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Comment by cm2012 | Hacker News Reader

cm2012

I don't see why artist should be a special category deserving of its own UBI. Its no more important than any other job.

Art and culture is extremely valuable, but is often not profitable / sustainable. Banking is important to society too, but it's already well compensated!

Being an EMT is incredibly important to society but poorly compensated, why not them?

Both are important, both are unprofitable, both (in my opinion) deserve public funding.

let’s decide the proper compensation for all jobs based on how much ordinary people feel it is noble/valuable and then pay people accordingly.

food commodity trading? idk sounds speculative and ignoble to me, probably don’t need it - more money for the artists!

Strawman.

Some things need funding despite being unprofitable. Not everyone will agree, but I believe art/culture (including often unprofitable forms thereof) are worthwhile, and should thus receive public funding (to some degree). I believe the same about justice, policing, education, research etc.

None of this rules allowing a freeish market to operate where doing so "delivers the goods".

i do not feel that we have a shortage of art and in fact we have much more art than in past years where everyone was forced to do agricultural labor.

art is relatively low on my list of positive externality activities to subsidize, after stuff like ensuring everyone has food to eat, home, etc. at least in the US, we are already running a deficit so we do not even have the money to do this - let alone some broad UBI for artists.

and how do we agree on what jobs are undercompensated? every person will have their own hobbyhorse

Yes, if we are worried about the amount of art we have available then maybe we should focus on making existing art available first (e.g by reforming copyright) instead of wasting money on dubious programs to create more of art that will be locked away.

You have to make an argument on _why_ market forces don't compensate artists fairly. The standard argument is that art is a public good with a free rider problem– a mural might produce value to everyone who looks at it but there is no way to force them to pay for it. That argument fails for many of the things this program is funding: theater, opera and film. All examples of art that is easily excludable.

I think there's a danger in removing art from any kind of market mechanisms because it can lead to some very navel-gazing output that appeals to very few. In the long term, this kind of art would lead to making this kind of UBI unpopular and would undermine the whole thing. Not a lot of taxpayers are going to be on board with paying someone to can their own feces[1] or submerge religious icons in piss[2] for example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist%27s_Shit

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ

Art and culture is extremely valuable. But the kind of art and culture supported by government programs tends to be less so.

What would also be much more valuable than creating art is making that art available to everyone including for the purposes of producing more art. If the art subsidies came with a condition to release the art to the public domain then I would be much more for domain-specific funding.

Yes it is. Culture is important for national identity and international standing.

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