDP per capita increases greatly, and the population as a whole becomes materially more wealthy. Even though wealth is being distributed away from top earners, there are huge material rewards available to anyone able to supply goods and services to the masses, because the masses are able to pay for those goods and services.
In the wealth-concentration economy, those mass-production industries have to fight for scraps, because the top 1% has as much purchasing power as the bottom 99%, and the top 0.1% has more purchasing power than the 1% below them. More purchasing power is directed towards luxury goods: golf courses, supercars, yachts, country club estates, Rolex watches, art, private jets, and real estate. Production quantities are low and inefficient, and in the case of land, production is effectively impossible. Prices go up for these assets, but there is little productive benefit to the economy. The excess wealth of the 0.1% is put towards buying political influence, buying news media, and so on, which becomes another negative for society as a whole. Meanwhile an entrepreneur might identify a pressing need among the bottom 25% of the populace, where very simple things (eg. vitamins or eyeglasses) could create an incredible increase in social welfare, but they will not be able to secure investment nor be rewarded for such efforts because there is no profit in it; the poor cannot afford to pay.
I cannot do that.
But given that we need the labour of about 10% (give or take) of people for society to function, we need to change our economic arrangements
I think we should fund the basic meat hook realities for the common person. Accommodation, food, health care, shoes...
That is a UBI - Universal Basic Income
It will simplify so many aspects of modern life, increase our taxes, and open up many opportunities
The current system has failed to deliver anything like economic justice and needs rethinking
This will mean that people are able to "focus full-time on things where they can't make a living", rather than hustle for crusts. That is a side effect, not the purpose
The important quote you want here is: “If you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years, here it is: It will be what [Alan] Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God.”
Software developers are not Alan Greenspan.
We taxed our top earners 90% in living memory, which was naively high and absolutely caused distortions, but their current crazy low tax rates are a ridiculous policy failure. We could absolutely fund a small basic income by fixing this alone.
Second because the second order effects of reverting American society to Victorian slums would be incredibly bad for the economy and your tax burden.
Because somehow a plurality of Americans seem to have been convinced by the guy stealing all their money that it's someone else's fault and you should stone them to death instead.
Because letting large portions of the population starve to death slowly is just a bad thing in general?
Because it would be good for everyone including you.
Because you'd wish that someone else wasn't a smug asshole with an "I got mine" attitude and gave you help when you need it.
That's a pity, because it could have done so brilliantly. The catch is that we need a government that is not corrupt and incompetent to administer that process and that's exactly what was in charge at the time.
So while it can't happen now it would be worth exploring what that tipping point might be and how to make sure it serves the people its supposed to.
I actually read the article before going into the comment section, and your comment was surprising and baffling by how detached from the content of the post it was.
There are plenty of exploitation arguments made in it, but if you read the article is income inequality one of them? Well, no.
> 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.
I think that this conclusion is far-fetched if your starting point is the actual article. The music business is notorious for being virtually impossible to make a living, even if you are an international act. There were plenty of examples from decades ago up until now of musicians from popular international bands with packed international tours not being able to afford to quit their day job to make ends meet. If your income comes from selling tickets to the public, sometimes directly, and you still cannot generate a livable income, the problem is not income inequality. The problem is that there is not enough demand for what you're selling to make it a viable business.
I mean, if your primary source of income is playing shows and not enough people want to spend money to attend them, why do you think the fact that some people earn way more than you is even relevant?
> 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.
Here is a though experiment: does your assertion hold valid if you replace "store baggers" and "taxi drivers" with "contortionists" or "jugglers"? Because while "store baggers" and "taxi drivers" aren't exactly activities associated with upper middle class income levels, they are activities that most people are coerced to have because they have no alternative to make a living. Musicians are another story altogether, and associated with people pursuing their dreams. In fact, there is that age old cliche about third generation wealth being artists and academics because their exceptional wealth allowed them to pursue their dreams.
Basic income has been tested very thoroughly many different times and all results show it basically doesn't do anything good or bad. So it won't create any new musicians. The main effect is it's simpler to administrate than other kinds of welfare, which is a good thing because it saves money.
Wealth taxes are inflationary (because they force you to sell assets) and so would probably cause fewer musicians. Especially if you assume musicians are nepo babies, in which case you actually need rich/upper-middle-class people to create them.
Anyway, the solution here is to copy other countries where it works. They don't do any of these made-up future policy ideas. Japan/Korea produces a lot of culture because it has a low cost of living, a mature industry that trains a lot of people, and most importantly (but negatively) wages are low so there's nothing more productive for the musicians to be doing. Doubly so for women, who might as well become Z-grade idols when they can't get a career job at all.
In the West IIRC a surprising amount of songwriting talent comes from Sweden, but don't know much about that.
At the end of ever taxation year, the government calculates its deficit for the year. Divide this by all income earners at their marginal tax rate. Then, at tax time, the tax payer can choose to either pay this or allow it to accumulate at the same rate that the government charges itself. Maybe once we can cover deficits we can start thinking about UBI.
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?
For a band, it's virtually impossible to find work outside the weekend. If a region had a few restaurants that were known for year round "live music Mondays", "live music lunches", etc, it would increase the number of hours that a musician could work during the week, and make full time performance viable for more musicians. Of course, people would also need to support these performances by patronizing the venues that host them.
But until a working musician can fill their weekday calendar with paying gigs without excessive travel/lodging costs, you'll continue to see talented musicians drop out and do something else.
The current world we live in doesn't care enough about creativity. I find it a bleak thought, but here I am. Feel free to try to talk me out of it, because it does feel kind of depressing. Or feel free to validate it. I want to see the world for what it is, not what I like it to be.
What do you mean by not valuing music? Should we allocate more of our paycheck to music? Or should we talk more about how great music is?
> It seems to me that most artists are making music because they love to do it themselves.
I mean, art is ultimately an expression of emotions. If you don't love creating the art you create, unless you have another deep emotional reason to create it, it's going to affect the result quite significantly.
> The current world we live in doesn't care enough about creativity.
This is just human nature though I think. Most people want the fuzzy feeling of something familiar. And then you have those who go to large events for the shared experience of going, rather than what's actually performed.
Personally I love going to smaller venues (<300 people) where the cost of admission is such that I feel I can take the risk of something unknown and outside my comfort zone. But I also realize I'm weird that way.
The problem is that it's a bit of a winner takes all market. It's comparable to professional sports.
Everyone loves soccer, but 99.9% of people won't get paid to play it. That doesn't mean it isn't valued - some of the highest paid people in the world are soccer players!
Why watch local soccer in most of the world when you can watch the Champions League on the internet ?
In the Soviet Union people were watching Dynamo and Lokomotiv on TV rather than going to local games too.
Tech allows distribution, and the social factors is people want to listen to what's popular
That's a drag in many ways because local circuits and regional music are where a lot of new styles and bands came from, and the wealth is more concentrated now into fewer people.
Think of it: a lot of people listen to music as a background of some kind. That means they don't want to keep going "Ugh, this one sucks, next, next, next..."
But, there's thousands of absolutely excellent songs that are time tested. You can play top 100 from the 80s and not be annoyed most of the time.
But ever time somebody plays Prince or Duran Duran is a time they're not playing the song you just released.
There has never been as many ways to make money off being creative as individual as right now.
This board just loves to romanticize the past to an absurd degree and then conclude free money fixes everything.
It is basically every non-software discussion on here. The present sucks, the past was better, free money.
And you'd be locked to only playing certain types of music (country, classic rock, singer songwriter), doing multiple gigs a day.
Truth be told, most musicians would be better off by picking a job, any job really, and treating music as a side hustle. And that really pains me, as I started out as a musician.
If you're going to make a living off music, it's going to be a never-ending marathon of hustles and uncertainty. Cover bands, church bands, wedding bands, session work, lessons, roadie work, instrument tech, and half (of not two thirds) of that work is based on sheer luck, depending on what people you cross paths with.
The problem with this as a framing device is that it doesn't describe very many working musical acts. 360 deals are probably generally gross? But Pemberton's situation is weird. In most cases, labels are in fact going to lose money from midlist acts.
The more you look at these kinds of businesses the more striking the pattern is. It's true of most media, it's true of startups, it's true for pharmaceuticals. The winners pay for the losers; in fact, the winners are usually the only thing that matter, the high-order bit of returns.
What's challenging about this is that you can't squeeze blood from a stone. The package offered to a midlist act might in fact be a loss leader; incentive to improve dealflow and optionality for the label, to get a better shot at the tiny number of acts whose returns will keep the label afloat. There may not be much more to offer to acts that aren't going to generate revenue.
David Lowery (a mathematician and the founder/lead vocalist of Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker) had an article about this years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3850935
It's worth a read (though things have probably changed in a number of ways since then). It's an interesting counterpoint to the automatic cite to Albini's piece that comes up in these discussions. Not that you should have sympathy for labels, just it's useful to have a clearer idea of what the deal was. The classic label deal with a mid-sized advance that never recouped (and which the labels never came back looking for when it didn't) was basically the driver for "middle-class" rock lifestyles; it's dead now.
This is almost certainly the case. The music business is the economics of superstars. see: Rosen, Sherwin. “The Economics of Superstars.” The American Economic Review 71, no. 5 (1981): 845–58.
Small personal difference translate into enormous differences in earnings. The income curve has only small area for middle incomes. Either you are below middle, or you quickly get into upper middle class or higher incomes. It's not a market failure but a predictable dynamics of this particular field.
Artists low pay is driven by two things:
First, an oversupply of talent willing to work below a living wage keeps incomes low.
Second, promotion and marketing are the primary drivers of an artist's financial outome, leading to uneven deals where labels handle the heavy lifting and deserve larger piece of the cake. Once an artist's career reaches a certain scale, their earnings can grow to outweigh their direct creative input.
One thing that could help is transparency, but in a way the lack of transparency is a good part of what keeps the system going. Most people would not agree if they knew how little they would keep if they were successful; "what do you mean I have to pay for the losers?". They would just want to pay for what was necessary for their success, ignoring every expense that didn't work as a "stupid label decision". The thing is that nobody has a true recipe for success, you can just get reasonable estimates on your bets, but each bet will always be a biased coin flip.
We decimated recordings as a revenue stream (and literal decimation might be wildly generous, given that stream payouts frequently never add up to a single sale for many artists). We let people peddle the lie that artists can just find some other revenue source like merchandising or another job or anything else rather than paying for the thing people ostensibly value.
Minor league success was never an easy proposition but we had a chance to give it better margins. And we let Spotify and others eat those, and let too many people tell comforting lies to consumers along the way.
And without a major cultural shift, we will do the same thing for everyone eventually.
If hundreds of millions of people decide to use Spotify and Youtube to obtain their music, and if that means most artists are shafted in the process, no secret organization enacted some conspiracy to achieve that. Instead, technology enabled a new form of consumption, and producers faced a new level of competition.
a) just a theory not a proven thing and
b) based on flawed assumptions that were quickly disproven. See the 2008 paper "Should You Invest in the Long Tail?" finding that consumers don't like niche products and the bottom 80% sold $0, contrary to the theory's prediction.
https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=32337
Had nothing to do with merchandising or whatever. The Long Tail was never correct.
I’ve played many gigs for $20-100, which is once a month or week and tough work relative to typing some code from home. I played for 25 mins in front of 1000 people and spent 8+ hours total all-in to make 200 bucks. Way harder money than coding.
Really, think back through history. Musicians were needed for dance, parties, all occasions. Now hit play on your phone connected to a speaker, GG musicians.
Not really comparable experience though.
More reliable, no divas, no drunk musicians, always on time, the repertoire is literally unlimited.
Perhaps a bit cynical, but my thinking has long been that if I see a band that's playing in a venue that takes like 100-200 people or so[1], they're doing it out of passion. And that immediately makes it more interesting for me to go.
I've had lots of great experiences that way, including for bands that's normally way outside my comfort zone. And as the price of admission is fairly low, if it somehow is a miss it's not a big deal.
Now, as I know they're making little or no money on the gig itself, I usually end up buying some merch.
[1]: I'm in Norway, we don't have a ton of large venues.
John Philip Sousa had the right opinion on recorded music.
Should we stop thinking about music as a job and start thinking about it as a hobbyist art form? Nobody is out there lamenting that you can’t make a living off of landscape painting. It’s a fun form of self expression that people will do regardless of the economics, so maybe the problem was ever thinking you could make a profession out of it?
At one point there were several million "MySpace Bands". That's music as a hobbyist art form. Some of them might even have been good.
Maybe you don't value music or live music, but there are a lot of people out there that do. You not caring much for it doesn't change the fact or make it ok that they're getting stiffed by those with the upper hand in the relationship.
Bandcamp is chock full of bands, from home produced stuff, to bands spending saved money on a cheap studio. It's enough that even in the sub-niches I like, I can listen to 10-20 newly released albums every week.
I doubt more than a small single digit percentage of them make money that way, but they very often really enjoy what they are doing.
Some are already worried: https://fortune.com/europe/2025/06/09/bnpl-loans-klarna-ceo-...
"How many jobs there should be for X" is not a question that can be answered by people whose main intent in the last few years has been to put others out of a job while claiming they're making the world a better place. Aka, us in tech.
The future feudal lords will just sell to each other and ignore the jobless, moneyless masses. We don’t like to hear this, but normal people will likely become less and less economically relevant, to the point where their total economic activity will one day be a rounding error next to the economic activity of the top 0.0N%.
I worked with a founder who dealt with only a small number of very rich customers. He would say “We only sell to the rich because they have the money.” The future looks like a more extreme version of this.
I sell you stuff worth 5 billion, you give me 5 billion. Nothing happened. Maybe you even consume the product so there is less wealth.
Only labor can generate value. Work is what transforms a thing into another thing that has more value than before. Machines and AI do not create value.
You might wonder what would happen if they had an general AI, maybe actual autonomous robots? Would those create value? Well, at first whoever got the first AGI would get incredibly rich but if everyone had access to that tech, the prices for everything that can produced with it would plummet down until they are the cost of running the AI.
Rich people get richer by employing poor people. So they can extract the value they produce. If they don't employ anyone, they are not making any profit. (Well for actual free markets, you can of course make profit being a monopolist and stuff or just do crime.)
So yes, rich people are screwed. That is why they buy bunkers in New Zealand. That is why we see the rise of fascism, because they will have to tighten the screws to keep the ship running a little while longer.
If we're looking at extremes, I don't think the ultra rich are in as bad a position as you want them to be.
silicone valley is grifting its own rich people with paper bomb shelters.
So you worked with someone who you claim to be a direct -knowing even- participant in this trend. You presumably benefited from this work too. No?
It's impressive how many people bemoan the dangers they see in a thing, while continuing to contribute to its growth, again and again and again, as long as the personal benefit keeps working their way.
But, if your central moral argument about the subject does revolve around thinking such a scenario is likely and being disgusted by it, then being paid by the people supposedly promoting this kind of economic inequality and working with them while they do it is pretty goddam hypocritical.
Completely different markets, though: how much time per day do you spend looking at landscape paintings vs. listening to music?
Meanwhile, outside of museums most landscape art is also advertising. But I’ll spend two or three hours at an art museum when I get the chance.
I like art but I cannot remember the last time I went to an exhibition. Certainly not since my wife and I became parents.
That seems like a weird angle to take it, no? I know it's just an example but there is more than one type of artist, just as there's more than one type of musician. As simple as it is, someone needed to design the YCombinator logo. Art is everywhere as well, even on a site like this that doesn't host much visual media.
(P.S. I do remember the last time I went to a concert. October).
Anyone who could live on this planet without music is a psycopath.
silence is golden and allows for reflection upon what we heard
It’s not really The Sims. You don’t usually go stand in front of one of your paintings and emote a bunch. It’s just there breathing life into a space.
We do spend a lot of time looking at photos!
If musicians can't make a living, then both the quantity and quality of our musical options go down. Yes, hobbyists will always make music for themselves, but hobbyists won't necessarily record music for us or tour around the country for us to see in live venues. The issue is not that musicians inherently deserve to make a living; the issue is, what kind of musical market is available for consumers?
That's not contrary to what I said, which was "hobbyists won't necessarily [emphasis added] record music for us". And of course you didn't respond to my point about touring.
In any case, the music and recordings of hobbyists are likely to be inferior to the music and recordings of professionals, because in general, professionals are better than hobbyists at almost everything, music being only one example.
> A lot of the music I listen to is from youtubers with a handful of views.
If that's the future you want, then I guess you're in luck.
There's plenty of music available even if only some hobbyists record. In terms of musical options, I'd say we're in a golden age. Used to be, we could only listen to whatever some record label was willing to fund. Before that, just local musicians. Now we can pull up all sorts of obscure musicians all over the world. Recently I went down a rabbit hole of famous rock songs played in medieval style on period instruments; that's not something I'd be likely to find at a record store.
Recording isn't the barrier it used to be, and it'll keep getting easier to make good mixes as the software improves.
Meanwhile, it's likely that the power law will continue to apply, and plenty of especially talented musicians will hit the big time and do live touring. In fact, as more music is generated by AI, I expect people seeking authenticity will develop more interest in live music.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O7EcT5YzKhQ&pp=ygUeUXVhcnRlciB...
Gabe Churray: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGufuxRFqAM
Pete Calandra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUxNw2MEg0Q
LtN Jones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qke-hC7RnXQ
Johannes Winkler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1tySFkXUUA
Caught In Joy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhxM9MNau3U
Jay Hosking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCLqevwWE1g
Gattobus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGeAMOwW01k
Dexba: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3PB05qVI38
Tefty & Meems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILVIzsoc6_0
Vox Mnemonic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnQi3dnWrKE
Oxix52: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDNZPzSaYKo
JP Blasco: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKiB04JlQqY
Kris Lennox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC3GNZYcXUU
Singing Circuitry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwdxTuFosdo
Winterdagen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhNfUDs6TGY
Noah Lifschey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVFg-ZxNns0
Like, I see where you're going with this but music is one of those things that's actually the whole point of being alive. If all we ever do is do "useful" things ($$$) we lose our chance to actually live our lives.
we absolutely should be pursing things that are creative, beautiful, and transcendental. but.. should we expect the pursuit of the creative, beautiful, and transcendental to be a career? we should encourage everybody to do because it is inherently valuable instead of pursuing it because its a job.
In the absence of that, neurosis is certain to flourish.
So, it is not an economic matter but a matter of the psychodynamics of society. For the sake of the health of the whole, some members of the whole must be able to bring in certain vibes, patterns, states of mind, ideas, etc. And without the ability to pursue that and only that skillset, they won't be able to succeed at that. And it is required for the functioning of the whole.
It's a bit akin to the way the entire body depends on the cells that process ATP. If you eliminate all cells that serve that role, the entire body dies, even though they are a miniscule aspect of the entire operation. That is where the animating spirit comes from.
My answer is no not necessarily. One can pursue it in their free time. Whether it should be a career or not is honestly an invisible hand question (aka capitalism). I'm normally not pro invisible hand such as in the case of healthcare, but when it comes to stuff like this, I totally am.
It might be beneficial to have dedicated people to do this, but a lot can be accomplished by free time.
If we do not explicitly carve out a space for the arts and other transcendental pursuits, capitalism eats them. And then the cancer grows.
So it is a moral imperative to make it possible for SOME of us (obviously, not everyone is called to such things) to pursue these things exclusively.
*Realizing this might be confusing in context. I meant e.g. navigational instruments
Plenty are. But your experience in landscape painting transfers to other professional crafts, so the loss is mitigated. What does a skilled musician have to tranfer to if the industry falls apart? Teaching music?
I also really don't like reinforcing the idea that "the arts aren't meant to be a career". One of the biggest turnabouts in the 20th century is that you don't need to already be set for life in order to spend your days training your passions. The arts are (or were) no longer this "high class" means to distinguish yourself from the working class.
Meanwhile so much of society is built upon and weathered against destruction over such artisans. Are you really going to have a healthy society if all kids see growing up are pencil pushers, hard physical labor, managing retail, or hyper-specializing after 20+ years of schooling? What's all that work building up to? To serve billionaires?
nobody is out there lamenting that we're not supporting a 'middle class' of baseball players.
the top 0.001% get to the big leagues and make bank. the top 0.01% scrape by in the minors. nobody else makes a dime. yet... plenty of people are still passionate about the game and play it for free. the guys playing in an adult rec leauge aren't thinking "there's a career in this I can put together a good highlight reel this season". they're playing because they find it fun and fulfilling.
so maybe musicians should view music like professional sports? do it because you love it. start a band with your friends. play gigs at your local bar every friday. but don't kid yourself that it's a career.
I will cheekily argue that the "transferable skill" of failed athletes is charisma. It's pretty clear that being able to talk about sports is a cheat code for upwards mobility (no matter the industry) and the mentality it builds is of high social value (you'll never find trouble finding a local court or field to make a pickup game with. An artists Meetup, a bit harder to arrange). Certainly more than 99% of artists.
But to properly answer your point, I don't have the full answer of how to balance "necessary careers" with "dream careers". If you want to maintain a satisfied populace (aka, prevent a violent coup by people who feel they have nothing to lose), they need to feel their dreams are reachable. Emphasis on "feel".
You don't even need to make money off your dreams per se. But you need time for it, and basics safeties taken care of. the current atmosphere offers neither.
I think most artists would tell you that if people couldn't make a living as visual artists, the quality of new art in the world would decrease tremendously. Painting is a craft - it takes a lot of training to develop the skills. It also takes a ton of work to develop one's own style. Then there's the whole business part of marketing the work.
Very few great artists would have been able to reach their level of quality just doing it as a hobby.
Now, with AI, all signs seem to indicate that the industry will finally reset to what was the norm for hundreds of years : Artists would be supported on their craft by patrons and benefactors. Most didn't make it to be wealthy, but at least, they got to enjoy time in their craft.
That depends, how much do you value culture (and, my extension: cultural power)? If it's a take-it-or-leave-it kind of thing, then whatever the market will bear.
Once, when criticising the toxic effects of advertising, I got a response to the effect of 'but how will streamers be able to support themselves?!'. Which I was really struck by, because it presumes that streamers should be able to support themselves by streaming. Should they? Is this actually a desirable outcome? Yes, the financial viability probably leads to more streaming, but what about the quality of the overall streaming? And what about the opportunity cost when someone gives up their job and puts their labours into the business of streaming?
There will always be some level of cultural output, since there will always be passionate people. But has making the arts an industry (through an ever expanding artifice of 'intellectual property', and the ever expanding criminalisation of its subversion) actually led to better arts? Would this be a better or worse world if people built bridges in their day job and played rock gigs at night, solely for the love of it?
I'm not trying to do a Socratic dialogue here, I genuinely don't know. But I suspect the answer is much more nuanced than 'more money = better art', and I am sceptical of certain legal or economic distortions based on that assumption (e.g. life + 70 copyright terms, surveillance advertising, surveillance DRM software, billion-dollar industries that subsist solely on 'IP', fines and prison terms for unauthorised sharing, or the reversing or bypassing of DRM, etc).
Many musicians teach others. Without them how will we learn one of the most beautiful / coolest things to ever exist?
I’ve tried learning from an app and it’s not the same as spending an hour with my guitar teacher. It’s not even close. I wish he were paid more given how talented he is and how hard he works.
He's your guitar teacher. It would be difficult for you to state a wish that was more completely under your own control.
Now someone with a $400 controller, pirated music, and some free time can do it. Loads of people willing to play at venues for free just for the fun of it have crushed the viability of doing it as an actual job.
It reminds me of ex-Soviet chess players. The emigration of so many good grandmaster-level players diluted the market, and unless you were in the absolute upper echelons (like Kramnik, Karpov, or Kasparov), you pretty much had to supplement your income by teaching on the side.
Among other things, I play large-ensemble jazz. Over the years, I've played in a number of bands, and the level of quality and variety achieved by players with professional training is a noticeable step above amateur players. The material that my current band plays is unplayable without training. About half of the band members have music degrees (many teach music in the public schools) and the other half are dedicated amateurs with past training like myself.
Other styles, like folk music, are essentially sustained by amateurs.
Some things can only be done by amateurs, or professionals who also have a musical hobby, such as playing experimental, obscure, or historical music. Amateur musicians also support the professional scene by attending performances, taking lessons, buying instruments (resulting in economies of scale), etc.
I can keep playing this game, as can others. Why do we need all that money invested in data collection and disseminating cat videos, political unrest, etc.
We can only speculate about the future having more AI-code or the repercussions thereof (as many do).
And for me with musicians the number is zero.
You probably want digital payment systems like banking and warehouse management. But I am thinking those sort of areas are only fraction of modern software industry.
Not at all clear.
FOSS before that likely made it fall as well
Almost certainly false. Imagine a world where the concept of open source never happened, so if you want a website you have to pay thousands of dollars for web servers, compilers, databases, etc. Would the demand for software developers be higher or lower than in our world?
But how are you going to get good if you don't get any practice and feedback?
I remember someone lamenting people videoing comedians in small venues and posting the fails, that follow you forever. How are you going to get good at stand up if you can't fail and learn?
Not everyone can be Steven King and get an advance worth 3 years salary for their first book.
Well, you know, it is kinda like how companies are replacing all the juniors with AI. It's cheap, for now. But then comes the question of what do you do in 5-10 years when you need some seniors with actual experience?
When you do a hobby you can get practice and feedback in. It depends on their situation.
Someone is a kid? A lot
Someone is single? 4 hours per evening and 6 hours per weekend day. That's still a lot.
Someone has kids? Don't know but doesn't seem like a lot
There's lots of value in amateur engineering. What if we deprofessionalized engineering via making it difficult for anyone to make a living doing it? Some people would no doubt still continue to do it, to scratch their itches and exercise their minds. But they would spend less time doing it, less time sudying how to do it, more time doing whatever it takes to pay the bills and claw out some semblance of security. We certainly wouldn't fall into technical poverty immediately, and maybe we wouldn't miss what we don't quite invent / develop, but both the people who actually love it enough to pay attention and the professionals would know the difference between what isn't getting done.
(And in fact, the US is standing on the precipice of a FAFO event with research here, having just made it more difficult to make a living focusing on it.)
What happens to a field that can only be engaged as a dilettante, never as a committed investor?
Software development will go this way, too, as we are all starting to learn.
The problem is people are ok with corporate, mass-produced slop—whether it be music, furniture, or (soon) software. Fewer and fewer people are willing to pay for human craftsman-produced product.
those responsible for advancement of musical boundaries rarely are recognized or rewarded in kind, at least since the dawn of the recorded music mafia.
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." Hunter S. Thompson
It's of course quite dull, kitchens, cabinets, ... Mostly tailored to living spaces of upper middle class and rich people of varying taste, so you'll be doing a bunch of tacky stuff no doubt.
That and carports.
clearly that isn't the case. the fetishism of amateur/hobby practice here is ridiculous. if people found value in these activities, they would pay for them. UBI advocates basically want someone to fund them drinking beer while they tinker in their garage.
Well you don’t need to. The answer is ”as many as the market will support”, as it is with any other product. However, your rhetorical question misses the point completely. The question is not should a person just make thing x as a hobby, but that this global multi-billion dollar industry shares very little of it’s revenue to the people who make thump thump and bum bum that get’s asses on the floor and people to move. All of the examples in this article are clearly quite successful acts that people are willing to pay to listen to and are quite integral part of the economy as a whole (not to mention softer values such as cultural enrichment of all human life), but are struggling to make the ends meet. Why.
Because some else literally takes the money people pay to listen to them. If I want to listen rapper Yakkedi Yap’s new single Xingabow and give him money, I would be better off to sending them money in an envelope than listening them from any streaming app (maybe Bandcamp is an exception), or even going to their concert or buying their merch. Because someone literally steals the money.
At least if you buy a landscape painting from a gallery the gallery takes just 20-40% and artist gets the rest minus materials and taxes. They don’t take 60%, then minus every possible cost from the artist, then take what is left and give it to Drake.
The right question is likely how much time we should dedicate to subsistence - roof, clothes, food.
And that number ought to go down.
From that you can derive that we should have a freaking lot of people who can devote their time to music.
I found very little actual insight in this article. I think musicians have been struggling for decades and the parents have known for at least as long to tell their kids to get a degree regardless of their talents. Schools like Berklee are… questionable at best. Lots off nepo babies just taking a few years to fuck about, basically.
when you think about it
Oddly enough Berklee is considered to be a jazz school, but the players from there who I consider to be real stand-outs (performing at an international level, or well on their way to doing so) have chosen to earn their livings outside of mainstream jazz.
The "live from Emmet's place" series that you can find on youtube has some of the best jazz players today playing mainstream jazz.
The Beatles and Van Halen did the same.
Let’s say your child wants to be an actor. One way to make this happen is to be a successful actor yourself - require your children to be cast in the film in return for you starring. This is how famous acting families pushed their kids forwards, including Nicholas Cage (Coppola) and Jeff Bridges.
More relevant for HN is rich people. So you are tech rich and your kid wants to act. Fund the movie on the condition your child acts in it. That is the way since movies began.
The customer of such a movie isn’t the audience but the wealthy patron sponsoring the movie. I suspect this self-promotion motivation is a large reason why so many movies are so bad.
- making movies is hard. A lot of things that require years to master need to go right. A *ton* of tech is involved.
- making movies is expensive. Money alone won't make you a good movie, but many productions are so on the edge that some choice they had to make for monetary reason will cause the bad.
- making movies is complex, that means making a masterful one requires multiple botched attempts and experiences by all people involved. These botched attempts are also what you see.
On top of that come the contacts and being rich. But the contacts are not a thing other people couldn't make as well, especially if they are good. One of the somewhat hidden benefits of higher education are the contacts you will make. Maybe you're not rich and your parents are roofers while you want to become an actor, but if you're good and well connected you might benefit from other peoples connections. This is how I started to make my living in a foreign country with two parents without any shared background: There were people who had those contacts and I benefitted of them simply by being the one they chose because I am accurate, reliable, on time, knowledgeable, patient and good at what I do.
But
When they are younger they could pay for acting classes, acting camps and help them get into local productions.
Out of school they pay for livings costs, education and any additional classes. Living in New York or LA and being able to concentrate on getting parts of training rather than having to make money would be a huge boast.
Maybe at the next stage getting their kid an agent or manager who has contacts and experience to get their kid the roles.
Perhaps you mean throwing a few thousand dollars at student-level films to ensure their kid gets an important part. I guess maybe some will write 6 (7?) figure cheques to get their kid a part, but that probably doesn't happen often.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/01/writers-recall...
Want to work for the most prestigious fashion brands? You start with unpaid (or very low pay) internships in some of the most expensive cities in the world. Same goes for record labels. Art. Literature publishing.
And these days, some of the above will filter out applicants that don't have big enough social media accounts.
Same sh it is happening with basketball. More nepo babies that got to go through expensive camp than ballers from the streets rising up the ranks homie. And no person embodies dis shit more than Bronny James.
Sad cause sports was supposed to be the ultimate meritocracy yo!
I was very aware that I was lucky. You can be the best, you can have a great network, but (in my experience), luck is the main factor. and the "luck" window in the music space is more and more narrow currently.
I want to "move up" in my career, but I simply don't see the (performative) art of data science and data engineering. It feels too narrow. Music and data analysis feels broad. I could take a higher paycheck but it'd cost of a lot of fun.
It probably helps that I on top of that get to integrate LLMs and create LLM flows, basically n8n but then programming it using the APIs of an LLM. So I'm still actually programming as well.
It's fun being a generalist.
I'm not arguing in favour, I'm noting the deep historical social worth of a musician. It's classic veblen goods for a few, and serfdom for the rest.
Composers had ambiguous social standing. Virtuosi were superstars, but you didn't want your daughter to marry one.
What if the underlying relative value of music was returning to its organic roots? Maybe this is a version of the burger index and their labour value has been overweight for 50 or more years?
The cost in time and effort to become a musician is comparable to an apprenticeship or a surgeon. That cost isn't reflected in their value in the market.
We did in some ways (cosmetic procedures) go to low cost rental models. They're terrible.
You may say that people just care about the music and not the musician, and that thus an AI-generated track is as good as any. Perhaps. But when I was a kid, all my pals developed their musical taste by word-of-mouth and I-want-to-be-cool-like-you-and-listen-to-Rammstein. Can't imagine all edgy teenagers will fall in love with an AI model.
You see, I firmly believe that music, itself, is a form of currency.
So exchanging that currency for another is the problem.
However, I can say with a great deal of certainty - having observed musicians for decades - musicians make money when they make live music.
Not all music can be played live.
But live musicians are the future of music.
It’s one thing to be able to conjure up whatever you want with AI.
But, do it live, in front of 1000 people.
Or, even 10.
I can walk through my city today and encounter 100 (easily) musicians making money every hour, plying their wares into the stones of the streets and pedestrian bubbles.
But yeah, it’s hard work. Why not make an AI do it?
I really am missing some context here.
Interesting take! I can see the value/process you're describing, never thought of it that way.
Same thing with music. Streaming pays so little compared to physical media now that artists never make up the difference.
Not sure what the problem is, the streams will pay the budget of the movie, just like the old movie studios did. So where is the difference? Do they pay much less and no royalties?
It has been a double (triple, even) whammy for musicians, compared to mid 90s and back. There used to be a time where you could play in a band, not a huge signed one, and still make a living. Just off playing the door, on the regular bar / club circuit.
People went out much more back in the day. A regular weekday gig could bring you more money than a weekend gig does today. Unless you play in the most tourist-y hot spots, in the largest cities (think Nashville Broadway), you're not going to find places that play music all days. Not even 3-4 days a week. If you're lucky, it is going to be live music a couple of days, and almost only during weekends. Assuming you're paid $70 - $200 pr. gig, calculate how many gigs you need to play a year to not live in poverty.
Pay hasn't really changed much, either - for the musicians that play for a flat fee, that figure has been standing still for decades.
Almost every professional musician I know will have a battery of side hustles, these days. They will take every gig they can find, they will give lessons, they will do studio work, they will work as techs, become niche influencers, they will do whatever it takes.
But more often than not, they will have abandoned music as their main revenue stream, and rather pick up regular job that generates a steady paycheck, and gig during the weekends.
I can count on one hand the musicians / artists that have managed to make it "big", as in being C- or D-lister artists, and thus making a living off their recorded and touring music. They still spend equally much time on their social media, as that is what gets your name out. There is an immense pressure to play the algorithm, because that could make your tune blow up and become viral.
In fact, that is often how musicians become "famous" these days. Suddenly their tune becomes viral in tiktok vids, and that's how they manage to get millions of listeners...doesn't actually pay much, but it puts a big spotlight on your name.
80s entry level coder
90s team lead
00s manager
10s cto
20s cto with help from parents
Wage stagnation and inflation and asset inflation.
>It’s easier than ever to light lamps, and harder than ever to make a living from it
Lamplighter used to be a job. Now it’s not.
The point of anything becoming trivially scalable for most people is that it suddenly stops being profitable.
My favorite years in Austin for music were between 2007-2010. You could always see a band who were making music for fun, free drinks and girls, not to be famous. You can see a gig every day or so for $10 or $20. Just people doing it to make a few bucks and for fun.
Then I moved to NYC. Every venue was "who are you here to see" bands had to make relationships with venues to make them money. Everything was about the industry and getting famous. None of it was about having a good time. I hated every minute of it.
When you can listen to any artist from around the world in your earbuds all the time, most people won't be able to make a living from it. Still, you'll be able to go to a honky tonk in Austin on the weekends for $20, because there will always be folks making and performing live music, not for the money, but because it's fun.
But: fundamentally, why did all of this happen, and why haven't prices normalised (i.e. dropped) since?
Does anyone have a hypothesis, beyond 'corporate gouging', which I can accept, but seems too simplistic to explain what seems to be an enduring global phenomenon?
Because governments printed an enormous amount of money during the pandemic. Money is worth far less that it was pre-pandemic, so prices are higher.
Many things were technically feasible pre-pandemic but not done habitually: remote work, streaming movies instead of going to the theater, ordering delivery instead of dining out, and so on. The pandemic forced many people to change their habits and get over any initial inertia (e.g. investing in a WFH setup or home theater). The result is that when the world returned to normal, the markets didn't: consumer habits had already moved on.
As has always been the case with music, success is extremely rare. For every winner, there are a million losers. So, better to think of it more like a lottery than a normal industry / job.
Before that, I mostly gravitated to 'blockbuster musicians', old classics, 1970s psychedelic rock. Today I buy some unknown musician's album every few days (and I pay what I'd pay for a 'proper' album, even if it is pay what you want).
Part of that is simply availability. The old record stores of old were often just "what's popular" with a side dish of "what the owner likes". Today? I found some Touareg rock band the other day. In the 1990s, that was virtually impossible even for music lovers.
Part of it is that today, I pay for what I like. Radio sucks, the classics are oversaturated, and often enough new releases are just qualitatively worse - both in composition as well as remasters which tend to sacrifice nuance for loudness. But indy bands? I don't expect perfection, but often enough find it.
Now, I understand I am a rare breed. In a Spotify world, the one buying FLACs is exotic. I do understand that the mid-range musician is not going to become a millionaire - but who ever did?
The example in the article sounds a lot like the artist has been bent over a barrel by the record company - a pattern even "successful" musicians have experienced. Maybe instead of chasing fame, the solution is to do your own marketing.
The musical middle class wasn’t thinned out by the audience, but by labels and streaming models. If you’re not topping the charts, you vanish between promotion costs and algorithmic obscurity - unless you go directly to the listener.
recording also works to give a 'real job' to those who insist on making music for a living.
Only a few have ever made a job of performing. The midevil bard was often a second son of a nobel supported as a way to ensure they kill the older brother for the throne. Everyone else music was a hobby they did after farming was done.
I'd look at NFTs for similar market dynamics. Some big winners but mostly people not making a dime.
In some regards, the ZIRP era ending was needed; companies can't just make money by relying on hype for years, even decades before the piper needs to be paid. But of course it couldn't have ended in a worst time.
Maybe that is why lots of people are struggling more now while the economy numbers say things are better than ever.
-Poor and malnourished member of the common folk.
-Part of the elites, who is set for life anyway and creates art thanks to the ample spare time they have.
I used to be in a band and one major point of contention in our group was whether we could make a living out of this. My opinion was that no, we couldn't.
I have a friend who enjoys moderate success with his band - they're doing historical reconstruction so they're invited to events in the space and, of course, paid. He keeps his day job though. Truth be told in the historical reconstruction field only smiths and tailors can pull off this being their main thing and it's not a given.
* Is the amount of music listened to in a day down? * Is the rate of music creation down? * Given some metric of diversity is music diversity down? * Given some metric of quality is music quality down? * Are there fewer artists per capita / in total? * Has the Gini coefficient really shifted?
I assume that for almost all of these, the answer is actually no. Presumably, technology has made making more higher quality music easier and cheaper than ever, and people are listening to more than ever.
All these professions did not disappear. They have transformed though more to tending and overseeing machines, at an income level below middle class, with a much smaller number of highly-skilled professionals doing the exceptional things which machines don't do too well.
When the technology is good enough for a one person to record an entire album, it's hard to be a specialist musician, like a violinist in an orchestra, or even a guitarist in a band
I suppose the skilled professions that will resist machine replacement for longest time are these which require a lot of custom work and adjusting to unique local circumstances: electricians, plumbers, car mechanics, doctors, hairdressers, maybe construction workers. But they will likely handle mostly special cases, where standard, machine-friendly solutions don't fit well, a bit like modern tailors.
Connect with fans, treat them well and stay creative - and they'll buy your stuff. Often a lot of it.
Rapid release schedule (except the last year or so), inconsistent genre choices, questionable aesthetic choices, not much marketing, and just some generally goofy stuff and it just works. I think part of it is folks just tired of the packaged crap and see it for what it is. Pure authentic stuff.
I haven't read the article yet but I suspected as much that there is not much money in music, not even a livable wage. That's not why I'm doing it though. I have a few tracks in my mind since childhood (and a few more recent ones) that I want to get out. Also it's a fun thing to learn about marketing while I'm at it.
My point: I think that should be enough. Not everything we do has to make enough money.
It's finally time to put that perfect pitch and subconscious OCD style melody generation to use!
spotify in particular cemented a payment structure that disadvantages any “serious” music versus endless repeat pop songs, while also being completely corrupted by conflict of interest from record labels with an ownership stake. now they manufacture their own muzak and steer your playlist to it, draining the last bits of revenue possibility away from these “middle class musicians.”
youtube streamed music for free for years, paying no artists, and it was one of its core growth engines. completely asymmetrical outcome.
the whole thing denigrated musicians, and music itself. hordes of early online young tech professionals making great money at their office jobs poo pooing the concerns of an entire industry which previously enabled some of the most sophisticated artistic endeavors our culture ever attempted.
just dumb. a complete victory of lowbrow values.
baffling someone is writing this article in 2025. at every fork in the road, the path was taken that would give less revenue to the musicians. and ~no one in tech felt it was a problem.
talking about it like there is a revelation or an emerging phenomenon here mystifies, while rubbing salt in the wound.
I know of one songwriter with multiple number 1 hits that was with a large american label for a while ... then moved to another, and the original label kept collecting the royalties when they were no longer contractually allowed to.
Their answer: "So sue us, it'll cost more than you'll get, we can drag this on for years, and you can't get costs awarded, so if we were you we'd just eat the L".
Seems to me that music has an additional challenge which is most revenue channels requires middlemen: streaming infrastructure, merch factories, venues owners, technicians, etc which artist can't/won't replace.
At some point musicians - as product creators - need to have a clear biz model for their enterprise and passion to try it. Not just passion to create, passion to sell.
Throughout history it seems that there has always been an imbalance of musicians that make good money and those that don't. It seems that most musicians did it for free as part of a community/spiritual ceremony, or did it as a part time thing.
The modern issues are related to the technological advancements. The true cause of issue the article talks about is right in the beginning of it - music has never been easier to make and record. Supply and demand?
Literally everyone is an artist, even if their art consists of bad doodles and singing in the shower. Sure, some people are more talented than that, but expecting to make a living with art? Nah...
Notice, how I used "attention" and not "money" or even "listens". Just look at the first and the main goalpost independent artist set for themselves. It's no longer "buy our music" or "come to our show", by now they strive to convince the audience to attempt to listen to their songs.
By this time I consider an artist that's only present in streaming services and lacks a visible way of direct distribution of their music (which includes such services as Bandcamp, for now) either an utterly mismanaged one or, again, a part of the problem†.
The only way for the artist to feel appreciated is building their loyal fan base, but if you don't want to wear the "entertainer" hat (which now equals becoming a circus monkey for the trending social media) this becomes harder and harder for a bunch of reasons:
1. Music is just not as culturally important as it was 50 years ago. 2. Live shows are in decline and dominated by cover/tribute acts. 3. As correctly mentioned in TFA, you're fighting with everything else plus everything that came before you. 4. The world is closing. Visas have always been a curse‡, but nowadays even if I jump through a myriad of hoops and get one, I can't even cross the border to the countries we usually started the tours from in a previous life. 5. The internet feels like a collapsing space too, though it's probably the most controversial opinion of mine.
There's also a problem of NNGC. At least the previous boom (blockchain) promised to make things better in some way (and it did, but underdelivered tenfold), but the current one ("AI") doesn't even do that — there's not even a positive scenario how the life of a common artist becomes better, unless "post-scarcity" truly happens (it won't).
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†: To clarify, this is about modern artists, things are a bit different when we speak about "legacy" acts that jump started their careers in a different era.
‡: Even though in case of EU most artists entering didn't care and used their tourist visas because they did not make any money anyway.
* The Death of the Middle-Class
There I fixed their title
The hollowing out of the middle class, wealth distribution producing more unequal societies where few people amass wealth and more of the (previously just working class but now more and more of the middle class) are pushed out a lower rung of the income/wealth bracket and ultimately completely displaced.
Fundamentally in a healthy economy the money is the blood that circulates around. If you create an economy where most of the wealth is held up by few rich individuals who then use the wealth to buy more assets and produce more wealth it means that other less well off people will get displaced in the society and that means that they will also not be able to afford to participate in the society to buy goods and services simply because they have no financial means to do so.
And to those who immediately go "but the economy isn't zero sum game", yes that's correct. But when the real economy is growing at 1-2% rate and the musks and bezos and other wealthy individuals are growing their wealth at +20% per year that means it effectively is a zero sum game and some people's slice of the pie is ever growing at the cost of everyone else.
But then people say "but the rich people invest". Yes but how much of that is actually active investment in new businesses and how much of that is just investing in asset portfolios, property and other financial instruments?
Also to grow more businesses and start new businesses you need an individual who has financial means to take risk, has an idea, stomach for risk and determination and drive to start business. Many people do not have that.
For the economy to grow new businesses which one is better? 1 person with $1m and 9 with $0 or 10 ppl with 100k each? What are the chances and probabilities in each scenario that the person who has the qualities to start a new business is capable of doing so?
If you want to see the future (especially relevant for US and UK since they're furthest along the way) just look at the economy of Nigeria or India for example. Few rich people, tiny middle class and large swathes of people in poverty.
I used to go to shows that cost $30-80. Now they are hundreds and the biggest artists may cost >$1k. I'm lucky that I make a good living, cause I wouldn't be able to go to most shows otherwise.
I venture that live music has suffered because of it.
Damn, people somehow made art in 10000BC, when everyone was a hunter-gatherer by necessity.
This comment makes the same point, better than I did:
This means that a former musical artist became a Youtube content producer in order to earn a living. This does not illustrate the negative effects of paying musicians to make music.
Admitting that there might be another way and that it might be much better would be admitting the unthinkable cruelty of the status quo.
1. Any of the creative professions have way more applicants than positions so nepotism dominates. It's almost shocking how many nepo babies there are in Hollywood. It infects every level. It could be that some rich person will fund your indie movie as long as you give a major role to their child. It can be family connections to studio decision-makers,. It can be currying favor with Hollywood heavyweights. Whatever. Either way, getting in as a nobody is increasingly difficult;
2. Education. First, you have legacies. Roughly a third of Harvard's undergrad class are legacies ie the children of wealthy donors. That's the real DEI. But also it's the cost. The wealthy can absorb the cost of an elite education.
This is a real issue with medical school. Someone can often graduate with $300-600k in student loan debt. By the time they finish residency they may owe $500k-1M. The wealthy can absorb this. There are a few medical schools now that offer free tuition thanks to some large endowments. Many medical schools try and have people from more diverse economic backgrounds but it's difficult. Not having to worry about money means you caa afford to spend a year doing unpaid research to pad your resume. The free tuition schools seem to have skewed more to students from wealthier backgrounds because they're simply better connected and better able to game getting into such schools;
3. Housing costs specifically and the cost of living generally. 30 years ago if you were trying to make it as a musician in LA you could rent an apartment for $300-400/month. You could live cheaply. You could chase that dream. Now? The average apartment seems to be near or over $2000/month.;
4. The disappearance of third spaces. Higher housing costs mean the higher cost of businesses. If a bar or a coffee shop needs now absorb rent of $200,000/year where once it was $10-20k, that affects what busineses are viable and for those that are, it's an input to the cost of everything. Well, those were performance spaces for up and coming acts. You see this in the UK, for example, where the number of pubs just keeps going down as they sold and converted into apartments. Community spaces just cannot survive with the high cost of property; and
5. The freedom to fail. I saw a clip of Allison Williams recently who acknowledge this. For those that don't know, she was one of the main cast of HBO's Girls. She's the daughter of Brian Williams, a long-time news anchor. Fun fact: the entire main cast of this show were all nepo babies. It cannot be overstated what relieving the fear of becoming homeless can do to your opportunities.
Now some, particularly here, have long pointed to tech as their key to social mobility. That's been true for a long time but I suspect many here are in for a rude shock. We're already seeing it with the layoffs and how many people apply for any given job. AI will make this worse.
And who do you think will get positions in this shirnking pool of opportunities? It'll be the same children of wealthy people. It'll be connections, access to funding and other factors that give you opportunities.
This is a huge problem, and it's due almost entirely to bad government policies rather than "capitalism working as intended".
It's weird to call it dead because I'm not sure it was ever truly alive.
When the state dictates artistic content, that is socialism.