Ireland rolls out basic income scheme for artists
reuters.com
reuters.com
Then there are people who see art only as a rich person's pursuit. It can be, but it doesn't need to be.
I am reminded of Daniel James also known as Gwyrosydd, his bardic name. He was a Welsh language poet, who wrote probably the greatest Welsh language song, Calon Lân (means 'a pure heart'). People throughout Wales sing this song 130 years later. It is a proud continuation of a bardic tradition in Wales going back probably thousands of years. It also encompasses the Welsh culture of choral singing, noted in early recorded history.
Daniel James spent his life slaving away in an ironworks, making crucible steel. John Hughes, who wrote the tune worked in an office there.
I like to imagine what they could have done had they been at leisure to work and perform all day.
Go Ireland, great scheme. I wish we had it over here in the UK.
In an era where working a full time job is not enough to pay the cost of living, arts and culture no longer exist except as hobbies for rich kids. Seattle successfully exterminated their entire arts, music, and culture scene by raising the cost of living sky high.
In Ireland _today_, we are in an era where working as a nurse, paramedic, firefighter, teacher, etc have become unable to pay the cost of living, leaving them to exist only as hobbies for the rich kids who can be subsidised by their parents or immigrant labour willing to be exploited to avoid deportation.
Is health not wealth? Education? Safety? Or does only the arts deserve this subsidisation?
Isn't that a false dichotomy? We can only afford health or the arts?
Ireland already greatly subsidises health, just not to a level that keeps pace with the cost of living. That’s why nurses and doctors are emigrating, and why recruitment and retention are constant crises.
The arts scheme isn’t the problem in isolation, but when the State recognises that market income alone isn’t sufficient for artists to live, but doesn’t apply the same logic to other socially critical professions, it's definitely a questionable policy.
You need to solve the contradiction within the economy in order to make UBI works.
The current way our taxation policy work is to tax labor and capital, which is the basis of our economy, while flinching away from taxing land, which derives much of its value from the surrounding economic activity rather than an owner's effort.
By the way, the UBI is an old idea. In the 19th century, it was known as the Citizen's Dividend.
Nice places to live can't support all the people that want to live there.
Because demand is, for all intents and purposes, insatiable, the dollar value of housing/property isn't based on supply and demand because supply can't practically be increased to affect demand. Instead, the price is related to what a prospective buyer can afford to pay _every month_ and, thus, is related to interest rates. Interest rates go down, prices go up to the point where a prospective buyer's mortgage payment would be the same.
People who bring up the (un)affordability of housing are never talking about Oklahoma, they're talking about the Bay Area, Southern California, New York City, Seattle, Portland, etc. All places that are so desirable, they can't practically support everyone that wants to live there.
I can't figure out how to make the math make sense even if I were to build a house in the middle of nowhere. Time and materials is the real killer.
Some day, when AI eliminates software development as a career, maybe you will be able to hire those people to build you houses for next to nothing, but right now I don't think it matters where or how many you build. The only way the average Joe is going to be able to afford one — at least until population decline fixes the problem naturally — is for someone else to take a huge loss on construction. And, well, who is going to line up to do that?
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/3024-N-Vermont-Ave-Oklaho...
No need to build new, a plethora of affordable homes are available.
Except it is not clear who can afford new construction either. It is even more expensive.
I explained earlier why I don't think it would. The places with a housing "shortages" are the places where everyone wants to live. Those places would have to build an impossible number of houses to affect demand.
You have people saying they can't afford housing and then, when you show them they can, they say, "not there..."
If houses were able to be built freely then everyone would be able to build a house... Except, if you can't afford a used house, you most definitely cannot afford a new one. As before, time and materials are the real killer. The used housing market is merely a reflection of the cost to build new. Same reason used cars have risen so high in price in recent years: Because new cars have even higher prices.
> You have people saying they can't afford housing and then, when you show them they can, they say, "not there..."
The trouble is that you confuse affordability with sticker price. I technically could live in that house for six months before I have to return back to my home country, but I could not legally work during that time. It is far more affordable to pay significantly higher prices in my country for a house and work all year long. The price of that house is low, but the cost is very high.
The places everyone wants to live are the places everyone wants to live because they are the most affordable places to live. If it were cheaper to move somewhere else, the people would have moved there already. Humans love to chase a good deal and carve out an advantage for themselves. However, a low price doesn't mean cheaper.
The majority of the cost of a home in places with shortages is the land, not the home.
https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1314...
You're right: The cost of new construction anchors the used market. Used housing is so expensive because new housing is even more expensive. If new houses were cheaper I, like many others, would have already have built one and my current home would be up for grabs at a lower price than I'd expect in the current reality. However, that's repeating what was already said.
What part of your idea was supposed to stop that happening and why didn't it work?
We could tax it and pay some of the money to artists?
The part where people see their money burning away paying maintenance and tax on deteriorating assets.
Why are people holding assets unused?
Because they don't believe that the city will allow sufficient development to allow them to purchase like-assets in the future if they chose to reinvest and the carrying cost is minimal because council taxes are trivial relative to the value of the asset. If my research is correct, Kensington council taxes are under 10k USD per year.
Baby steps. Everyone deserves it, but getting there in one step is politically impossible almost everywhere in the world. Nobody’s saying only the arts deserve subsidies. It’s just easier to justify. But if we want everyone to have basic income, we need to applaud whenever it happens, even if it’s a small subset, and argue they deserve it and that we should have more of it. Complaining about the unfairness of artists being subsidized demonstrates and adds to the political difficultly. If we accept that it’s unfair for a subset, then we might never get basic income since the rich don’t need it and many don’t want it.
It definitely isn't. In fact this is so polarising that I wonder if it's an attempt to poison the concept of basic income for decades to come.
Following the announcement of Budget 2026 last October, I think this expenditure came into sharp focus, as the budget was considered to be almost hostile to workers and families, and anecdotally I think it has become more controversial since.
That said, it is not unpopular, just polarising.
The cohorts at each pole don't have to be equal size, and for now, there are definitely more in favour than against in Ireland.
Far more in favor than against completely supports my speculation that basic income for artists is easier to publicly justify than basic income for all. You argued sharply with that, but have so far provided only evidence in support of what I said. I would love to hear why, exactly, you claimed this issue would somehow poison the idea of basic income, and why you don’t agree with the idea of getting it approved for small groups in stages.
I don’t know what you mean at all, why is this “so polarizing”? A lot of the art world already runs on subsidies, and it’s well known that it’s more difficult to make a living as an artist than your examples of jobs that come with steady pay, even if it’s low. Solo artists don’t get any steady income at all, and many have to take other jobs in order to support their art work. The general public where I live (in the US) is absolutely more willing to fund the arts than to fund generally low paying steady-income jobs, especially steady-income jobs that are already funded via taxes like teachers and firefighters. This is why I claim it’s easier to justify subsidizing artists. What is the reason you claim it’s not easier to justify, and where is the evidence your claim is true?
It’s not much of a life but the same still stands in many cities.
If you go to Liverpool (which significantly punches for musical history), it’s actually manageable on 20hr/weeek minimum wage.
You’re not talking sustaining a family or anything, but that life has been gone for 40 years at this point.
[1]https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/music/that-magic-...
effective tax rates
0% ... not realistic outside very unique circumstances. 25% ... feels fair to me. 33% ... still fair but yeah 1 out of every 3 days worked you start to feel that. 50% ... the border of fair and unfair. if i keep less than half of what i make, that feeling of fairness wears thin.
Now, when you are near that border of fair and unfair and then you see John Q Artist getting his whole list comped using tax money that pushes the somewhat fair into unfair territory real fast.
Now, we already have situations similar to this in most countries either from subsidies, gov't spending you don't agree with, corruption, waste, etc.
All of that should be reduced but when you see your neighbor living free while you slave away you feel that differently.
For select megacorps that have the luxury of being in a business that lets them structure themselves that way, sure.
For the laboring peasantry it's a very different story (though the actual rates vary, this goes for most "tax havens"). Ireland in particular has a high VAT so if you spend a lot of your income on consumption (which most individuals do) you will get very screwed by that.
> if i keep less than half of what i make, that feeling of fairness wears thin.
How fairly you made that money in the first place and what you get in return in the form of government services makes all the difference.
I propose allocating upfront the work, so that those who disagree don't have to contribute into the "done" part of those who allocate it in a weird way.
Ah the good old "if you're homeless just buy a house" argument, only this time coming from the mentality of a statist.
You want to unilaterally decide that you don't want to pay much tax on income, billionaires decide that they don't want to pay much tax on capital gains, yet both of you want to continue living in a society where you can buy cheap bread baked from flour milled from wheat grown on subsidized farms, heavily reliant on public infrastructure, and you want to drink clean water and drive on public roads, all of which is paid for through taxes that you want to opt out of, and somehow you don't see a problem with that?
You can't pick and choose parts of society that benefit you and opt out of your duties, that's not how society works. All of those parts that you don't see value in are essential to someone else.
> You can't pick and choose parts of society that benefit you and opt out of your duties, that's not how society works.
of course I can, actually the more money I have the more options to exercise this ability are available to me. And there are no inherent duties to benefit someone you're not choosing to help, unless your society is cattle.
Probably nothing.
The idle rich and trust fund kids aren’t exactly know for producing, well, anything of value, really.
Getting paid to sit around all day and do fuck-all isn’t exactly character building.
I reckon the 20 years as an iron puddler he had done by then had built his character already.
Surely no one would intentionally suggest we pay people to sit around with the hope they produce something anyone will be bothered to read (or whatever) in 2000 years.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Independent_scientist... - "An independent scientist (formerly called a gentlemen scientist) is a scientist with a private income who can pursue scientific study independently as they wish without excessive external financial pressures."
Including: Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin (Evolution), Ben Franklin, Robert Boyle (Boyle's gas law), Oliver Heaviside (electromagnetic theory, co-axial cables), Alexander von Humboldt (established modern Geography), Thomas Jefferson, Leopold Kronecker, Alessandro Volta (voltaic pile battery)
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist - "Self-funded scientists practiced more commonly from the Renaissance until the late 19th century, including the Victorian era, especially in England, before large-scale government and corporate funding was available. Many early fellows of the Royal Society in London were independent scientists. "
Including "Charles Babbage, Henry Cavendish (discovered Hydrogen), Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Thomas Young (Young's modulus of elasticity, eyeball focusing), Joseph Priestly (discovered oxygen)
Rene Decartes "arrived in La Haye in 1623, selling all of his property to invest in bonds, which provided a comfortable income for the rest of his life."
And basically any tenured professor paid to do whatever interests them, or academic or researcher, especially mathemticians, hired and paid for blue sky research, all the places like Bell Labs that HN loves.
So you’re kind of refuting something I didn’t say.
It's a bad scheme, it divide's your population into people who have to create "wealth", and people who create "art".
Yes creating art (or preserving rare potatoes[1]) should be supported by your government if it's not survivable in a capitalistic society, however having different rights because of your occupation is not better then the middle ages.
So you do agree that art should be supported by government I see, so how would you do it?
That's what i meant with the potatoes, the government pays for the field with the rare potatoes, and the standardized potatoes make wealth.
>So you do agree that art should be supported by government I see, so how would you do it?
With free housing (art community's), tax free stuff (for small to medium sales etc) like it's done today. And to be honest i think 99.5% of artist dont do a full-time-art-job, most of them do other stuff too...and that's good.
Is my friend who plays the didgeridoo in his free time now an artist if he declares it's suddenly his full-time occupation?
One example, why exclude people like Geo-scientists who sometimes dont even get any money (except they work for big-oil or the state).
On a base your are right, not everything that's good for societies is compatible within a capitalistic system. But this is just a complete wrong step.
Giving housing forces people to live in certain places. What if you are a traveling musician, you might be better off with a van.
It is like the Victorian view of giving charity. 'Don't give them money, give them food', like the people don't know what they need.
Art community's are most always self managing, i would argue finding out who makes art is much more complicated.
>Giving housing forces people to live in certain places.
No one is forced to take free housing or being an artist, if you want something for free you have to play by rules.
>like the people don't know what they need
True, but why are people who are artist different from anyone else, that's my critique. Why is creating art more important then preserving art, being a scientist, a rare-potato-farmer, a retro-game-preserver...or a small town politician?
I don't think it is helpful to frame it in terms of, 'sure they should get it, but what about other people doing public good? Since the others can't get it, the artists shouldn't'. How about saying, 'this is a great start, how do we get a broader scheme for other philanthropic causes'?
I think it's the only logical way, same right for everyone, occupation is not a factor for additional rights.
> 'this is a great start,
And the end...sadly.
Is this really a risk, given UBI is generally minimal? Anyone who wants to live on it full-time to support their art, whatever it may be, is welcome to it. It's not like they're sitting back and getting rich, here.
> One example, why exclude people like Geo-scientists who sometimes dont even get any money (except they work for big-oil or the state).
Because "UBI for everyone who deserves it" is a much harder, bigger step, and fighting against small wins because they don't include literally every single outlier case you can think of is absurdly non-productive, not to mention that it's a vacuous counter-argument.
the wealth in this case isn't monetary, it's material production, the productive work of people who create material objects, including your food and shelter. If it was about monetary stuff the government would just print the artists whatever amount of money they need. But that money has to be spent to buy from those who produce the stuff the artists need to live. Who's sponsoring the wealth producers?
I think it should go a lot further than it does but it seems unambiguously positive even by your own framing.
most people don't "create wealth". They're forced to serve up half of their awake time to someone that is "wealthy", most likely through inheritance.
>We could just tax the hell out of the rich
Then they leave your country...however if someone could make it international....
But lest we forget, all this wealth is still protected by people with guns. These days, those people normally work for the state rather than directly for the wealthy, but the latter can also leverage their wealth to steer politics such that the state does violence on their behalf to protect their property as needed.
It's the same as cities/governments spending on free public basketball courts/tennis courts/running tracks. I come from a country with none of those things, and the difference that makes on the average fitness/skill level of the population is massive compared to places where those things exist.
Both basic income, and public sporting infrastructure have a significant (but not unreasonable) upfront cost, but the payoff in even 2 years time will be massive. Provided the economics check out, there's no reason to not give it a shot.
Living in a one room dwelling, with a shared bathroom is unpleasant, but safe, warm, and has a bed. Having enough for basic food, but no luxuries.
My point is, welfare(not disability, welfare) should sustain. Keep safe. Alive. Free from elements. But absolutely be something a normal person wants to escape from.
And there will always be those happy with the above, and .. well, OK.
But whether artist or whomever, basic living in hard times should be there for you.
Why? We are well beyond the scarcity that would require this.
The person in my description would be housed, fed, safe. To this you say, we're well beyond the scarcity that would require this.
Believe it or not, people still work to produce almost everything. While aided with machinery, farmers are human beings and work. People actually physically build houses. Everything that you own, is assembled or manufactured from components and parts that come from human labour.
If someone is going to live off the backs of the work, and effort of other human beings, then certainly they should not live in luxury. They should, in fact, feel as if they are putting other people out, which in fact they are.
I've already expressed a situation where I want nobody to starve. Where I want nobody to not have a roof over their head, if they're having a difficult time, where I want them to be safe.
This is an extremely generous, extremely kind, extremely compassionate thing for me, or anyone else to do. To give some of my daily effort to help others, is laudable.
To this you say, why don't you give more? To this you say, it's not enough to be housed, but why doesn't somebody get a free large screen TV too? To this you say, why doesn't somebody get more than just the basic necessities? Can't they have steak, a large home, all, provided by the efforts of others?
Do you not realize how completely selfish that is? It's completely out of touch with the whole dynamic of people working to produce goods, and other people just getting those goods without effort.
The vast majority of our wealth is already stolen by megalomaniacs so they can buy big useless yachts. I'd give up twice as much if it meant the local crackhead got not just a house, but a PS5. At least the crackhead is funny, and when my dog got his head stuck in my fence, the crackhead got him out.
You specifically said you didn't want them to be comfortable... Which means you wish suffering upon someone you don't know. Just because you think it's unfair that you work and they don't? Why focus on the downtrodden then, rather than the generationally wealthy vultures?
I just gave them life, vs death. I just gave a little of myself, so they don't starve, aren't going to freeze to death, and are safe. Yes, I don't want them comfortable. You think this means I wish suffering, when I just helped them?
Absurdly selfish. "Why not give more!! How dare you only prevent starvation, giving housing, and ensure safety!! What's wrong with you!", you say?!
Blathering on about wealth and the rich is an absurd tact to take. We're talking about the fact that a person toiling every day, is giving to another who isn't. No hand wavy gibberish, will change that the house was built be a human being, one that isn't wealthy, and is paying a portion of their daily work (it's called taxes) to house someone.
If you want to donate your own effort and work to help people beyond that, no one is stopping you. But don't walk around complaining to others that giving basic necessities aren't enough.
You need to get your head on straight.
If you want to discuss the economic system and the rich, that's an entirely different conversation. Discussing the working person's need to house those that aren't working?
Keep that real.
It's the same conversation. The only reason the burden falls upon us at all is because the tax system is fundamentally broken. No reasonably organized resource allocation algorithm would allow so many people to hoard so much of our wealth. If our resources were allocated more efficiently, it wouldn't just be the homeless that the state could house comfortably, it would be all of us. After all, Singapore manages it, and they also have a mostly broken tax system, just slightly less broken than other places.
Preventing a stranger's death from starvation and exposure has been a bare minimum for human decency in many cultures for thousands of years. You've read about it in the Greek and Roman stories you had to read in school, where a god shows up disguised as a beggar. Native Americans had similar stories, so did Peloponnesians, Chinese, areas in Africa, northern Europe... It's a modern degeneration of our human values that this is considered such a big ask. We used to accept that we're responsible for each other's well being.
To be fair, the majority has been conditioned in thinking that only money should be your purpose, that's literally how capitalism works, even arts now is a product that need to be sold to the highest bidder, or manufactured in the millions to be sold.
Am I eligible if I doodle on a piece of paper once in a while? What about if I decided to expose a urinal? Or paint a can of soup?
if your artistic practice is truly so abstract that you can't prove labor by any material means then you probably just won't get subsidized for it.
Your either don't understand or don't want to understand what people are commenting about here. Of course nobody thinks that only money has value. If only money had value, why would anybody exchange money for, say, a bread?
What many people are wondering about, is whether the value of the money paid by tax payers to artists, equals the value of what they give to the tax payers in return. Because if it would be equal, then one might wonder why they apparently are not able to sell their art for the same amount of money.
The same way it solves all problems: poorly, yet better and more fairly than corporations do.
> Why can’t a private organization replicate that?
Private organizations are driven by profit motive. Profit motive is usually in a negative correlation with fair results in these sorts of situations. If you mean a church or non profit, then, because those don't represent a region of people, and there's no petition mechanism to change their behavior if they're bad. "We'll stop giving them money" great so you're back to my original point then: profit motive.
> How was art produced previously without the existence of these programs?
Hard to say, but there sure is a lot of it, from as long ago as ten thousand years, so personally I think it's safe to say there were lots of reasons beyond either an S Corp or 501(c) buying popular art, or a liberal democracy funding it.
Clearly the artists somehow managed to convince government to support the scheme, why can’t the same people form a non—profit and convince ordinary members of the public to support the same scheme in a non-profit structure?
That way we have a smaller government, lower taxes, and the people who care can directly spend their money on addressing this problem - rather than have their money going to taxes where it might be spent somewhere they don’t agree with!
Nobody has to argue about money being spent on things they don’t care about. Everybody is happy.
I assumed that was an angle people were going for: charities and non profits rather than governments.
I'm not convinced the artist fund happened because artists were good lobbyists with transferrable sales skills, just socket in either Big Government, Big Church, or Big Nonprofit and they'll happily churn away art. Seems it's more a government initiative, sourced by the public out of a desire for more art, or to live in a society where artists can focus on making arts.
Personally I thought the whole point of improving automation and increasing productivity was so that we could all just hang out and paint or make music or whatever.
> That way we have a smaller government, lower taxes, and the people who care can directly spend their money on addressing this problem - rather than have their money going to taxes where it might be spent somewhere they don’t agree with!
It doesn't make sense to only privatize art, then, because all things that taxes are spent on are things some people don't care about. What you're arguing for is a total privatization of everything, and functionally the elimination of government (since some people won't want their taxes to go to, for example, the police or military or even the president's burger budget). So, an anarcho-capitalist argument.
Some people would be very happy in that world. Most wouldn't.
If you specifically want to single out art and ok with, idk, roads and fire departments being funded by taxes, then that just means you disagree with your neighbor about the kind of society you want to live in, since the only way to build a society based on your values in a liberal democracy is through government - private markets are concerned only with profitability, which is often negatively correlated with having a fair and comfortable society.
Is this passive aggressive insult really necessary?
> Because we use taxes as a process to crowdsource funding more effectively
I’m sure you will agree that not everything that everybody wants can get funded. The debate here is how to draw the line.
I think critical shared physical infrastructure occupying a limited valuable resource is nothing like art, so I’m struggling to follow your argument.
I think simplistic cliche's deserve derision - if you don't like that, perhaps don't use them? It's hardly a shot at the writer to suggest that what he wrote is mediocre.
> I’m sure you will agree that not everything that everybody wants can get funded. The debate here is how to draw the line.
No, your argument was that I should fund things myself directly. I pointed out that that's an inane and boring argument. If you want to debate other things, then do that in the first place.
> so I’m struggling to follow your argument.
It might help if you re-read your own arguments first, instead of trying to make them into new ones. Things people want funded by the government get funded when they vote for them to get funded either directly or via representatives - if you don't like those things, there is a clear way to change the algebra. In no case is suggesting people just like, "pay some extra taxes, man" a useful are additive observation.
Effectively? It doesn't seem to me like most western governments allocate this funding "effectively" at all. How do we increase the accountability?
Based on what specific metric? How ought it be allocated? I assume this isn't just some ideological whining.
Better to amortize the cost across the population and have public works. Like we do for infrastructure. Seems to work just fine.
This is why hyper privatization will fail: it's impossible to separate out all the intricately intertwined systems in such a way that people are throwing pennies in a million directions to pay exactly enough to each stakeholder involved in the functioning of their society.
"The headline finding from this social CBA is that for every €1 of public money invested in the pilot, society received €1.39 in return"
This came about as a mixture of greater economic activity from participants, cultural impacts that saw public-facing artist activities increase, and improvements to wellbeing of participants that reduced their requirement for psychological interventions by the state. The state also predicts that the further roll-out of this program will benefit consumers with lower prices for artistic works, as there will be more supply overall.
The scheme has been quite popular here in Ireland. Given the history of Ireland when it comes to art (both in the sense of spoken and written word, and in other mediums), it makes sense to introduce a scheme like this to safeguard and uplift those who produce art.
[1] https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-culture-communications-a...
> "The headline finding from this social CBA is that for every €1 of public money invested in the pilot, society received €1.39 in return"
Okay, so if you read the CBA, the net fiscal cost of the pilot was:
* Gross pilot cost (2021–2025): ~€114 MM
* Tax revenue: ~€36 MM
* Social protection savings: ~€6.5 MM
* Net fiscal cost: ~€72 MM
So for every €1 of public money invested in the pilot, society received 37¢ in fiscal return. So it's an unambiguous fiscal cost, a net loss.
Of the "Total monetised benefits", €80 MM of the benefit was in "wellbeing gains", as measured by the WELLBY test, which is calculated based on a single survey question:
> “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays, where 0 is "not at all satisfied" and 10 is "completely satisfied"?
The €80 MM in "wellbeing gains", which is the sole decided of whether this pilot was a net positive or a net negative to society, is because on average, the 2,000 pilot scheme participants had a very approximate 0.7–1.1 increase in score when asked the above question during the pilot as compared to before the pilot. Each 1 point is deemed to be worth €15,340.
That's it. There's no economic return - it's a proven economic cost. There's no proven social benefit. No demonstrated effect on art prices or availability.
The pilot was successful - if you consider it to have been - solely because the artists who received payments as part of the pilot had an improvement in Wellby satisfaction score when they were asked via survey. If you remove this factor, the pilot was an abject failure.
You know what would have been a worthwhile use of that €114 MM? Improving the pay and conditions of our naval personnel. That way, the nation might now be able to put more than one patrol boat out to sea at a time.
From where I'm sitting, this is theft, its forced wealth redistribution, from people that are potentially already struggling,to people that choose to slum it as artists. Its not even means tested, this really will result in money transferring from those on the edge of poverty to rich art school kids.
There's currently 16,000 homeless / at risk people in Ireland, including 5000 children [0]. I can think of at least one better use for that money.
[0] https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/social-affairs/2025/11/28...
In this comment society seems to mean "the government, and its tax revenue profit/loss statement"
In the previous comment society seems to be construed more broadly and encompass both non-economic activity and economic activity outside the collection and disbursement of tax funds.
No, that's not correct. I specifically separated the pure economic impact from the society impact, but the only societal impact used to quantify the success of the pilot scheme is that the people paid a basic income by the scheme had higher life satisfaction as measured by a single survey question.
That is the basis used by Government to claim that it's a social benefit.
Personally, I support the arts and I think that culture, health, housing accessibility, safety, fitness, happiness, and companionship are all better measures of a society than GDP or other fiscal metrics.
Right now, we have a health, housing, and social crises desperate for resources - resources that are allocated exclusively through Euro budgets. This pilot scheme has not demonstrated any cultural or social impact at all. Only the aforementioned increase in recipient satisfaction.
Meanwhile people in dire situations face multi-year waits for operations, or dying of a treatable stroke/MI due to a lack of ambulances, or death by suicide as the mental health services are overwhelmed.
Is the WELLBY score of these artists more important the WELLBY score of parents awaiting their kid's operation for the second or third spring? Or burying their children? Or raising them in hotel rooms?
Ireland is only economically successful. We are failing our citizenry abysmally outside of fiscal terms and basic income for artists should be allocated while hundreds of more pressing needs are left unmet.
Some art, like classical music composition, is and has been propped up by grants and wealthy donors since forever.
Whether that’s a good allocation of resources is of course entirely subjective :)
"Public goods" like parks, museums, bridges, roadways, transit, nature preserves, community spaces, and public safety services produce both direct value to their immediate users as well as substantial diffuse value to their community. Direct value can be captured by user fees, tolls, subscriptions, etc but capturing diffuse value is challenging. A park raises surrounding property values even for people who do not visit the park. Good transportation infrastructure increases the value of surrounding land and and productivity per capita even for nonusers. Relying solely on user fees may force some of these entities to close or fall into disrepair, thereby reducing overall value by substantially more than it would have cost to maintain them. And in some cases shifting the cost burden to direct users substantially lowers the diffuse value, for example back when fire fighting companies would let houses burn unless their owners paid them, ultimately resulting in more overall community fire damage.
In these cases, subsidizing these public services with taxes (optimally Georgist land-value taxes) is an economically rational decision.
One could plausibly argue that artists similarly produce diffuse value e.g., raising the profile of their nation or culture, making their neighborhood a more desirable place for people with money. Not only do artists typically struggle to collect a share of this diffuse value, as renters the very value they create often ends up pricing out of their community. I could imagine cases where it is a net benefit for a government to subsidize such entities if such subsidy is less than the fraction of the diffuse benefit that ends up being collected by taxes.
I have no insight as to whether this scheme in particular is net positive, please see sibling posts for that. I'm just explaining that such arrangements are both economically rational and extremely common in high-functioning societies.
Expect something? Yes. Enforce it? Not sure for the first tranche, but make it a prerequisite for continued funding.
One big obstacle is, of course, how to define what to expect from each artist. For example, you can't expect the same level of output from sculptors and musicians. Another big obstacle is obviously the expected quality of output.
I don't pretend to know the solutions to either of those obstacles, but they should be surmountable [1]. I think it's fair to expect some output in exchange for funding, but it doesn't have to be a high expectation.
Personally, I like the idea of hiring artists as full-time with particular projects in mind [2], but intentionally leaving ~50% of their time to personal projects.
[1] Perhaps artist communities themselves could discuss ways to make this exchange work for all parties.
[2] Murals, restorations, beautification of public spaces, etc.
The expectation doesn't have to be too specific or unrealistic. If you agree on some common ground [2], everything else can be fair game for the artist.
Your analogy with the bridge would apply if art also had a minimum viable version. Collapsed to its functional requirements, you could say that visual art is something to look at. But I doubt either party, especially the funding body or the public, would be happy without inserting some quality requirements (i.e., what makes something nice to look at).
Many artists do commissions, so you can see this as a commission with deliberately underspecified requirements.
[1] I won't get into the disagreements between the Pope and Michelangelo, and it's certainly not an example of a good contract, but we can assume that both parties were somewhat satisfied in the end.
[2] For example, both parties need to like it. Or the patron doesn't have to like it, but it needs to appeal to some public audience.
For something like this I think a citizens assembly[1] may work best. Take all artists receiving funding and are NOT up for renewal. Select a number of them randomly to form the assembly. This assembly then reviews submissions from artists up for renewal and determines if they meet a minimum standard for funding to be renewed.
My understanding is that the Irish scheme doesn't force any specific work for the three year period, though I'd expect any artist who takes a three year, ~$60k grant and uses it to do literally nothing may find it hard get a grant in the future, potentially ending their art career. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if a few recipients end up doing that, in which case it's an economic question as to whether the net loss from such freeloaders is more or less than the cost of the bureaucracy necessary to prevent them.
Of course the more fundamental question is whether the whole scheme is even worthwhile. Clearly the Irish government believes that their trial in 2022 demonstrated a positive financial return, but my guess it that it will take decades before we can truly answer this question.
From reading your comment I think this observation applies to your own understanding, not the gp's.
> whether the value of the money paid by tax payers to artists, equals the value of what they give to the tax payers in return. [...] one might wonder why they apparently are not able to sell their art for the same amount of money.
You might not see it but this is effectively equivalent to thinking only money has value, because you're describing a system whereby value is defined by money. Your dichotomy assumes anything that cannot be sold has no value, & anything that is sold is only as valuable as its price. The emergent conclusion from that formula is that only money has value.
It's worth noting that it also follows from this that value is defined by people with purchasing power. If for example the only cohort who value any given piece of art cannot afford to financially support the artist creating said art, not only is the art & the artist's work without value, but by extension so too are the perspectives, autonomy & - ultimately - the lives of that cohort without value.
> Money is just the measure of value
Money is the measure of market value. If you believe it's the measure if inherent value, you believe anything outside of the market has no value. E.g. that human lives have no value outside of waged labour (or heck, even slavery).
The point here is the monetary value is a model of value, not the definition of it. If you are defining an item's value by it's market price, then you believe what the gp was describing: that "only money has value" (since it defines all value).
Because the skills and effort needed to market and sell your art to an audience are not equal to the skills and effort needed to produce good art [1].
I agree that there could be other complementary or better solutions compared to this scheme. But as long as the above premise is true, not every good artist will want or be able to sell well.
[1] However you define this. Supposedly, Van Gogh was a lousy salesman, but a good artist.
> equals the value of what they give to the tax payers in return
This seems incredibly shortsighted.
Instead, focus on taxing scarce resources, especially since we cannot make more of it. If it's natural resources coming out of the grounds such as minerals and oil, it becomes a severance tax.
If we're talking about occupying land, then it's a Land Value Tax.
You could also tax negative externalities like pollution or traffic congestion.This is known as a Piguovian tax.
It's easy to channel indignation toward those people and not, say, their corporate masters that seem to hold everyone's strings.
Whereas with taxes, if you don't like them, you can elect a different politician. Look at the Americans, they do it all the time, their tax rates go all over the place.
I want roads, libraries, firetrucks, and for my poop to vanish into oblivion when I pull the toilet handle. I don't really want my money to buy my boss a new car.
Not necessarily as easily as you can vote for a different politician, especially since you're restricted by your ability to change locations (family, property, heritage ties), or industries. And in this day and age changing employer very well may not at all mean you're changing who's extracting your value or how much.
Government meanwhile, at least in a liberal democracy, is fundamentally designed to be petionable and changeable. Thus "we the people." Of course I would agree that this system has been utterly corrupted by neoliberalism and corruption ("lobbying"), but I'm talking at a theoretical level here.
Voting is easy. Of course that doesn't actually do anything, you're entirely held hostage by the 51%. Unlike switching jobs, which is entirely consensual and determined by you. If you dislike the arrangement you made with your boss you are more than welcome to leave at any moment.
If I dislike the arrangement made by 51% of people my only option is to leave - an option that I have to pay exit taxes in order to exercise.
Yes, we live in society. You're correct, society has in many ways enslaved you, mostly in ways you aren't aware.
The language you speak, the values you hold, the way you see the world and the people in it, your bone density coming out of childhood, your literacy rate, your vaccination schedule, your perception of normalcy, and so much more, were determined for you when you were born.
Some of these things you can adjust after the fact - learn new languages, adjust your values, learn to read, but you'll then forever be the "native xyz speaker that learned abc," or, "former Christian, now Zoroastrianist" or whatever. You can't really ever leave behind the impact a society had on you.
Everything is deeply interconnected. So this idea that 51% of people are holding you hostage but somehow if you can change jobs then the corporate world is different is fallacious. First, that same 51% must also have determined the legal business environment you're operating in, right? Second, you're enslaved to a much smaller proportion, 1%, the capital holders who hold the majority of the power in a neoliberal democracy through lobbying. They're the reason it's getting more and more difficult for you to engage in collective bargaining with your colleagues, a far more effective strategy to change how much profit is skimmed off your labor than changing jobs.
You think you're enslaved to the 51%? What about your "market rate?" They call it a "labor market," after all, so changing jobs just means getting paid roughly the same amount by someone else, which means the same profit margin being extracted. Unless you think a 10% raise is a meaningful impact when the value extracted from your labor could be as high as 500% or higher, depending on industry and profession?
Just because companies don't collude in writing doesn't mean they aren't colluding when it comes to the topic of our discussion. All are competing to extract more value from your labor, not to try to win you to their side so as to get the happiest workers (barring extreme outliers such as Valve). They don't call it a "race to the bottom" for nothing. The profit motive is a shared fundamental value of all these companies, job hunt all you want, it's the same as changing churches but not the religion, in the end the result will be mostly the same. Works even better as a metaphor if you're Catholic, since in the end the collection tray money always goes to the same place in Italy regardless of the church you attend.
Furthermore, if you're a chemical engineer working in oil and gas, the margin on the profit of your labor is always spent on the same lobbyists who influence your government to let the same 5 companies devastate your natural environment for their profit. The CEO and board is made up of the former or current executive team of other oil and gas companies. If you're a software engineer, that margin is used to get a return on investment for the same 20 something investment firms and accelerators kicking startups back and forth between them.
Now, for petitioning: see if you can convince Bain to stop putting the pressure on your boss to seek hockey stick growth, instead targeting a sustainable gentle linear that'll pay off their investment a few years later, just not 1000x. See if you can even get the phone number of someone there from your boss. Try to convince your boss. Or quit and go work for some other company - see if you can find one Bain hasn't invested in, or a drop in replacement for same with the exact same goals.
If you dislike the way the government is working, you have many options beyond leaving: you can walk into the office of your congressperson, or make a phone call, or attend a town hall meeting (for various levels of government). You can, as mentioned, vote. If you feel held hostage by 51%, you can go try to convince other people on the other side to your way of thinking - much easier than convincing your boss, in my personal experience! You're not even held hostage by 51% anyway, more like 30%, so really you can be more effective by convincing people who already agree with you to actually get out and vote; this is what canvassers do, not try to convince opposition to vote for their candidate, but rather to convince amicable voters to make it to the polls, and help them plan how to do so.
Tax is an easy enemy to pick because you see a number on your tax statement at the end of the year of exactly how much money you gave to the government that year. If you want, you can easily then download a pdf of the budget and see how they spent it. That's the most transparent visibility you'll ever see for a dollar that leaves your pocket - you'll see who collected it, who determined how much should be collected, how it was divided to be spent on exactly what, who divided it that way, and when it gets spent, exactly to whom it finally ended up, and usually how they spent it (such as a construction company for a public works project having strict reporting requirements), and who decided to choose that person too!
Your boss gives you a paycheck and if you're lucky might tell you a little something of the company finances - startups are an outlier here, most people get 0 visibility or insight. If the company is public, you get a little more insight, but no more than anyone else, and it's not as transparent as how your taxes are spent.
Something tells me that if at the end of the year everyone got a form from their employers demonstrating the dollar value extracted from their labor, minus their salary, people wouldn't blink an eye at taxes.
Capital owners aren't the only ones taking a risk, laborers do as well. Why is it that only capital risk is considered?
SBA loans are given at the whim of a bank, who is looking for a very strong guarantee of return on investment. It can also come with terms that restrict business behaviors - this is HN, just imagine Bain capital gave you ten million dollars, do you then get to run your business in a way that targets a healthy, sustainable profit margin with albeit flat growth line?
Anyway that's boring and been done before. Surely after ~300 years of plain Jane capitalism we can start playing with more exotic modes of organization? Why do only the banks get to invent new financial instruments to destroy markets with?
Are you against all taxation?
Or is it more of have to apply to be subsidized and the government chooses what art is worth subsidizing, which won’t result in good art, more just government building lobby bad art.
Part of being an artist (at least it used to be) is struggle.
I wonder how far are we from a song that is entirely generated by AI and becomes as loved as a song created by a human, and is still sung/played by people decades later? It feels weird to even think about it.
If AI does get as good as humans at creating art (I think it might), what happens then? Will human generated art be still as respected/valuable? Will humans even bother creating art at that stage?
On the topic of basic income - people seem to have strong opinions on both sides. I guess time will tell, but there isn't anything wrong in experimenting, at minimum. To those who strongly oppose UBI - don't we already give bailouts, huge tax breaks, subsidies to entire industries etc, to the extent of rewarding bad behavior (criminal behavior even) - like the one that caused 2008 crash? Why is corporate handouts okay but not UBI?
I would hope that humans would always value human generated art, but these days it seems that many businessmen and AI bros do not. Perhaps they are not human.
Humans need basic income (or at least resources) and to have culturally valuable work to do. Art and craft esp as a form of human expression seems like we should ASSUME that humans want to do this, that we as a society value the human energy that goes into it.
I am not trying to turn all threads into AI debate, but AI threat to art is a legit concern. If AI mass produces art at comparable quality level to humans, it would be near impossible for humans to compete for other humans' attention. If nobody sees my art, would I still make art? Maybe some humans will, because creating art makes them happy and they don't care if anyone sees their art or not. But many humans will give up
I hope one day you are able to acknowledge all the people in this world that live for purpose instead of for making Lumberg’s stock go up half a point.
Another question is would Daniel James work have been as good if he wasn't working in an ironworks? In the 1800s most of the great literature was written by normal guys writing on the side, they need that experience to make great art. Heart of Darkness is never going to be written by an academic. Hemmingway doesn't write anything without his experiences in Italy, Spain and France in WWI, Civil War and WWII, if he was just a beat reporter forever, all of his great inspirations don't amount to much. Tolstoy and Doestoyevsky are notable exceptions.
Here's a non-exhaustive list of eligible types:
https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-culture-communications-a...
As for the second question ("would Daniel James work have been as good if he wasn't working in an ironworks"), well, life and art really are too varied to draw the kind of conclusions the following comment implies.
"Dad why are you working your hands off? Well... the government decided to pay people to "make art" instead of working. How come? Well... nope I have no fucking idea"
They don't care about the art, only the clout it brings them in terms of hoarding a limited thing people value.
Art is a medium that is used to convey and stir emotion in the viewer. It's not currency to anyone but shallow fools.
The only person I know getting this money was already semi-retired after selling their house in London and retiring to the Irish countryside, and basically just noodles around on the guitar now and then.
Frankly we don’t know the selection criteria for the program this year. It will be only released in April.
But we know the selection criteria for the pilot program, and for that this was not true.
> So if you gave up art because you had bills and kids and needed to support yourself or a family, you're SOL.
Again we don’t know the full program’s eligibility criteria yet. Under the pilot program there were two separate streams. Those who were recently trained, and those who were “practicing artist”.
Your hypothetical “artist who gave up art” might fall into the “recently trained” stream and thus be eligible.
Or if they gave up on art a long ago (more than 5 years), there are ways they can get back to it. They can start practicing their art on the side again, produce a portfolio of work and thus become eligible again. They don’t need to be full time artist for this.
> The only person I know getting this money
In the pilot program they randomly selected 2000 participants from those who where eligible. So to get the money in the pilot program you both needed to be eligible, have applied for it, and be lucky enough in the lottery.
Because of this lottery whoever is getting it today is not representative of who is all eligible for it.
The article also mentions that overall the program had a positive impact.
If you ask pensioners if they should get higher pensions, they'll say YES. If you ask students if they should get more subsidies, they'll say YES. If you ask unemployed people if they should raise unemployment benefits, they'll say YES. If you ask people on minimum wage if they should raise the minimum wage, they'll say YES.
Everyone is quick to be very generous when it's from other peoples' money without accounting for the second order effects of those decisions, which is especially a big problem of the extended welfare state, since everyone pays taxes and so then everyone wants more and more subsidies so they can feel they're getting their money's worth out of the system, or else they feel cheated.
Personally, I want people on the high end of earnings (such as myself) to be taxed more so that a basic income scheme like this can be available for anybody who wants it. Charge me an extra $300/month and give it to some random 24 year old so that he can smoke weed and play his guitar. He'll get more use out of it than I will.
One day, that kid will decide that living in a crap shared apartment is getting a bit old and he'll grow some ambition, get a real job, and eventually start earning enough to help sponsor the next round of deadbeats.
Wow! You’re optimistic!
The data shows that having at least one patent on welfare is a strong predictor that a child will grow up to spend their life on welfare. Having both parents on welfare almost guarantees it.
Having single young men on welfare is one of the worst things a society can do for young men. They’d be much better off spending four years in compulsory service and learning to be useful.
I'm sure there will be plenty of people with low enough ambition that they'll just stay there, subsisting. But I don't doubt they'd be doing that in their mom's basement without basic income, so I imagine that society will survive just fine.
I’m 110% on board with that. It’s exactly one of the functions of family: communism is a perfectly function system of governance up to the level of the family.
> basic income
I’m 120% not on board with that. Men need to work, especially young men. WPPP - Work / Protect / Provide / Procreate. There is nothing worse for a society than idle young men with time and money in their hands.
I’m voting for Compulsory Service before I’m voting for Basic.
You work to earn your keep.
The extent of "anybody" is the detail that contains the devil.
Anybody who? Citizen? Asylum seeker? A person who obtained asylum or other forms of protection? A 'tolerated' person who was not deported? (Duldung in Germany.)
Europe is already politically ablaze, and one of the factors of this blaze is "too many foreigners from the Third World as recipients of welfare". If you introduce any basic income scheme that doesn't totally exclude non-citizens, you can expect the people smuggling gangs of Libya and Turkey to advertise it tomorrow as a next pull factor for their business.
Here's how it works: You take 1000 Euros in taxes from a productive German/West-EU citizen, and then redistribute that to 5 migrants giving them 200 Euro each, so you lose one angry voter but you gain 5 happy new ones.
The government is using your tax money to buy and replace your votes, this way the mainstream politicians cemented in the status quo parties, can keep making your life miserable with no accountability or repercussions for them and their careers, because your votes now become irrelevant.
And for good measure, in case the citizens vote for the so called "extremist" parties that promise to counter this obvious scam, you just slander them as nazis/$-FOBES/Putin-supporters with no proof, and form a 'cordon sanitaire' around them to take away their democratic representation, or just ban those parties altogether from elections so you can rule undisputed while masquerading as democracy.
You know you CAN donate money to the government any time you want, right? Do you do that? Practice what you preach, don't hide behind "oh if only the government made me do it."
> One day, that kid will decide that living in a crap shared apartment is getting a bit old and he'll grow some ambition, get a real job, and eventually start earning enough to help sponsor the next round of deadbeats.
This is the critical problem you and others like you make: assuming that everyone is a reasonable, honest, ambitious person just like you are. Many people -- not all, but a big enough proportion to be a problem -- aren't. And when we make it possible to actually make "do drugs and play videogames all day" a viable lifestyle, there's loads of people who will take the government up on the offer. And remember, they can vote themselves UBI raises.
You know we can also advocate for higher taxes, given that it's astronomically more meaningful for everyone to give ten cents than for me to give a few dollars, right? Or did you think this was an insightful, valuable addition to the discussion that no one has ever suggested before? Is this the comment section of a local newspaper? Good god.
> there's loads of people who will take the government up on the offer.
Prove it. How many are loads? What, specifically, do you think UBI actually amounts to?
And you can ALSO voluntarily pay more in taxes while doing so. It's called leading by example. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates get called out on this and they do the same thing; "oh I'm just one person, my extra tax money is but a drop in the ocean, so why bother." If you and everyone else saying "tax me harder" actually put up, it might amount to something! And at least it would make people respect your position a bit more.
> Prove it. How many are loads?
Well let's see, anyone who's lived their entire life on welfare (we have families of multiple generations who have done so at this point) would qualify. So would all the homeless people more content to live on the street and do drugs than go to rehab.
> What, specifically, do you think UBI actually amounts to?
Enough for people with low ambition to live on! And their vote counts just as much as the productive members of society paying for them.
You're just repeating the same fundamentally silly thing I argued against like saying it louder will make it somehow less childish and silly. Did you have an actual point here, or do you think "people's respect" has any slight value in the context of the discussion?
> Well let's see, anyone who's lived their entire life on welfare (we have families of multiple generations who have done so at this point) would qualify. So would all the homeless people more content to live on the street and do drugs than go to rehab.
So you have no actual clue, but you think hand-wavy bullshit that feels good will suffice for numbers. Fantastic. I'm glad you have such strong opinions on things you clearly know absolutely nothing about.
> Enough for people with low ambition to live on! And their vote counts just as much as the productive members of society paying for them.
Is "low ambition" angry-posting on social media? Do you think vibe-coding React bullshit, or whatever, is "productive"? Do you think engineers at Meta, busily finding new ways to make teen girls depressed are "productive"? Or is this just more stuff you have convinced yourself is true because it makes you somehow "better" than other people?
In Ireland their best chance of having their own place is emigration or waiting for their parents to die.
https://ifs.org.uk/publications/health-related-benefit-claim...
You can argue that nobody is systematically abusing the system but numbers go up. To those paying the taxes to support these benefits that sort of growth looks like abuse.
Yes, but for 'tax payers' everything looks like abuse until they benefit from the services for which they pay taxes. The favorite hobby of people whose identity is shaped by being a taxpayer is to complain about paying taxes.
Correct, the programme is FOR artists. How could this possibly work otherwise? By somebody stating they intend to become an talented artist?
How else would you gauge merit if not through their portfolio of prior work?
We're not objectively deciding what is art and what isn't, up front. Who decides what counts? Who's to say an AI generated self-published vomit novels on Amazon aren't as valid as anything else.
>Who decides what counts?
Clearly for this scheme the people approving the applicants and those setting the criteria for those reviewing the portfolios.
A better line of questioning might be who decided on these people and what makes them qualified to judge but you'll find yourself going down a 'Who guards the guardians' conundrum.
Your comment reminds me of when some member of the audience challenged film critic Robert Ebert on who made him the 'boss' to decide which films were good and which were bad.
He simply answered with the name of the owner of the building since he authorised the production of his film review show.
Lacks real courage. Not committed. Next!
edit: found it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45590900#45591439
The UK has this with lottery funding for athletes - it started really positive - but is now a lottery funded gap year for private school kids
Seriously though, having a basic income that is not basic was bound to give issues.
The whole point is that paying everyone a fixed $X amount regardless of anything else is extremely easy to manage, so you can drop all the bureaucracy that builds up around welfare. But, yes, in practice it also acts as a progressive income tax of sorts even with an otherwise flat tax rate (which allows for further simplification) because delta between UBI check and taxes is going to gradually decrease as income rises and eventually becomes negative.
That said even with just personal income tax it's viable. I once crunched the numbers on what it'd take to have everyone in US receive the current federal min wage as UBI payment, assuming a flat surface tax (i.e. relying solely on that UBI check to make it progressive), and it was somewhere in the ballpark of 50%.
Of course, you can get there much easier if you go for the sacred cows such as capital gains. Raising that to the same level as regular income alone would bring a lot of tax revenue.
We could also start taxing AI, since it is (or at least positioned by those deploying it) the immediate cause why so many people are going to find themselves out of jobs.
Maybe the issue is with the definition of the profession of artist, that's it's too vague and fluid allowing anyone to claim to be one without much hassle.
But then if you have a strict definition of the artist profession, everyone will rush to conform to the bare minimum of that in order to score those benefits.
So maybe then the core issue is with the welfare state that unfairly picks winners and losers instead of being "universal".
Artist have exited way before the welfare state has. They were poor and had patrons who supported them if they loved their work. So then why do we need the state to subsidize this now? Do we have proof this leads to higher quality art?
Joshua Citarella (Doomscroll podcast) often talks about the practicalities of producing art.
In 1970's a (starving) artist worked part-time job (eg waiter), enabling them to focus on their craft most of the week.
Today, typical artist has to hustle, juggling 3 jobs, and can only focus once per week on their one day off work.
Further, "entry level" jobs are unpaid / underpaid. Such as internships at a museum or newspaper. Ditto teaching positions.
Consequently, only affluent persons are able to break into the creative disciplines (production of culture). Trust funds, nepotism, and other lottery winners.
--
I, for one, enthusiastically support heavily subsidizing both creative and caring work. All those "not-for-profit" gigs and unpaid labor. They're the grease that keeps society working. Despite not being tabulated in someone's payroll accounting system.
Artists had to make a buch of art which was then given to the government. The state ended up with entire warehouses filled with crap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration
The work also included infrastructure projects, and often would create public art to decorate the infrastructure. That is why you'll see far more decorative work when looking at bridges from that era, for example.
As I've gone on to live in a few older cities, I have been surprised the number of times that I have (for example) come across a bridge or tunnel or whatnot and seen a big serif "WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION 1936" plaque on one side of it. It always feels like stepping into an alternate reality where history is more present and real.
It feels like a silly way to phrase it, but growing up where only a handful of buildings were older than 40 years, encountering history in a more banal form, like a simple bridge with some engravings, always feels more impactful than seeing some 500-year-old castle, monument or other touristy site.
Due to EU rules on state aid though, it's technically a quango and not part of the government despite being spun off of the then privatised national sugar company.
They also pay Ireland's contributions toward ESA, so the Irish flags you see printed on the side of Ariane rockets aren't a direct result of what the government is doing.
> It also recouped more than the trial's net cost of 72 million euros ($86 million) through increases in arts-related expenditure, productivity gains and reduced reliance on other social welfare payments, according to a government-commissioned cost-benefit analysis.
Reminds me of the WPA
A lot of societies have realized there is value in supporting art and culture. For thousands of years that activity was sponsored by monarchs, royalty and other nobility. Up until actually quite recently, most first world countries without monarchs and nobles also provided substantial support for the arts.
Basically outlandishly rich and gaudy benefactors have always had so much money they could employ OTHERS to do trivial pursuits. Now - the average taxpayer will bear that cost.
God knows Walmart couldn't exist with all this rampant welfare.
Maybe if workplace democracy was enforced upon Walmart it would be an entirely different entity, likely for the better too.
It is dismaying to find out how many American academicians take Marxism seriously - unless they stem from countries like Cuba that had the misfortune to actually let Marxist ideas rule them. It is mental fentanyl for certain kind of collectivist mind.
Give me Hayek and Buckley instead.
In practice? For example, nationalization of businesses and collectivization in rural areas, including suppression of "kulaks".
Binary thinking is analogous to quantizing an LLM to 2 bits (worse, actually). You're not going to get good results.
edit: or maybe the communities served by walmart should build their own rain ponchos and bananas locally.
is the point of this conversation just to proclaim you don't like some guys? what is your claim here? what action do you desire the collective to take? what is the rule that society should follow?
why do you expect that rule to lead to a more prosperous, thriving society?
A) The government building an entire logistical supply and warehousing chain across the country for groceries to support food welfare. Cold food, meat, spoilage & waste, a bunch of federal jobs.
or
B) The government gives citizens a bit of money, which they then spend at existing warehouses (with existing logistical supply chains) to buy food. Some existing warehouses will accumulate larger shares of this money, as it has more customers.
The existing warehouses in example B are called grocery stores, like Walmart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQOXdtPBGXI
Seems like the it IS cheaper for the government to do it, odd how much better prices can be when you don't have to worry about making sure the fat cats stay fat.
This is not the case.
Walmart doesn't have the lowest prices because they are efficient, yes conventional wisdom might dictate that but you are forgetting wholesalers exist from which conventional retailers buy from and the margin definitely tilts towards walmart but there was a time where they could easily compete against walmart and set their prices.
Now what's happening is that walmart has these special deals (in this case with pepsi) where pepsi would literally surveil all marts and see which is selling cheaper than walmart (FoodLion did that) and then what Pepsi did was cut off all the promotional money of FoodLion and increase their wholesaler prices.
Is this legal? Hell no. It's all completely illegal but the govt. stopped enforcing the law
Then when it was released by FTC, the whole document was almost redacted and Trump signed an executive order essentially trying to stop it from going out but some journalists dug/pressured for its release.
So walmart isn't the base because they are price competitive, hell-no. It's because they set the floor & have special deals with other companies to maintain that floor artificially.
Which actually leads to small retailers/chains shutting down because they can't compete on price and this essentially leads to a monopoly of walmart where it can dictate prices & increase them and the people are forced to STILL go to them.
And all of this while being immensely govt subsidized as you say too while paying their employees peanuts.
Actually Walmart when it was launched in germany was sued quite a lot for such practices that iirc they had to take an exit. No country wants a walmart because they know that they might use their american profits (which we discovered how come from shady practices themselves) and then use it to run marts at losses until the competition dies which is still immensely bad long term for the average consumer of whole world but particularly the americans in my opinion as all other govts are more protective of such industries for this good reason and walmart fails to measure up to those standards in other countries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odhVF_xLIQA : We Uncovered the Scheme Keeping Grocery Prices High [More Perfect Union]
A lot of my points were heavily influenced by this video so I would recommend you to watch it to help understand more as well about what I am talking.
The deception of walmart actually fools a lot of people but the economical margin is actually quite low. It's the artifical floor that they set which gets unnoticed by many and this is why other retailers aren't able to compete, all of which is highly illegal but once again, the govt. stopped enforcing this law.
Did those shower curtains have a design? Did your sweater have a color and style? Probably so, but you never pay attention to how the world of "fine art" refracts into your daily life.
If the products were cheap, it's likely someone unpaid is responsible for the design. See, for example, the lawsuit against Zara over theft of ideas from small-time designers [1].
In any case, cheap Chinese brands do the same thing as Zara en masse (copying designs – note the "external suppliers" bit in its defense PR), and those products then end up in Walmart/on Amazon. The artists starve but you have your shower curtains and are happy with the price.
[1] https://www.grossmanllp.com/independent-artists-on-the-offen...
So ironic I guess
Maybe we should have a structure in place that taxes companies based on how many benefits their employees claim, say five times the total amount of money claimed.
Did you have to be the party pooper? People were trying to indulge one of the most noble and timeless of pursuits: pissing on the poor! >(
I'm not in Ireland but it's the same everywhere. No one likes paying taxes.
Not saying that anything should be done about it. TBH I'd even like to have unemployment benefits be an optional insurance to reduce my taxes since I haven't gotten a cent out of it yet, but that's separate.
Just noting that artists aren't in some unique situation.
Nothing is stopping them from opening a company and giving themselves a fixed salary or doing some mix of salaried, freelance and under-table work.
Your bio says:
> I'm not trolling. I actually want to know the answer, although my comment may feel less than diplomatic.
And so here is the real test. After reading the numerous responses to your question, do you get it?
Art is seen as a worthwhile endeavour even if it can't necessarily support itself as a private endeavour. It's for the same reason galleries and museums are subsidised by the government.
Anyone can call themselves an artist but to receive this money you would have to have a portfolio of work that is approved by the application programme.
Ireland already has a competitive economy. There is more to a country than economics and that includes promoting things like art to foster a sense of identity and promote Ireland on a world stage.
Milton Friedman wouldn't approve and we're okay with that.
At a minimum you need a registered business, regular exhibitions or performances in your field, you have to register with the ministry of culture, and can't have a job. Contract work is allowed and encouraged. Also you are expected to apply when the government issues a Call For Creatives.
I think you get paid minimum wage as long as you continue fulfilling criteria.
> Self-employed in culture can be given the right to pay social security contributions from the state budget.
https://e-uprava.gov.si/si/podrocja/izobrazevanje-kultura/za...
I love the idea of having a list of "Registered Artists", where you get a basic income as long as you're prepared to Answer The Call of Your Country when needed.
"We need a nice cartoony figure for this public safety film! Find me some artists!"
"Here you go, boss"
"Naw, not those guys, have you got anything in a more Shel Silverstein-y kind of look? How about those ones?"
But Friedman would have supported a broad basic-income scheme. We know this because he did support one. It was his proposal in 1962 of a “negative income tax” [0] (in Capitalism and Freedom) that gave rise to the movement to replace traditional social welfare programs with simple schemes that just give money to poor people. (This movement led to the Earned Income Tax Credit [1] in the United States.)
Friedman’s negative income tax is equivalent to the contemporary notion of a guaranteed basic income (but not to a universal basic income, as only people earning below some threshold would receive it). Like most economists, Friedman believed that people (even poor people) can typically make their own economic choices better than a government program can make those choices for them. (He was likewise not opposed to redistributive policies per se.) That was the root of his advocacy for market-based mechanisms of organizing the economy.
0. The idea dates to at least the 1940’s, but Friedman’s book is typically credited with popularizing it. See, e.g, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax.
‘2,000 creative workers’ would make this quite competitive, even if it’s only 20k USD/year that could easily enable people to be artists who wouldn’t make a career of it on their own.
Pulling a 80 hour workweeks at 24, supporting yourself while doing something else is not sustainable. Similarly someone supporting themselves as an artist + a kid is suddenly a very different situation.
20k USD/yr is life changing for some people down on their luck.
Expectation that you have portfolio does not strikes me as outrageous either.
Writing a few songs on a guitar from Facebook marketplace is cheap. Turning that into a live show is expensive and time consuming.
Writing some Irish language poems on your lunchbreaks is cheap. Doing public readings as an unknown poet is not.
Well done Ireland.
How is doing public reading of poetry not cheap?
I have friends who do standup comedy and they just show up at open mic nights and it doesn’t cost them anything. One is good enough that now the venues are paying him a little bit.
Because of the cost of living here, particularly in Dublin, there is no way that the Basic Income would provide me with anything like what most people here would consider a decent standard of living. (It would currently leave me with about €200 left over every month, after I pay just my rent. That's before any bills or groceries or anything.)
Plenty of people find a way to continue to make art that other people value, even if the cost of living continues to spiral ever upwards. This payment is simply a buffer to make making art a little easier, for a fraction of the many people who contribute to the social, cultural, and intellectual life of this country. For some it pays their rent or mortgage, for some it pays for childcare so they have time to work, for some it facilitates research or purchase of materials, for some it allows them a workspace outside their home.
It's not perfect, as no public arts funding is perfect but, to me, the kind of cheap cynicism displayed in this comment comes from a place of deep ignorance and bitterness.
In other places (like Italy) there is.
Ireland's economic statistics are so badly distorted by US companies routing money there that there is an entire subfield of economics dedicated to trying to figure out what Ireland's real economic state is, called "Leprechaun economics". A common adjustment made by economics researchers when studying the EU is to just subtract Ireland entirely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprechaun_economics
https://www.cfr.org/articles/leprechaun-adjusted-euro-area-g...
https://democracychallenged.com/2025/05/14/irelands-phantom-...
> The key to understanding this disconnect is a number few outside Ireland pay attention to: Modified Gross National Income, or GNI*. Unlike GDP, which counts all activity happening within Ireland’s borders, GNI* adjusts for the distortions caused by the huge presence of foreign multinationals. And the gap is enormous. In 2023, GNI* was just €291 billion — meaning more than €219 billion of Ireland’s reported output never truly flowed into the Irish economy at all.
When looking at Ireland's own economy without the influence of US tax transactions, the economy shrinks by nearly half.
There is no single indicator of wealth, measuring wealth requires a number of measures to provide context and contrast. The Irish economy is largely comparable to the Danish economy. I'd say the Danes sneak in just ahead of us but well behind Norway and Switzerland.
Ireland for example is wealthier than either the UK or France on a per capita basis. The GDP of Alabama and Bavaria, Germany per capita is largely the same, yet you would be insane to think Alabama was in anyway wealthier than Bavaria.
I stand by my comment.
The Irish economy is competitive and your little 'gotcha' that is a common trope across various shallow sub reddits, increasingly at an alarmingly peevish rate simply doesn't persuade me or others who are interested in understanding these things at a deeper level. There is a time and place for that discussion and it really isn't this thread.
Danish GDP per capita is about $71k nominal. According to the Irish Central Bank mGNI per capita is a fair bit less than that at around $65k.
https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-mip/measu...
However, that assumes the modified GNI measure is accurate. If you believe these numbers the Irish became nearly 40% wealthier between 2020 and 2023. That would be a truly unprecedented spike in wealth never before seen in history, and I don't think anyone believes it. It's much more likely that their attempts to subtract the distortion of American corporate success from the Irish numbers aren't successful. Tech firms did great during the COVID period whilst the average person... not so much.
Well it has a competitive tax haven.
I don't give a shit about Milton Friedman. I do give a shit about wage earners in Ireland who are being forced to pay for an artist welfare program. Ireland has a competitive economy.
that's the way you do it
You play the guitar on the MTV
That ain't workin',
that's the way you do it
Money for nothin'
and your chicks for free
We got to install microwave ovens,
custom kitchen delivery
We got to move these refrigerators,
we got to move these Color TVs...
Dire Straits, Money for Nothing, 1985
Guest artist: Sting
https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Dire-Straits/Money-for-Not...
We need more art that pushes boundaries and remains controversial. Instead, we favor the type of artist who attracts the most attention through their personality, whether because of their looks or a manufactured edgy image, while producing mundane, lowest-common-denominator work. We must support contemporary artists who move us forward rather than remaining stuck in popularity contests or constant nostalgia.
Under the current system, it is almost inevitable that influencers use their status to promote gambling ads and NFTs, ruining the lives of their fans. We need to break this cycle of rewarding increasingly poor behavior while making it harder for independent artists to earn a living.
I worked in "culture" for a while when I was younger. 90% of it is just disguised unemployment benefits for those that consider it a dirty word barely good enough for the hoi polloi.
You will live long, but I will have more fun.
No, I can figure out how to build a shelter. But I can't figure out how to be an artist.
So if you are so grossly incompetent that you can't figure out how to build a shelter to save your life, sure take your carpet installer and enjoy your hundred years of boredom.
Maybe they could sing up for say extra 20-50% tax which then get distributed.
That being said, wise governments recognize the value of some kind of support of the arts. One reason for the incredible esteem that Korean culture is held in within Asia is the Korean government's active support of its filmmaking, TV and music industry. This was also true in Renaissance Italy (courtesy of the Medici family) and in 17th Century France (courtesy of Louis XIV). It was even true of the CIA's active support of abstract expressionism. The payoff of such support is soft power, which is a very real force.
Through the kunstuitleen they leased and sold art to galleries and private homes. It was like a library for contemporary art which paid struggling artists and their families, while also exposing the public to more art.
To say that "no one wanted" is a massively overblown. Thousands of art pieces lived happily in many Dutch homes.
The Young British Artists (YBA) boom of the 80s was a product of the innovative teaching environment of Goldsmiths' college plus the drive of people like Damien Hirst, who organized the ground-breaking Freeze exhibition. The British Council did their best to capitalize on this.
Artists couldn't apply for this, but were officially selected. The program was stopped in 2010, meaning no new recipients have been selected since. As far as I know, there's been no studies surrounding any measurable increase in artistic quality or artistic output.
It is of course easy to point out how deeply unfair such programs are on multiple levels. Unsurprisingly, many recipients have utilized loopholes in order to receive the grant despite having incomes and wealth well above the threshold.
Edit to clarify: Sweden still grants long-term stipends to various artists, sometimes up to a decade. What's described above is a guaranteed, life-long, basic income.
Scholarships and this kind of funds happen elsewhere and are based on merits. They end up funding a bunch of upper middle class's children because it turns out those children are well-equipped to perform higher on merits.
If you are too rich, then you wouldn't need this kind of fund.
If you are below upper middle class, then you would have a hard time competing with children from that class.
The upper middle class isn't rich enough to fund the kid but is good enough to accumulate a lot of merits.
I'd argue they are well equipped to give the appearance of merit, rather than performing higher on actual merit.
We can easily look at countries like Vietnam and Thailand where the merit is basically exam-based. Extremely difficult to cheat or "give the appearance".
The upper middle class's children perform very well. The top universities are full of these children. They are the top of the country. They are math/computer/science olympiads
If you are too rich, then the children are too spoiled. If you are too poor, then you don't have time and space to study nor access to private tutors.
While I'm sure there are some wholly self-made virtuosos on the list, it does give off an air of apparent nepotism.
[1] https://www.gamereactor.eu/report-20-of-steams-revenue-goes-...
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statlig_inkomstgaranti_f%C3%B6...
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/money-and-tax/tax/inco...
Maybe it shouldn't be possible. Society is telling your friend that her work is not particularly valuable and that she should probably consider doing something else.
I hope you find out before it's too late.
I think we as a society strive to make gp correct that money is representative of value, and rightfully so.
Anyone partaking in any activity that has value to others should be given money. That is literally what this basic income/tax break for artists is for. Someone thought producing art had value and pure capitalism wasn't correctly matching that value with monetary rewards.
There are lots of rich churches and church leaders out there. That's because they serve a human need, and those humans are willing to direct some of their finite resources towards that provider. (I'm talking about the collections plate if you didn't catch that.)
Now obviously money on its own is not value. It should represent value that you delivered to someone else in the past, and is helpful for getting whatever value your life needs. You mentioned philosophy --- that yoga retreat in the Andes isn't free, is it?
Now sometimes we muddy the waters, for example we permit lotteries where the winner takes home a good deal of money without providing any value to anyone. That debases money, and I think it has no part in society, but I'm unfortunately swimming against the tide on that one.
Then get divorced and discover your children don’t know who you are, and neither do you. And your wife took the dog too.
It’s an almost guaranteed way to eradicate this wildly stupid idea you have.
1. She gets better all the time, and might be super popular in the future 2. Many writings became relevant only long after the death of the author
No. If I was arguing that I'd have said that.
I'm observing that a lot of great writers had pretty miserable lives and I'm arguing that people should aim to live comfortably.
Sometimes artists suffer, but it's mostly a legend at this point. Plenty of great artists have perfectly fine lives. Look at like, any modern fantasy or sci fi author.
I have thoughts on how we're defining value as well, but others have covered those.
She isn't entitled to have a large family and work whatever job she finds fulfilling.
Challenge
> I don’t think it would be possible without the tax exemption.
^ That tax exemption _is_ from society. You may not agree with it, but clearly (at least some part of) "society" does.
Broadly speaking, vernacular artists work for a fucking living; it’s rare there (like in most pursuits) to get super rich. We can’t all be David Baldacci or Danielle Steele.
NB: Thanks to Neal Stephenson for the best essay on this. He calls genre artists “Beowulf” artists.
Am noob. The phrase "folk art" never satisfied me. Is it really all that different? But I didn't have the gumption to learn more. Happily, the critics and philosophers did:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naïve_art
Thanks.
Obviously not because of this income scheme and not complete disintegration, but Irish society is under extreme strain from housing pressures, rising living costs, and growing polarisation that is tearing at social cohesion.
It's frustrating to see funds allocated to this scheme when health, housing, transport, etc are all failing apart.
And we have wildly out of control inequality, inflated asset prices, and unaffordable housing, out the wazoo.
The income program provides €33,800,000 a year (2000 participants, €325 a week, 52 weeks in a year). Double that to account for cost of managing the program -- that seems too high to me, but I want to err on the side of caution for this analysis.
Some percentage of that money flows right back into the economy, of course.
Meanwhile, ignoring windfall corporate taxes, Ireland ran a €7.4 billion deficit in 2025. So the cost of the program, ignoring the money flowing back into the economy, is under half a percentage point of the budget? Those small amounts do add up, but I can't see this as relevant competition to the cost of shoring up health, housing, and transport. I don't have good estimates of how much those costs are, which is why I'm using the deficit as a relevant proxy, but still -- we ought to avoid the trap of seeing numbers which are large to you and me and forgetting that other numbers are larger by orders of magnitude. (There's a term for this which slips my mind.)
That 33 million could have built, let’s say, 66 houses and housed, let’s say, 264 people (66 families of four) for a generation before needing much in the way of maintenance.
But no, fuck the working poor, let’s fund artists.
Myopic.
I'd love to see the breakdown on this, because in my experience with Government comms, if it was a straightforward economic win like an FDI or industrial announcement, they'd headline the figure. Unquantified phrases like "reduced reliance on other social welfare payments" are usually spin at best.
The net fiscal cost after accounting for increase tax revenue and social protection savings was €72 MM.
This was then offset to get to a positive net social gain by €80 MM in "wellbeing gains", as measured by a single survey question called the WELLBY test:
> “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays, where 0 is "not at all satisfied" and 10 is "completely satisfied"?
The €80 MM in "wellbeing gains", which is the sole decider of whether this pilot was a net positive or a huge net negative to society, is because on average, the 2,000 pilot scheme participants had a very approximate 0.7–1.1 increase in score when asked the above question during the pilot as compared to before the pilot. Each 1 point was deemed to be worth €15,340.
They just totally made up[1] a number, tripled it, doubled that, and finally applied a multiplier before using it as the basis to support their preconceived… let’s not mince words: agenda.
1. That’s not very kind. I’m sure they didn’t “just make it up”. There’s bound to be an entire bureaucracy if not dedicated to, at least tasked with, conjuring up this sort of codswallop.
Definitely arguable the artistic output of Ireland is a better investment and more important than housing 66 non-productive families.
I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it sounds a bit like you've got a pre-existing opinion of the value of artists vs. however you're defining working poor.
What if they built those 66 houses? Is the complaint then, "what about the other working poor, why didn't they get houses"? Is there ever a point where it's like, ok to help some people given that some is more than none? Or is this all zero sum bullshit where if we can't help everyone we should help no one and just give Google back it's tax dollars?
Speaking of "myopic".
This is an eight-figure recurring commitment. It represents the total lifetime income tax contribution of well over 100 ordinary Irish workers per year. That's not an abstract, it's decades of PAYE from real people.
Public finance is about marginal allocation. Many high-impact projects sit in or below this band:
* St Christopher’s Hospice rebuild in Cavan – €13.5 MM
* Cork Educate Together Secondary School in Douglas – €45 MM
* NAS Ambulance Centre in New Ross – €0.5 MM
* CAMHS national annual opex budget – €180 MM
So these aren't symbolic sums. They're the difference between capacity and waiting lists.
“Money flows back into the economy” applies equally to nurses, SNAs, paramedics, construction workers, carers, etc. Recirculation is a property of all domestic public spending. It is not a defence of any specific programme.
Comparing this to the national deficit is also wrong. Almost every discrete programme looks small beside a multi-billion euro figure (whether it's the structural deficit or the €29 BN DSP budget). That does not mean it should escape scrutiny. Budget decisions are made at the margin. €60 MM for artist basic income competes with all these other €5-100m line items, not with the entire deficit.
Exponent blindness is real, but it is not relevant here. The question is:
Is this the highest-value use of €60-70 MM per year in a system with delayed scoliosis surgeries, SNA shortages, and overstretched mental health services?
I still think there’s value to encouraging the arts that isn’t purely financial, but I don’t think there’s an easy way to answer yes to your last question.
For example, Budget 2026 did not address the €307 million structural shortfall in university funding. Is basic income for artists a better allocation than third-level education? Or capital expenditure on cancer care? Or NAS opex?
I specifically disagree with this allocation of funds as we live in country filled with specific solvable structural and life-limiting problems that should be solved before artist wellbeing.
Ultimately that comes out of their pockets. Every tax benefit my neighbor gets simply shifts the tax burden more to me. Unless I am someone who doesn't pay taxes I guess. Do you pay taxes?
I pay alot of taxes. Probably more annually in the last decade than I made in total my first decade working.
Many of my peers spend alot of time agonizing about this stuff and spending both mental energy and significant capital in avoidance. I get a higher ROI focusing on more valuable activities. Besides, art is an economic engine. If you studied it, I’d guess those tax credits in Ireland generate multiples in domestic economic activity.
It seems dubious to claim that the tax break is a net positive for the country's economy. If art were so economically viable I suspect it would pay for itself and not need government incentives. I have no problem with the government paying a muralist to beautify some public space, but this is not that. This is subsidizing art that already has some economic value to someone, just not very much.
I feel like what is actually happening is subsidizing the buying of art, as the artist themselves can afford to charge a lower price due to the tax break. So you are encouraging the population to buy more art. And I guess that has some hypothetical returns in terms of life satisfaction and civility...? I think if they framed it this way, as a tax benefit available to anyone instead of exclusively to a select few, it might be more well received. I think of the mortgage interest tax break in the USA (which is actually almost completely negated at this point by the growing standard deduction) in the same way. It encourages people to settle down, maintain a job, and buy into society, so it helps build social stability and reduces violence.
Has art improved in any measure?
What do you mean?
There is already a "Merit based" system that supports the arts. It's called the private market.
My initial gut reaction was akin to many responses here but a post that detailed the implementation mitigates many concerns I'd have if I were an Irish citizen. As long as the system has some required 'buy-in' from applicants to prove they are working towards being an artist, and the distribution is random so it's not a guaranteed payout, and possibly the odds of being selected are driven by the number of applicants and so no one could do a cost-benefit analysis of submitting the 'buy-in' purely with hope of receiving a payout, then this seems to be a more fair way of supporting up and coming 'arts' than the government paying some already established artist for a mural or to design a park or to create a sculpture.
Another funny difference is the word "corporation" meaning the government in some cases. Like someone living in Belfast could go home from their corporation job to their corporation flat, if they lived in public housing and were employed by Stormont.
3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45590900
4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29977176
People have seemed critical of the presentation, scope, and goal of this program. (e.g. It's not "universal" basic income, the number of recipients is limited to 2,000, and why are artists being subsidized instead of essential workers?)
Now it seems that we'll get some real world answer to those questions/concerns.
There are far more than 2,000 real, paying jobs for schoolteachers. And for grocery clerks. And for nurses. And for fire fighters. And for drivers of rubbish lorries. And for ...
Not so much for the folks who hope to be the next James Joyce or Louis le Brocquy.
But the obvious point is to help "artists" in Ireland. It's pretty normal for small nations to want to cultivate / protect / subsidize their arts / culture / language / whatever. The Irish gov't isn't trumpeting this program because they think it'll annoy Irish voters.
But I think people who benefit from this won’t be artists. But people who are good at making money off artsy projects.
I’d see much more value in investing in supply and demand. First, provide free studios with arts supplies, music instruments and so on. Next, force government agencies to hire local artists. Make municipalities have live music for local events and hire local musicians. Make gov agencies buy local art for decorations etc.
325 Euros/week sounds like basic rent & food & transportation. Not artsy projects with enough spare Euros for someone to skim serious money off from.
Providing "free" studios, supplies, instruments, etc. sounds like a scheme to give politicians more photo ops and bureaucrats more jobs. Why can't the artists just source exactly what they think they need from existing supply chains?
The normal welfare and employment system still applies to recipients, which is one of the more notable things about it.
Exactly. But it's a nice addition for „project-conscious“ crowd who can add one more income stream.
> Providing "free" studios, supplies, instruments, etc. sounds like a scheme to give politicians more photo ops and bureaucrats more jobs
Some libraries here started providing free studios with some basic instruments. I hear it was a hit with long wait times. It's awesome for artsy people who want to get together and jam with friends on saturday morning. Artsy people neighbours also love it that they don't have to hear said jams too :)
It's also great for kids who want to give it a shot. It's easier to come in and find some instruments than try to get some used stuff just to play.
I'm all for enabling people to do artsy stuff en-masse. The more people give it a shot, the better. Results don't matter, playing and creating something (no matter how crappy) is important.
IMO „mass-playing-with-art“ has much better ROI than handouts to let a selected crop of people pretend they're living off their art.
For the arts, free studios & such are both en-masse support, and a wider part of the talent funnel (vs. basic incomes).
Biggest problem that I see with basic incomes is in selecting who gets those. The article notes they'll pick randomly from 8,000 applicants - but there's judgement and selection somewhere. Otherwise, the scheme would implode politically after giving money to folks whose "art" was offensive graffiti, or appreciating expensive whiskey, or whatever.
Ordinary folks understand the whole "he who pays the piper" thing, and that "democracy" means the voters can choose to support the arts...or not.
Here it's already a problem for culture-ministry-financed projects. When some artists get funding, others don't... And then some people cry foul that it's because they crossed ways with some politician. Wether that's true or not, when arts funding and politics go together, it's a recipe for some sour FB posts.
But in a democracy, gov't-selected art has a failure mode more fundamental than mere political bias - the voters may decide they're paying too much for really crappy "art". That's what killed the public art program in the city I live in. In hindsight, the city's Art Committee was dominated by cutting-edge academics, big-ego art snobs, and well-intended persuadables.
Though the fountain they built in front of City Hall - abstract, drearily convoluted, generally ugly, horribly expensive, and usually broken - could be seen as appropriate and spot-on symbolic political art.
For that crowd, money for 3 years is not really interesting. It would ruin their existing (smaller or bigger) non-artsy careers. But their art, without significant mainstream changes, has no chance to cover a living. Even after focusing on it for 3 years.
I don't see a point to give such crowd a free ride either. They're fully capable society members. I don't see a difference between such artist getting a free ride vs me getting free money to ride my bicycle because I'd maybe do some cool shit if I had more time. Or maybe I should get a handout to do some opensource? Code is also art anyway.
Tbh though, that doesn't sound that special. Many countries subsidize artists.
Grants like this at a small scale is generally inconsequential to the country.
The quantity of arts isn't a good metrics.
I agree its pretty subjective and not the essiest thing to evaluate, but i think its certainly possible.
As part time artist I see many problems with these schemes:
- Decoupled from people's actual appreciation of the art being done: I feel better when I know people voluntarily gave up their hard-earned money for what I do. - Monopoly-style "winner takes all". The people who benefit from this are the ones already in a position to ask for the benefit. - No one bites the hand that feeds then. That will form a body of "artists" subservient to the state.
The human problem is that no artist is willing to acknowledge that the public is not willing to spend money on their product.
And in hard economic times artists ought to turn to gleaning.
I have a hobby and I don't get compensated for it (quite the opposite). It's not making art, but if art were my calling I could quite easily see myself making it without any hope of monetary reward. There are plenty of people who have the same hobby as me and don't have a job -- they pursue it as is it's a job, though most are not paid either. I view that as some combination of privilege and laziness.
If there's any problem here it's that people don't have enough time to pursue hobbies. I only have enough time because I work from home (no time wasted commuting). Perhaps the government should focus on where we as a society waste people's time and energy such that they have none left over for hobbies.
> Ireland rolled out a permanent basic income scheme for the arts on Tuesday, pledging to pay 2,000 creative workers 325 euros ($387) per week following a trial that participants said eased financial strain and allowed them to spend more time on projects.
> The randomly selected applicants will receive the payments for three years, after which they would not be eligible for the next three-year cycle. O'Donovan said he would like to increase the number of recipients over time.
> Over 8,000 applicants applied for the 2,000 places in the pilot scheme.
> A report on the trial found it lowered the likelihood of artists experiencing enforced deprivation, and reduced their levels of anxiety and reliance on supplementary income.
Which sounds quite a bit like "we spent more on one type of welfare so we ended up spending less on a different type of welfare." Which, okay, good, but I don't think you can say you "recouped" anything.
I shouldn't hurt my potential income like this, but the link is even mentioned elsewhere itt.
You mean the study you're complaining about without having read? ... The one that's not even a Google search away, because it's literally linked on the page you're already on?
Not being snarky, just really surprised at the expectation of being spoonfed data that's already right in front of you, and the apparent willingness to complain about things that you haven't even glanced at.
Many people worked hard to do this study. I believe if you want to complain about their methodology then you should probably take the time to actually look at what it was first. Is that snark? Is it snark to ask for payment when people ask you to do research (however basic) for them?
Personally I would have thought this money would have been better spent getting people on the margins the stability to retrain into in-demand skilled careers (e.g. single, unskilled parents training as electricians or plumbers). That feels like it would be a more durable, multi-generational benefit.
But again, this is just a grant programme.
Who said it is a UBI that this "rebuttal" even makes sense to appear here? The Irish government isn't calling it a UBI. The article doesn't call it a UBI. Even the FAQ for the program says it is not UBI:
>> Why this is not a Universal Basic Income
>> It is important to note that that the Basic Income for the Arts Pilot is not a Universal Basic Income. This is a sectoral intervention to support practicing artists and creative arts workers to focus on their creative practice. This policy is separate to the Universal Basic income as outlined in the Programme for Government.
https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-culture-communications-a... - C-f for "universal"
This happens all the time. For example, in the UK there was a push for a "living wage" in the 2010s, which the government responded to by rebranding the minimum wage the "National Living Wage" and bumping it a little for over-25s.
This seems to be the same thing.
The website will be established shortly as https://ww2.u2bi.ie:212/ as soon as the registrars can correct the typos.
/shttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_the_Art...
If you or your parents would like to sample a NSFW taste of your tax dollars at work, try this deep cut from Plaintiff Karen Finley: https://youtu.be/5gk6JCeGExo?si=FEqZtLlDiQDr0_XI
What criteria of artistic merit, cultural relevance, and common decency will Irish artists need to meet, in order to qualify for their basic income?
Likewise, with the NEA, since they offer grants, you'd need to qualify, apply, and justify your work, and probably renew on an annual basis.
Ireland selected the applicants randomly. I would suppose the 8,000 needed to meet qualifications first.
Ireland promises €325/week. The NEA grants seem to be on a project basis.
So neither of these programs are anything like UBI. UBI is the buzzword that sets us all atwitter with eager hopefulness and aspirations.
Artist grant programs are more like "publish or perish" research scholars. Most grant recipients view the application process as daunting and stressful, especially when it's not in their wheelhouse. "Grant writer" is a job title and a profession unto itself these days. Even charities and welfare organizations depend on grants themselves, so their recipients may be cut off if the grants don't come in on time and fill their budgets.
Ireland's program is like being on the dole. "Here's enough to subsist on while you do your art and try to establish yourself." After 3 years, they're cut off for 3 years, so the incentive exists to become self-sufficient in that time.
Subsidizing the arts has been the realm of religion, including Christianity, for thousands of years. Michelangelo and Bernini were among thousands and thousands of artists who were funded by the Church to create music, sculpture, architecture, images, and any other sacred object in their service. If socialism or communism are the first thing to spring to your mind, please rethink and consider that these philosophies sought to supplant the original collectives: religions; and the religious leaders and patrons were distributing wealth to every possible artisan and artist and composer and performer, in the service of truth, beauty, and goodness. Nobody knows the pain of shrinking churches like Ireland does, and so it really is incumbent on their secular government to pick up the tab here, lest the hands of artists become idle and restless.
Unfortunately I don't remember the references off hand.
I do think there's value in a society encouraging the arts. I don't know what that best implementation is (if at all), though.
>—Kurt Vonnegut
the irish government is adept at misplaced priorities, (very) short-term thinking, pursuers of feel-good vibes, basically everything besides running a state. incompetence here has bred the need for more and varied welfare programs just so we can have a variety of careers that cater to the needs of life. of course, necessity of the arts is undisputed. but can the artist make a career here when the money you make from a show, including tips, can’t pay your utility bills? when your income can’t afford you decent accommodation?
</rant>
Think about the big picture: your salary is a cost for someone else. In the case of "basic income" is a cost for the tax payers. Who decides what benefits the tax payers? The state can't possibly do it, if not for a limited extent. Today we don't have a method more efficient than free market and free prices. Planned economies have historically failed. It may work for now, we all love arts; but tomorrow it will be the artisans (were is the boundary between art and crafts?), then maybe small businesses?
Each of this "tax exemptions" or subsidies eats the profits of someone else. Very rarely it's the richest luxuries that are taken away. Usually it's the middle-low class that doesn't receive exemptions and subsidies who's penalized. Ironically, that same class that most could consume art, crafts, and products in general. This way society spirals toward an halt.
The subsidies and tax exemptions artists receive are small so if you are arguing for less state subsidy or its the least of the problems you should look at.
I am not convinced that this particular scheme is a good idea, but the alternative is not a free market.
> then maybe small businesses?
Big business already receives both explicit exemptions and defacto ones. Ireland is part of the mechanism that lets they structure their businesses in ways that avoid tax that are not available to small businesses.
> Planned economies have historically failed.
Very much false - the US war and post-war economy was very heavily planned, and was perhaps the most successful economy in history (precisely until it was gutted in the 70s/80s).
> best case scenario, create a proportional inflation
You give no reason to expect that this inflation will at best be proportional. It is perfectly possible (in fact likely) that the inflation will be less than proportional, because the price-setters (companies) are being taxed to give money to people on low incomes, who are economically speaking mostly consumers.
> Each of this "tax exemptions" or subsidies eats the profits of someone else. Very rarely it's the richest luxuries that are taken away.
Defeatist argument. It is obvious from history that taxation can be recouped from the rich, we just don't generally try to do that at the moment. We should start.
You talk about the US, but look at countries where the state is both heavy on taxes and inefficient. The point is that you delegate decisions on what do do and how to do it to very few people. They can be good, or be bad. Diversifying on an entire market is better.
The only thing that can save middle/low class consumers is the hope that the state won't increase taxes faster than we can save money. A culture of proper saving, of not falling for luxury items presented as necessary by our peers (or companies selling them), is the only way out. Focusing on what matters.
Most of us are instead living in the illusion that we can live a luxury life.
And you accuse me of cherry picking! I have to guess, since I don't know what you regard as "inefficient", but about half of the top-ten-GDP countries are high-tax western european economies. Normalising per capita just leaves oil countries and tax havens, so I'm not sure what metric to use.
> The only thing that can save middle/low class consumers is the hope that the state won't increase taxes faster than we can save money
Do you have any evidence from history to back this up? Saving has not done the lower/middle class very much good in the last 100 years. Is there any period you can point to where living standards improved because people were saving money faster than taxes increased? Taxes were very low in the 1800s - did it enable lower class people to save money?
is this true? Last I heard Ireland ran a surplus for the last 5 years or so.
If, once established, a thriving art scene generates value by attracting tourism, wealthy individuals who want to patronize the arts, etc then the artists would be able to charge enough to fund themselves and potentially do very well for themselves.
In that scenario we'd only need to fully subsidize artists for a short period of time, the subsidy law should have an expiry date.
That's literally how it works (at least in France). The government sponsors artists early on. Those who make it big don't need the gov sponsoring (and lose eligibility to it). Those who don't continue to receive the sponsoring.
Some artists take a very long time to pan out (some way after their death) so it makes little sense to cut funding to artists on an expiry date basis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist_subsidy_(Netherlands). 1956-1987.
>The randomly selected applicants will receive the payments for three years, after which they would not be eligible for the next three-year cycle.
Is it really correct to call this UBI? It is hardly universal if it applies to only 2000 selected artists.
Seems more like a 3-year grant, similar to the art grants awarded by the national endowment for the arts.
Here is how to do it properly without waiting for the federal government and currency: https://community.intercoin.app/t/rolling-out-voluntary-basi...
We need people to work to produce the things they need to live. As long as this remains true, UBI can never happen. This fantasy of being able to live without working is out of touch with the cold hard reality.
I guess those people continuing to live (or live semi-well) would be fantasy to you. I'm not sure where society will go at that point.
The western world has sold a 'we are improving your life' story to get buy in from the masses. What do you propose? Other options used in the past were typically state provided bread and circuses and/or waging war.
There is more than enough work for everyone right now, and (outside of recessions) we will not run out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
As more and more work is automated, the lifestyle level increases rather than decreases. Automation lets you produce more with the same amount of labor, increasing productivity and raising the standard of living. This is the sole reason we're not subsistence farmers right now.
War does not help the masses; it is purely destructive and one of the worst things you can do for the economy in the long run.
"Ray Dalio says America is developing a ‘dependency’ on the top 1% of workers, while the bottom 60% are struggling and unproductive"
https://fortune.com/2025/10/27/ray-dalio-america-dependeny-t...
"Millions of Americans Are Becoming Economically Invisible " https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45374779
War is unproductive and a destructive use of resources but that doesn't change that it has historically be an outlet for unused labor. My point was that if we don't approach things intelligently/intentionally we can end up with crappy unwanted/unintentional outcomes.
"Ray Dalio says America is developing a ‘dependency’ on the top 1% of workers, while the bottom 60% are struggling and unproductive"
https://fortune.com/2025/10/27/ray-dalio-america-dependeny-t...
"Millions of Americans Are Becoming Economically Invisible " https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45374779
The U-6 rate is nearly twice the rate of the official figures.
The unemployment rate is measured by if someone has done an hour of paid work in the last week. Which is pretty easy to disqualify for if you do any gig economy work. And in a true slowdown the gig apps will probably stop being able to absorb people.
not in this case though. as explained elsewhere, the artist is a dying career choice in ireland owing to economic reasons. no artist == drub society therefore the incompetent government intervenes the only way incompetence approves: free money. making the state function is much harder, and that’s not what these politicians signed up for. reducing electricity bill by 50% is a herculean task so how about jacking up taxes in one place and giving it back as free money in another? this is the modus operandi of the irish government.
New Zealand pays a pension to everyone over 65, whether or not they are working. No means testing and little political will to move the age upward. About 25% of those over 65 work, and the percentage is growing.
There are multiple reasons this could be true (eg, limited savings forcing work). The lack of means testing obviously saves money and shenanigans working out who is entitled, though the ‘universal’ nature limited how much a needy recipient can get.
I argue this is a test case on UBI.
Proper basic income has never really been tried. It would have to be universal (for the entire population) and be enough to live on.
Most countries have non universal basic income in the form of benefits, state pensions, food stamps, and various social security insurance programs. One way or another people that can't or won't work still get enough to survive. Mostly, countries don't let their citizens starve. They mostly don't put them out on the streets. And if people get sick, generally hospitals/doctors will help. You won't necessarily get a very nice version of all that in most countries.
If you think of basic income like that, UBI is actually not that much of a departure from that status quo. It just establishes that as a bare minimum that everybody gets one way or another. The reason that the idea gets a lot of push back is that people have a lot of morals about having to earn stuff which then results in complex rules to qualify for things only if you are unable to earn a living. Which then turns into a lot of complex schemes to establish non universal income that comes into a variety of forms and shapes. But it adds up to the same result: everybody is taken care off.
A proper UBI would have to award it to anyone. That's what universal means. It would be a simplification of what we have now. If you are employed, you would get a chunk of income from UBI and the rest from your employer. Basically, you work to add income on top of your UBI and it's between you and your employer to sort out how much you work and how much you earn. If you get unemployed, you fall back to UBI. UBI would be untaxed. But if you work or earn income you pay taxes. Company earnings are taxed as well. And you pay VAT when you buy stuff. Those revenue streams are what already fund things today.
People think of UBI as extra cost but it could actually be a cost saving if done properly. There's a lot of bureaucracy that's no longer needed. You could still layer insurances and benefits on top of course. But that would be more optional. And you could incentivize people to work that are currently actively incentivized to not work (e.g. to not lose benefits or get penalized on their pensions).
People forget that the status quo is not free either and that it requires an enormous, convoluted bureaucracy that also costs money. UBI could end up being simpler and cheaper.
The hard part with UBI is balancing fairness and financial viability and implementing it in a way that isn't massively disruptive and complicated. You'd need to incentivize most people to still want to work while making the system generous enough that people can opt not to. That's not a solved problem and the key show stopper. Many people that work object against anyone getting anything for free. But if you consider the status quo, we already have a lot of people not working anyway. And we all pay for that already. That is actually a rather large percentage of people that are allowed to vote in many countries.
Mostly the moral arguments against UBI are what perpetuates the very inefficient and costly status quo. We just keep on making that harsher, more complicated, and more expensive. Effectively if you work, you are paying extra for all that inefficiency. Worse, you can work your ass off your whole life and still have to worry about having enough to retire, the affordability of housing, or being able to afford essential health care.
The point of work is to produce the things we need to live. Somebody's gotta grow the crops, drive the trucks, mop the floors, crunch the numbers, process the paperwork, write the code, whatever.
If you offer enough UBI for people to live without working... the work won't get done, and things we need won't get made.
This is setting morals aside. Moral and ethics could be considered, but it's a far wider topic than a HN comment allows. An hint: nobody asks why a moral phenomenon came up in the first place. It must have had a function in society... maybe it still has today.
If they leave the country, then not so much.
It's even worse for techbros. All techbros ever read are self-help books and Nick Land's meth-fueled ramblings. Peter Thiel is a head honcho techbro because he was able to finish The Lord of the Rings.
The "intellectual" Americans will bring up Thomas Kinkade and how his work embodies the true nature of what American society should be all about. His pieces make them long for the good old past where non-whites knew their place and segregation was a godly law.
The cost benefit analysis includes a euro value to attribute to better wellbeing, using the WELLBY framework and apply £13,000 per WELLBY
That came as a big relief as he always struggled to make money, but it's still not a thing that a lot of people get.
Get rid of it. State sanctioned art is is probably worse than no art.
I think a mix is fine. But there are disadvantages if you weigh too heavily on the latter two. In Europe, there's already quite a lot of government subsidies for art. Try finding a British or French movie that doesn't open by announcing its connection with some government subsidy program. While I quite like quite a lot of what Europe produces (especially cinema), in the long run I suspect it won't be sustainable. Whereas the free(r) market approach of e.g. the US and Japan will end up ahead.
Much better than all three choices combined if you ask me.
Overall It's a bit sad going to American bars and not hearing the whole bar singing along to the musician up on stage. Amercia's culture I feel is way more focused on celebrity then musicianship.
Nashville has plenty in the evenings, and then you can find hot spots in some cities. I've seen regular buskers in Boston, Seattle, Sarasota, and Boulder - usually in pedestrianized touristy quarters.
The looks were strange and from women in their 20s as I walked around Dublin. Im not much to look at yet do not receive such looks or rude behavior (one purposely did not hold the bathroom door at starbucks as I waited my turn 25 feet away waiting to get in rather she purposely pushed the door to close) at home in the DC region or my travels throughout the US and Europe. Another American mentioned a similar experience too. My friend traveling with me he was not wearing a hat & did not experience any such thing.
In Dublin's best music venues, nobody is singing along because it's brand new material from brand new artists. If you're singing along to well known songs in Temple Bar then I'm afraid you're missing some of the best music the city has to offer, in venues like Whelan's, Workmans, Sin É, The Grand Social etc.
What's far worse is hearing a sing along in the original release. Listen to Strumpella's "Spirits"-- those are paid crises singers!
Edit: clarification
Continue to avoid exploring obvious solutions because certain words have been made into epithets, or failed previously because they were solving future (now imminent) problems?
If we have a system depending on trading our labor for money to pay for stuff, and the value of our labor goes to zero, we need a different system.
We can't paper over that fundamental crack by giving governments even more power to decide what every person "needs" and send out resources accordingly.
There are so many problems in that system. How do we actually decide prices when every consumer has the same base level of money to spend? How does the government decide what we all need or deserve? How do we avoid the corruption taking over that massive power granted to dole out resources? Are we just living in a feudal state again? Does the government need to control the means of production to keep such a system stable?
Maybe we have a different look on basic income, for me it's like unemployment money with less steps and less overhead (less bureaucrats). I also dont know why you pull in marxism, but those systems normally starve because of bureaucrats (hello germany) where you have to fill out 10 papers to create one praline, and NO i dont say germany is "marxist", but they are really good at always taking the worst from both sides.
For giggles, lets say every work can be done by robots, every service by ai and energy is free (dyson sphere or whatever you want), who's left to spend money and for what? And tadaa StarTrek ;)
If all work is done by robots we have much bigger challenges than who spends money. We need to consider how to counter dynamics and incentives that might favor having fewer humans dependent on the system, for example. We also need to consider how we avoid either humans losing control entirely or human control being massively centralized to a small group of people running everything.
I'm also not sure why you assume I haven't read up on this topic. We may disagree, but its extremely dismissive to assume your view is right and I must simply be uninformed.
I get you don't like marxism. But you come off like a parody when you have such shallow grasp on what it is. Most real life communist countries, it is a crime to be without work. As far as you can come from a basic income.
I think the amount is something that can be disputed, but the underlying idea is, IMO, a sound one. Similar to the "unconditional basic income" idea - again, the amount can be contemplated, but the idea is sound, even more so as there are more and more superrich ignoring regular laws or buying legislation in a democracy. That means the old model simply does not work. Something has to change - which path to pick can be debated, but something has to be done.
Why would you want to randomly select here?
Random isn't a bad way of doing it in any case though.
In most of the world, rich people are rich because they are good at exploiting government funds. It's a lifestyle.
So it's permanent, but the recipients don't get it permanently?
Budgets are limited so they can't give to everyone all the time. They give each batch of artists money for 3 years and then move to the next batch. Interesting to see if there's a chance they start looping over.
So to answer your question: Yes, it's permanent (or as permanent as any gov't program can be), but the recipients don't get the money for an indefinite span of time (permanently).
Other industries don't move as fast but a 3 year layoff in tech could be a career death sentence.
No, they're allowed to have other work or earn money from their art. The intent is to subsidize their income, not be their exclusive income for those three years.
The idea is not new, only the rhetoric.
Whereas in this Irish program, it is less money for more people chosen by lottery. The only editorial control is who is qualified to enter the lottery. It is also subsidizing the artist and not the art work, with artists working in cheap mediums receiving the same as artists dealing with high costs. So you are still going to need a grant or commission if you work in monumental bronze.
France has had a similar scheme for a long time (“intermittent du spectacle”).
It is not perfect but does a great job at sustaining artists who work hard to live from their art.
But in my view, arts should be funded by people in private. Any spare resources the government can muster up should be invested in improving the security and quality of life for its people. If no one ever goes hungry, and their medical needs are met swiftly, and justice is swift and accessible to all. then I can see the appeal in funding arts. But even then, sciences can meaningfully and in the long-term improve humans' lives.
I don't even know if the arts would benefit from this. Will the government arbitrate whose art is better? Private persons would, they won't fund a terrible artist. and from what I know about artists, the rejection and failure is instrumental to revelations and breakthroughs in their art. Without that, will the state be funding or facilitating mediocrity in art?
Imagine if this was for entrepreneurs. If the government will provide income so long as you're starting businesses. If you didn't have much to begin with, it might prevent you from giving up businesses that are failing, hold on to that restaurant years after it's failed because you like the vibe, and your needs are met. But if you'll eventually be in danger of running out of money to support yourself, you'll be forced to shut doors early, learn lessons and move on to something better.
I'm just making a case against dreams being kept alive artificially on life-support. And of the consequence of not having adversity when needed. I don't know if it's true, but I remember an analogy of artificial biospheres failing to grow trees and plants early on, because they didn't simulate wind. the trees needed the resistance, push and adversity of wind to thrive.
But I'll digress, I'm not saying Ireland did wrong, just putting my thoughts on the subject out there. They know what they're doing, I'm sure. And this is sounding too much like damn linkedin post, and on HN too of all places, talking about entrepreneurship, shame on me! :)
For a start, it's a lottery. 2000 randomers who call themselves artists will get no-questions-asked income regardless of their skill or importance as artists. We have people who are full time carers for family members who get less money in their allowance, and it's means-tested.
So you can be a millionaire heir / heiress, independently wealthy and still be eligible for it. One artist on Twitter bragged about getting it, and has been using the "extra money" to go on long holidays. It's basically free world travel for her.
Also, what is an artist? There's one guy on twitter who gets this income and really, he just seems to take bad semi pornographic photos. Like the world really needs more of that.
Another lady my wife knows personally is a terrible artist, never had any talent and doesn't make money. No sense of colour, no line skills, just paints awful blobs in awful colours. She's 100% in favour of this scheme and won't shut up about it on twitter.
My wife has been struggling to make an income from her art for decades, but has created a small business around it, wedding stationery, other print fits. Guess what? She probably doesn't qualify as "an artist" she "runs a small print business". She also thinks that the government could do a lot of practically things to make life easier for artists but it's easier to take your budget and just give it to random artists. No effort, no real benefit. It's laziness and incompetence.
I know exactly one "real" artist whose paintings will genuinely be hanging on walls for hundreds of years. He has no business around his art, he literally paints and holds exhibitions to sell his work. His name is famous in art circles and you can instantly recognise his style whenever you see it. His work is truly amazing. He has a wife and two kids and struggles sometimes. The long gaps between exhibitions, the worry that an exhibition won't go well. Anxiety, depression. Did he get this magic lottery? Did he fuck.
For a start, it's a lottery. 2000 people who meet very broad but generally fair eligibility criteria (https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-culture-communications-a...) will get no-questions-asked income regardless of their skill or importance as artists, these being qualities that are both highly subjective and not fixed in time.
So you can be anyone – rich, poor, or something in between – and still be eligible for it. All you have to do is meet the criteria, which were created in consultation with artists.
Also, what is an artist? Thankfully that's not for me to say, because I have quite a narrow view of what art is, and that view would certainly exclude some people who were successful in the pilot.
My partner has been struggling to make an income from her art for over a decade. As she is a working artist under the pilot definition, she qualifies for the lottery even though she runs a small business (to be precise, she's self-employed – making and selling her art full time. There is a reasonable chance that you have seen it). She also thinks that the government could take many other practical steps steps to make life easier for artists, but that taking a small amount of money and giving it to random artists has a huge potential upside: practically no effort, many benefits.
I know several artists whose paintings will genuinely be hanging on walls for hundreds of years. Or prints. Or photographs. Most make ends meet, and one or two are comfortable. Their work ranges from truly amazing to decidedly mediocre (in my opinion). Did any of them get this magic lottery? Yes, some did. Others (including my partner) did not.
Ask her how much it costs for a stall at Showcase every year. Why does the RDS have this whole area sewn up? Why don't the government sponsor events like this? Why is the craft council absolutely useless? They can't organise anything, they just wait for gougers to set up ultra expensive events and then tag along.
Ask her if she'd prefer subsidised rent for her business in a decent location, in a city or town? Remember before Templebar got gentrified, it was an absolute shithole, decaying buildings that should have been condemned and torn down, and yet because it was cheap, it became the place for artists, designers, jewellery makers, cooks to set up, and became the most interesting part of Dublin. Sky High rent drove away all but the big chains, and now it's soulless. What do the small makers have now? Nothing.
What about subsidised shipping? Right now An Post are massively increasing the cost of their flat rate small parcel shipping within the country. Why invest in that, and make it easier for makers to ship their products at a reasonable, predictable price?
What about actual help with the "running a business" part, that many artists suck at?
I dunno. Giving free money to a few people, without even checking whether or not they need it, strikes me as unfair, lazy and short sighted. Why bother doing anything at all if you're getting free money? But reduce the cost and difficulty of running a business... That actually encourages it.
Teach a man to fish vs give him a fish.
Did anyone take a note of what kind of output the artists produced? Was any of it any good?
This was later one of the motivations to cancel the program.
What you're talking about is paying people to produce 'art' by the unit.
This scheme is about paying credentialed artists so they can breath a little bit. No need to supply slop.
BTW credentialism - good or bad? It certainly seems to me that the idea of credentials has crept from medicine, law and engineering into formerly freer and more bohemian territories. An idea of a perepiska for singers or actors would be considered absurd by most people in history. But once money transfers are in place, bureaucracy inevitably follows.
How long is string?
Some accreditations are strong. Others are nearly useless.
Reputation is easily hacked these days. Letters of recommendation don't mean what they used to. Something needs to fill that space - especially when you're filtering down to 2,000 applicants in a country of 5 million people.
Sure, there's a lot of dodgy doctors and lawyers out there. No shortage whatsoever, despite the efforts towards strict credentials. But I'd still rather have someone with a medical degree fixing my broken leg than a random chirurgeon.
The latter is quite a bit closer to the old feudal system of professional guilds, which were mostly concerned with defending the interests of their own members.
All the government-subsidized art that I've come across is straight up awful, and nobody ever actually cares for it. Typically it's weird abstract stuff.
By these standards, should I be paid an income from your tax money for my 5 side-projects on GitHub that nobody uses?
If we applied the rule of "it has to be good to be worth it" and money is the main indicator for "good", then what about the myriad products and services that are low quality / terrible, yet make tons of money because they can afford to shove marketing down everyone's throats and thus stay relevant?
Most popular music is downright awful to me. Do I want to take their money away because I don't think they deserve it? No. On the other side of that coin I'd like to see some kind of counter balance. How many artists were considered awful until they suddenly became the biggest deal ever? Often posthumously.
This tiny sliver of funding for some people you may not like won't take anything away from you.
The early internet was so great because it was full of weird things. We've lost ALL of it, due to commercialisation. We stand to lose even more if we don't do something to fund the people who dare to be weird.
This goes right back to the thing Bezos said about how we need to become interplanetary so we can inhabit the galaxy, because if we inhabit the galaxy we could have a thousand Mozarts. I think we could already have a thousand Mozarts if they weren't busy slaving away in Amazon's warehouses.
Once there's a trillion humans in the galaxy and they're still all slaving away in warehouses, we still won't have any Mozarts.
Not everything can or should be quantified by money and economics.
Also HN: UBI is a scam and no one will want to contribute to society.
Maybe UBI works for some recipients when it's clearly time-limited and the recipients have a clear way to building a stable income, but are bottlenecked on time and capital. I think artists are a good fit for such a program.
There's a huge group of people in western countries that has received unconditional basic income for decades, without any requirements. No questions asked, no documents required, no forced work. They could basically use that free money to flourish and pursue whatever creative activity they could imagine, without fear of economic downsides.
And we know the results already. We see it in our cities daily. But as a society, we have decided not to talk about it so we are not called racists or far right. Instead, we keep ignoring this massive group with an equivalent of basic income and keep pretending we still require experiments on its effects.
But yeah, let's test a few dozen Irish artists and keep pretending everyone needs to work for a living.
I already explained why I don't want to say it aloud in this context. Your guess is as good as anyone's.
> ... as a society, we have decided not to talk about it so we are not called racists or far right.
Still a good idea though.
I absolutely do not expect sillycon valley libertarians to understand or appreciate any of this so probably a good idea to avoid the comment section here...
It's despicable, they're as much as an insider threat as Hungary.
"Permanent", I don't think that word means what you think it means.
The same is true for a lot of open source and indie software. I have been running a free AI companion bot on Telegram for months and the operating cost (5/month server) comes entirely out of pocket. The users get genuine value from it but there is no revenue model that does not compromise the experience. If I add ads or charge money, the thing that makes it feel like talking to a friend (no transactional friction) disappears.
Ireland is essentially saying: some things are worth publicly funding because the market undersupplies them. That is a healthier framing than trying to force everything into a subscription box.