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Comment by BryantD | Hacker News Reader

Ireland has already provided substantial benefits to artists — income from art is exempt from income tax up to a certain level. Society has not disintegrated. Speculation and anecdotes are not terribly useful but my Irish author friend is not from a rich family, nor is she well-off, but she’s able to support her husband and child in a smaller Irish city by dint of writing several books a year and stressing a lot. I don’t think it would be possible without the tax exemption.

https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/money-and-tax/tax/inco...

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> I don’t think it would be possible without the tax exemption.

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.

There’s plenty of things that are valuable for society while still not having significant financial value.

Money is generally how we describe value.

Almost all religions, a good chunk of philosophy and even a good bit of economics would differ with you.

I hope you find out before it's too late.

Pretty patronizing, but I'll bite.

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.

Love, honesty, kindness, ..., none of these have value?

So... Money is generally how we describe value for those things which can be traded for

Of course they do. I'm not saying it's the only way to measure value as individuals. But as a society, lots of things do boil down to money, as that's the medium of exchange. Society was the context of this thread, not individual.

Working a 9-5 to support one's loved ones; an honest day's work; generosity. It's quite easy to connect each of these values to money.

Yeah ok now what's the value of verisimilitude? /s

Money describes prices, not value.

What I would suggest you do is, find a loving partner to start a family with, then do everything you can for 20 years to focus primarily on earning, or otherwise acquiring, money.

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.

Money describes a price, not a value. Two different concepts.

Not quite. Money is how we describe instrumental value, and occasionally allocation priority. Personal attachment and moral worth are also terms often used interchangeably with "value," though in my opinion that should stop and we should all simply never use the word "value" again because so many meanings have collapsed into it.

The most expensive vacations I took were not the most valuable ones to me

One of the really cool things about capitalism is that you can, directly or indirectly, put financial value on pretty much anything.

One of the uncool things about capitalism is that it, directly or indirectly, monetizes everything.

Indeed! e:g - looking after elderly and/or disabled people, to give their family carers respite. Which is a minimum wage job seen by many as "drain on the taxpayer", ignoring that apart from being worth providing for its own sake, it can enable the family carers to be also economic contributors and pay tax themselves.

It's naive to conflate income as a clear signal of what society needs.

If you have any understanding of history, it's naive not to.

This is a false assumption. We will only know retrospectively whether it was valuable or not.

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

A lot of those relevant writings became relevant because of the horrible experiences the author went through forged them into an interesting writer. If we're assuming that we only know retrospectively whether the writing is important then the best course of action would be for people to write as a hobby and make choices that are likely (rather than unlikely) to lead to a comfortable life. Particularly in this current era where we might suspect that writing and publishing a book is getting much easier thanks to technology.

Are you arguing that most good writers from history were poor? This is after all the only "horrible experience" a subsidy would alleviate. I don't think that's actually supported by evidence, most great writers I can think of were relatively extremely sheltered (although they often were sensitive to the horrible experiences of others)

> Are you arguing that most good writers from history were poor?

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.

Sorry, I must have misunderstood, I thought you were still on the topic of the subsidy.

I think the argument is a) most writers have to do a lot of writing to achieve writing consumable/appreciated but sufficient to be considered successful, b) most great writers had to go through some shit in life to incorporate that in their writing to make it interesting in order to be successful.

> A lot of those relevant writings became relevant because of the horrible experiences the author went through forged them into an interesting writer.

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.

As demonstrated, crisps are more valuable to the society than art.

Society told Van Gogh that nobody wants or will ever want his work. He killed (probably) himself out of depression and feeling unwanted, miserable.

Yes, this was empirically true at the time. Things change. And that does not invalidate my comment in the least.

Society is not telling her that - the labour market is. I guess she should get off her lazy ass and learn how to become a high frequency trader.

I don't think that being able to support a family of three in Ireland is particularly a sign that society doesn't value your work. If she had to pay income tax, perhaps she'd only be able to support herself -- but if you think everyone in Ireland who only makes enough money to support themselves is doing not particularly valuable work, I think it's worth considering the implications of that.

I have thoughts on how we're defining value as well, but others have covered those.

Her work can be valuable, in money terms, even of the value of her work is less than the money needed to support her family.

Sure, and again, she should do something else then.

She isn't entitled to have a large family and work whatever job she finds fulfilling.

> Society is telling your friend that her work is not particularly valuable and that she should probably consider doing something else.

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.

You’re missing, somewhat gleefully, most of the history of western art, which you could imagine as split between patronage-based art (have you heard of the Sistine Chapel, for instance?) and vernacular art - where things like genre storytelling and family portraits come from.

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.

TIL "vernacular art". I like it.

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.

> Society has not disintegrated.

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.

That's a problem with all tax havens. They drastically increase inequality and inflate assets, especially housing and rent.

Australia isn’t a tax haven, it’s a tax supermassive black hole.

And we have wildly out of control inequality, inflated asset prices, and unaffordable housing, out the wazoo.

All true, but let's not lose track of relative costs.

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.)

This program has nothing going for it.

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.

You didn't read the article. The scheme gave positive return on investment.

> 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.

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.

This sentence sounds like "We saved 1000€ on benefits thanks to this 1500€ totally not a benefit payment!"

I understand your point, but in response to GP (they should spend this money on houses for other poor people instead), the reduced reliance on other social welfare is totally legitimate to count.

I agree, but another commenter linked the cost-benefit analysis and it really is creative accounting to get to a positive net social return.

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.

Wild!

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.

Rest of the welfare cost in Ireland is around €68 billion so honestly it could be 100 million and it’s not even a drop in a bucket.

Definitely arguable the artistic output of Ireland is a better investment and more important than housing 66 non-productive families.

Sorry, but what exactly makes you say that artists aren't working poor?

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.

> But no, fuck the working poor, let’s fund artists.

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".

The allocation this year is €18m and it goes live in Q4. On a steady-state basis we are likely in the €60–70m range annually. That's not a rounding error.

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?

Thanks for the more detailed analysis — you clearly have better visibility into specifics than I do as an outsider. I sincerely appreciate the follow up and I agree that the economics should be examined.

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.

Meanwhile, what's going to be the social effect of working stiffs living paycheck to paycheck seeing the government giving preference yet again to someone other than them?

Why fix one problem, when another problem also exists?

Classic false dilemma. You're trying to frame my comment as “we can only ever fix one problem” when it is, in fact, “we have constrained resources and urgent systemic failures and so prioritisation is important”.

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.

> Society has not disintegrated.

Has art improved in any measure?

Yes! Can you prove me wrong?

Ireland has not disintegrated, but it's society is under incredible pressure and is fewer missed meals away from a cultural revolution sized event than most places.

People get very high and mighty when it comes to other people’s getting of benefits or paying taxes.

... shouldn't they?

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?

IMO, no.

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.

Agreed it is a waste to spend too much time worrying.

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.

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