Well that's not really universal by any metric (you have to be an artist, there can't be too many applicants or you'll get subjected to lottery) but I'm still enthusiastic.
It's always nice seeing countries look to support their artists in building their cultural heritage.
These feel more like government artist in residence grants.
> It's always nice seeing countries look to support their artists in building their cultural heritage.
But, at the end of the day it's still worth close to nothing, right?
I enjoy art and music as much as anyone else but the reason those professions are so poorly paid is because the supply outstrips the demand considerably[1]. What value is there in asking taxpayers to pay for an increase the supply when there's already too much supply?
Sure, paying people for doing what they love even when you are going to, in effect, throw away whatever they produce is madness.
[1] I play guitar and sketch/paint. Of the other people (who do these things) that I have regular contact with, no one can make money of the things they produce. My rough guess is that for every 1000 musician/art supply, only 1 is demanded.
Indeed, which is why, in my opinion, it is a reasonable thing for the government to fund. The government funding things which are of value but would not make economic sense in a free market economy is a good use of resources.
> Art and cultural heritage may have worth outside that represented by short-term supply and demand?
Or it may not. We can't tell objectively, because there is no metric to measure.
I suppose my point is, if you cannot tell that there is a benefit at all, why leap to the assumption that it's a large enough benefit to pay 25m euros for.
Because not of bread alone you shalt live. You can't get to the moon without moonshots. There is a queue of people willing to fund for-profit moonshots, but when it comes to art and other non-monetizable human endeavours, in practice there is only the State.
What great works of art have ever come from the State?
If anything, we need the ultra rich to fund this kind of thing based on their taste. That worked well in the past with the court musician/composer and patronage.
There are so many problems with this UBI idea. The medium is one that comes to mind. We have largely moved on from paint on canvas to video the way we moved on from sculpture in stone to paint on canvas.
Does the artist have the artistic freedom to start a youtube channel with the money? I would suspect not.
Most likely this goes to propping up outdated mediums of expression and will lack the complete freedom needed for a true artist to really express themselves.
Then of course you have to contend with those gaming the system to free roll by collecting old toilets from the trash to work on their homage to Duchamp masterpiece.
I suspect there is reason for the starving artist archetype.
I mean, OK, but one could also argue that the reason a given artist is struggling is because their work is not highly valued in the first place.
Maybe the artist is making under-appreciated contributions, or maybe their work is just not good. It's subjective, which means criticism is subjective too, but it seems a poor place to start with any UBI scheme executed in good faith.
I would think it would have more value as an experiment to start with some of the poorest people in a society and then measure their quality of life and economic contribution throughout and after the programme. If you could show a net-positive economic contribution during the programme, and a net-negative contribution before and after (as unlikely as I suspect that is to achieve) it would make it substantially easier to get popular support for UBI.
> I mean, OK, but one could also argue that the reason a given artist is struggling is because their work is not highly valued in the first place.
Many artists that are highly valued today weren't in their times, with many dying destitute or never selling anything of note. Current valuation isn't a predictor on later appreciation.
> It's subjective, which means criticism is subjective too
But that's precisely the point of the subsidy. Society as a whole already expresses value judgements, every day, through money. If an artist is valued, he is successful and accumulates money, so he doesn't need subsidies; but the fact that an artist is valued or not-valued today, we know, is a poor indication of their overall value in the long run. Maybe their art will explode in value after death, maybe he will start a movement that will generate better artists and designers...
The point of universal income, surely, is exactly to remove the immediate value judgement from the equation. UBI is supposed to pay everyone, regardless of what they choose to do (except for raping and murdering, I guess; but ironically, convicts are among the first to actually "enjoy" an UBI of sorts already, although to the price of their liberty). In this sense, starting from art actually makes the most sense.
> it would have more value as an experiment to start with some of the poorest people in a society and then measure their quality of life and economic contribution
The minute you start measuring economic contribution, you are not really in UBI territory anymore - you are just subsidising the market at its fringes. That's already done in social democracies, in practice, through various means.
Remember: van Gogh was undervalued while he was alive. I guess he should just have thrown his stuff away early and become a baker. Mozart had virtually non-stop money troubles, even before he started becoming a party animal, and died a pauper who was buried in a linen sack in a mass grave. Guess he would have had a better life being a potter.
Art is something that may only be valued highly ex post facto, and which takes a long time of intensive training to get started...
I get this with regards to Van Gogh, and I assume a thousand Van Gogh’s we never got to hear about or appreciate. I wasn’t suggesting at all that he should’ve given up if he wasn’t making money.
I’m just saying that there are easily hundreds of creative activities people do every day just for the love of it. Each of them could be artistically appreciated later. Narrowing in on this one subset, especially with taxpayer funding, seems not only unfair but also uninformative at large (we learn little about the economic impact of UBI as the U is missing here).
As others have said though, this appears to actually be an artist’s grant labelled as UBI, which makes the whole thing moot (these have been around for a long time with allocated funding).
> but it seems a poor place to start with any UBI scheme executed in good faith.
This isn't intended to start a UBI scheme, that's an embellishment from the article title. From the article text:
"The scheme [...] is meant to assist those working in the fields of arts [...] who suffered economically as the global Covid-19 crisis surged in-country."
From another source [0], it's also time-limited to 3 years.
I think the less hype reading of the news is that artists are struggling through COVID so the government is offering support to ensure they don't lose a good chunk of the industry.
> one could also argue that the reason a given artist is struggling is because their work is not highly valued in the first place.
Art that's not valuable now could very well be found to be valuable later. Van Gogh died broke and essentially unknown but now he's one of the world's most well-known artists.
Not very many people believe that a market of individual capitalists responding to supply and demand creates the best outcomes. For example many people believe that state mandated healthcare creates better outcomes. For anyone willing to look beyond a simple model of supply and demand, a deep analysis of the effects is needed.
If we had a true healthcare free market starting from scratch right now the money would go into blood panel sampling and building massive data sets to use machine learning algorithms for classification.
If I had a full quarterly blood panel sample that went into a database in 5-10 years the most trivial random forest would crush my doctor as far as classification.
Pushing 50 my visits to the doctor are not going to look that much different than when I was a kid in 1980 for my entire life.
Instead, with this bullshit system my doctor doesn't even want to do a full panel once a year. The government is not going to pay for that.
Even better, imagine a $200 dollar home device to do a full blood sample once a month with a $20 subscription fee for analysis. 2-3 years from now would be incredible.
Just impossible to have happen with this wonderful healthcare system the collectivist love so much.
Framing everything as a reflection of short-term capitalistic gain is a travesty. Culture transcends your lifetime and probably the lifetime of the people that you are a part of. You ask what value there is in that, but I am curious what value your believe there could be in anything else without it.
My point was not that there is no value in it, my point was that there is already a considerable oversupply of it, so why buy more of it?
Those people who have already managed to turn it into a fulltime job are more than sufficient to ensure that arts and culture exist. What exactly do you expect to see when more f/time practitioners are added to the existing mix?
Maybe an artist’s output might be tainted and diminished by having to worry about money, and someone in a secure financial situation may produce qualitatively different art? Pure speculation, obviously.
What's cultural and what's profitable don't always overlap, so the question is which you want to preserve.
If I single out musicians - where I am on the west of Ireland, the cultural impact largely comes from street buskers and trad sessions in small pubs - not the profitable acts filling a stadium once every 5 years.
Given that the local scene is a honeypot for tourists, where as stage tours breezing through town probably extract more than they bring, it might actually be an overall profitable investment - even if the individual artists aren't.
We do so because money is artificially scarce. There are plenty of games (like minecraft or prosperous universe) where you have everything you could possibly want at the end which then marks the start of a sandbox mode within the survival mode. Humanity is kinda like that, but once we are in sandbox mode, we don't like it and destroy the sandbox. It's like starting a new game.
> paying people for doing what they love even when you are going to, in effect, throw away whatever they produce is madness.
No, it's hardcore keynesism. You're still sustaining demand in the market for all their necessities, from food and toilet paper to brushes and smart LEDs; and you are supporting the overall quality of life in the country, which passes also through people getting involved in art in various ways (as critics, consumers, etc). The fact that you may or may not get valuable output at the end is relatively irrelevant; in the end, a couple of resulting unicorns could probably repay the whole operation just by publicity and goodwill flowing to Ireland.
Keynes was dreaming of a world where we figured out how to solve the liquidity preference problem. I.e. tax land value and tax cash. If we did that, then we would have so much free time, that we would be spending all our time on social/cultural activities.
The inflation targeting thing was an attempt to solve the problem in a less micromanaged way. In practice you still got the usual wealth concentration cycle that everyone knows from history.
Art is a public good. It's not something that gets produced and then consumed. It gets produced, and that production costs time and resources. But it is not comsumed like cheesecake or natural gas.
Taxes should be spent in a manner that serves society and its people. The sharing of art benefits everyone. Even art you don't like benefits you, because there is a good chance an artist you like will be influenced by it. If you want a thriving art scene you need people making art. Much of it might get thrown away and never reach an audience, but gems will emerge from it.
Even if one takes a completely selfish approach to art (ie, only art that I like is good art), there is benefit in having more artists making more art. As someone who does not live in Ireland I enjoy some art made in Ireland. So even I benefit from Ireland supporting its artists.
Art produces huge positive externalities. This is the reason artists are the pioneers of gentrified neighbourhoods. They arrive when rent is low (all they can afford) and their product increases the desirability of the area. The artists themselves capture none of this value and often have to leave when rents go up.
It's also a positive externality for businesses (and by extension workers) in the area and for people who own their own homes (home ownership has historically been the predominant long-term living arrangement in Ireland).
Even for tenants, it's not as simple as you suggest; most renters would rather live in a gentrified area than a run-down, crime-ridden one (which is exactly why rents are higher). Arguably the only category of people who definitely lose out are long-term, low-income renters with no protections, but they are relatively rare in Ireland.
Gentrification has its problems for sure but I know several people who grew up in formerly run-down areas that are now gentrified, and they would never want to go back to the way things were.
> What value is there in asking taxpayers to pay for an increase the supply when there's already too much supply?
When "taxpayers" refuse to subsidize non-taxpayers, they run the risk of those non-taxpayers murdering them; the "value" is that it directly prevents death and revolt.
Some people just simply don't agree that people should have to die simply because there are too many people, either because they're (directly or indirectly) worried about revolt or because they're "good people" who think people have a right to life, dignity, and happiness.
But some people don't: either because they lie to themselves about what the ramifications of their decisions will be (or are simply ignorant to it), or because they believe in destiny -- that god, for example, wants some people to live and others to die.
Come on, the alternative to taxpayers subsidising artists isn't that artists face a choice between death or revolt. It's that artists get a different source of income (which may require stopping being an artist).
> It's that artists get a different source of income (which may require stopping being an artist).
What a peculiar thought: Is an artist still an artist if they stop being an artist?
> Come on, the alternative to taxpayers subsidising artists isn't that artists face a choice between death or revolt.
No of course not, yet artists committing suicide for being unable to create their art isn't exactly unheard of. And what I said is exactly true if you maybe think about things a little differently.
I think that art is also about ideas and experiences that can stimulate another ideas. Can takes you out of your usual context of thinking. There is no demand for it. How can be there be demand for something that do not exist yet. But it can influence generations. Not every value can be directly purchased.
Modern art world is completely overtaken by cliques and is basically about marketing and who-knows-who. If you create something that is against the current clique that runs things (i.e. are curators in major museums, officials in Ministry of Culture, art critics in major newspapers etc.) then you're basically screwed. The art world absolutely eclipses academia in terms of petty politics.
The reason for that is of course the impossibility of objectively judging the value of a work of art. It's all subjective, and hence "emperor's new clothes" kinds of situation are commonplace. Also, subjectivity heavily supports no-skill fields like conceptual or performance art - why work 10+ years to learn how to paint properly, when you can do abstract paint splatters, and instead work on marketing it, building a clique (an "art movement") with like-minded allied "artists" instead?
IMO it's all fair game until taxpayer's money are involved. I for one don't want my taxes to be paying a small fortune for an empty piece of canvas, the "artist"'s canned shit or a "performance" of an "artist" sitting on a stool and peeling potatoes.
To me universal basic income is just that, universal.
This feels like the government employing 2000 people and telling them to do nothing in particular.
Also it seems the payment is set to the Irish minimum wage of €10.50 p/h. I would love to know what an actual minimum wage worker thinks of this scheme.
Fortunately, this is a testable prediction. If you can nail it down a bit, maybe you could register it somewhere like https://predictionbook.com/ ? After all, if you're right, having a track record to point to would increase your credibility.
Call me cynical but governments employ millions of people who effectively do nothing so a few thousand more won't cause a blip on the spending graph. My only consolation is that those who don't do anything don't cause as much harm as those who purport to serve their constituents via actual governing.
Nobody told them anything close to that. Any research towards basic income tells us that people continue working close to as much as before. So this seems like a really unnecessary combative comment.
Regarding minimum wage workers, one thing can be bad, while the other is also bad. So not really an argument.
> Any research towards basic income tells us that people continue working close to as much as before
I am curious about the research in this field. Living in Israel I see the Ultra-Orthodox being payed for studying the scriptures and they work much less than their secular peers. Knowing corrupt countries, I know of tons of people employed by the state and local authorities just to give them jobs - it is a sign of malfunctioning and corruption usually - and they often do nothing in their job.
What those examples have in common is that they create a class of people dependent on a party or on some politician to eat their meal. This entrenches tribalism and corruption.
Also there is a very big difference between "universal basic income" - which would be an extension of human rights accorded to all, and paying some "artists" money. The former may be the evolution of the latter but there is no way to be certain. I am not familiar with Ireland but I suspect it is a trick of some party to secure thousands of certain votes, and probably even to use them for propaganda (I want to see those artists expose critical views of the party that gives them money..).
> Multiple studies of where basic income was tried in the real world found it to reduce work.
> For example, "Manitoba, Canada experimented with Mincome, a basic guaranteed income, in the 1970s. In the town of Dauphin, Manitoba, labor only decreased by 13%, much less than expected" [1]. There are plenty of others.
So not "any research". The research you think of are probably academic and/or pilot studies, which is absolutely not UBI.
But I think the parent wrote in a hurry. It should probably have said "without demands or restrictions".
There was a debate regarding this topic just recently in Poland, where they wanted to introduce something of this kind.
This is wrong in so many ways. It will encourage people to basically pretend they're doing some kind of art even if they're not.
If someone is a real artist imo, they will manage. It will be part-time but eventually they will get better and can start making money out of it, and if not then well it can just be their hobby right?
Why am I not supposed to be paid for making my own garden look good? Is it art or hobby?
It will be part-time but eventually they will get better and can start making money out of it, and if not then well it can just be their hobby right?
Except that's not what actually happens. People working a full time job (or more than one job) don't have the time or energy to also be a part-time artist until they make it. This is especially true for people who have other responsibilities like raising children or caring for elderly relatives. Leaving it up to "the market" only works if a single part time job is enough to live on, and it isn't.
UBI for artists means they can work a little less to make time for making art. Society is essentially paying them to make art. That makes society better. Ireland has decided it's a worthwhile investment.
I'd love to live in a society where everyone is paid to do something they love, to make society better, but doing it for artists to start with is a great first step.
If their skills aren't marketable in free market, why should other people subsidise them? I would much rather the money to be spend on something actually productive or physical. And not wasted entirely on art...
>Because if the only culture you have is the marketable one it will be McDonalds, Disney and Marvel
And giving a couple of bucks to individual artist will somehow make them able to go toe-to-toe with the Disney juggernaut how exactly?
If marketability is what's missing, then why not give free airtime to all artists on national radio/TV broadcasters instead, this way the whole county can hear/see them, and then the audience will decide if they like them or not.
You can apply your argument to european SW companies. Because local companies lacked "marketability" we are now all dependent on US tech for everything despite having some local alternatives. However, the governments giving free money to local tech companies (which many received through various EU grants) wouldn't have improved the outcome much as the customers voted with their wallets (or with their private data) to use those US tech products and not local alternatives (like how many now use iPhones and not Nokias, Blackberrys or Ericssons).
I feel it's the same with art. Consumers will vote with their wallet or their attention and consume content that they enjoy or gives them dopamine hits regardless of its origin or financial backing. So if no consumers and no patrons like your art, why should the government just give you free money except for reasons of national pride and sovereignty maybe?
Why does the city/country not invest that money in affordable housing first?
Handing out a few bucks to artists will not fix the main issues of why artists and all low wage workers can't survive anymore in today's cities, namely, unaffordable housing.
Europe's biggest cultural centers (London, Paris, Amsterdam, etc.) have turned into the playground of foreign billionaires, real estate speculators and >six-figure income law-, management-consulting-, finance- and tech- bros, with rents skyrocketing, so how are artists or anyone else low on funds supposed to survive in these environments?
This artist-grant money will not fix the core issue as it's like trying to stop a flood with a paper tissue.
>Governments have enough resources to do more than one thing at a time.
They have resources, but reality has show they lack the will to properly use them as those in charge are more concerned about winning these popularity contests called "elections" rather than taking radical actions to do any meaningful change. So it's a lot less riskier for their careers to sit back and kick the can down the road while starting projects that sound good on paper and wins them sympathy ("new law wants to help struggling artists") but accomplish nothing meaningful in the end (CoL, inflation and wealth inequality will keep rising, wages will stagnate). Rinse and repeat.
If their skills aren't marketable in free market, why should other people subsidise them?
Lots of things that society has collectively decided are they would like to have aren't possible in a free market. Roads are a good example. If people had to buy their own roads you might have freeways but towns would be dirt tracks. Roads would be wildly different around the country. Signs wouldn't be unified by design. It'd be awful. The military is another example. If people actually had to buy military things in a free market you'd have a fragmented market of tiny militias and absolutely no national defence infrastructure. The list of things that are only possible to pay for in a socialized way is very long.
There's no reason why increasing the supply of art beyond the limited amount that the free market will provide isn't another thing that would make society better.
I think you're missing the point here.
It's great to have cultural heritage, but it's much better to get people out of poverty and hunger first, I think we should mainly focus on more important tasks at hand if we already have the resources to do that.
Don't get me wrong, I'm an art enthusiast myself but I think that if someone is really passionate, they will go out and look for a sponsor themselves that's how it worked over the ages and our cultural heritage as a civilization is quite rich I'd say.
This is especially true for people who have other responsibilities like raising children or caring for elderly relatives.
But that's how every side hustle works, you have to get organized and manage your time well, having children is not an excuse.
This was received very well by the artistic community in Ireland so it's odd to see people remarking it's not much or will do little. Certainly better than tolerating the open secret that many of them weren't' "actively looking for work" when claiming the dole.
People being given free money say it's good they've been given free money. News at 11.
> Certainly better than tolerating the open secret that many of them weren't' "actively looking for work" when claiming the dole.
I agree there. The real move forward is the (re)acceptance that certain sectors of society are a poor fit for the salaried-work/commercial-enterprise model. It's the good part of socialism, which should be par for the course in an European social democracy - the fact that we don't expect it anymore is a very sad result of 30 years of political decline in the West.
If it's anything like the way Tories designed universal credit to be in the UK it'll end up disqualifying real artists and qualifying people who learn how to game the system.
I mean, maybe some? That's typically a risk you take with these things, unless you want to spend most of the money on oversight. It's capped, and not a huge payment, so any impact from that would be limited.
> two thousand arts and culture workers for a span of three years … earmarked €25 million for the plan … top recommendation … €10.50 per hour
3 years × 2,000 hours per year (estimate of full time employment) × €10.50 per hour × 2,000 people = €126 million, five times as much as is earmarked (even ignoring administrative costs). Perhaps it’s 400 rather than 2,000, perhaps it’s not full-time, perhaps the mention of the top recommendation of €10.50 is a red herring and not what’s being implemented (one must admit that €2/hour doesn’t sound so impressive), perhaps something else?
There is more than a whiff of racism in the wanton attacks she faced.
She received more death and rape threats than any other female MP, for example.
Somehow there were more memes for fluffing her figures in one interview than the future leader got for hiding from a journalist in a fridge a week or so later.
It's a fairly well documented fact at this point that abuse of Diane Abbott's incorrect use of maths is driven mostly by misogynistic online abuse and hate-filled newspapers looking ot make a quick buck. I'm not suggesting that's you, but please don't perpetuate it.
You don't have to look far beyond the people in power right now to see politicians making stuff up or saying things that are completely untrue. Why is Diane in the firing line? She's not even an Irish politician.
The Prime Minister of my country in the 1990s stumbled over some easy math in an interview. It is still a meme today ("é só fazer as contas"), even as he's currently Secretary-General of the UN.
>It's a fairly well documented fact at this point
I don't know how an opinion can be a well documented fact.
A Guardian article quoting her party colleague isn't exactly an unbaised or even evidential source. Dianne Abbott is clearly capable in many areas, but the examples that follow her around persist precisely for that reason. She should have known better.
Except any mention of her in the right-wing press and online is always designed to make her look entirely incapable. The meme is "she's stupid", not "she's great and capable, but got some maths wrong."
I digress though. The mention of her here perpetuates a lazy stereotype about a politician in a different country. It adds nothing to the discussion and seeks to make a politician of a different country appear stupid.
However, slapping the phrase UBI on your program while it’s trendy is a genius way to “rebrand” something most governments already do. Politicians are the best marketers.
A few times in the past 3–5 years I came across Europeans who would travel and do stuff like photography or filmmaking while being compensated by the government. I was told that those are programs where basically all you need is to be an unemployed artist. (Some of those people would also do remote software consulting or such, although I think that was bending the rules slightly.)
For a country that wants to start a similar program, mislabeling it (because of course it is not actually universal) as “UBI” could be strategic—make people comfortable with the term that could later be expanded to involve actual UBI with less controversy.
> For a country that wants to start a similar program, mislabeling it (because of course it is not actually universal) as “UBI” could be strategic—make people comfortable with the term that could later be expanded to involve actual UBI with less controversy.
Or water it dowm so that people can't ask for actual UBI.
> mislabeling it (because of course it is not actually universal) as “UBI” could be strategic
Note that the Irish government, which already has a bunch of other artists' grants and supports, is _not_ calling it "universal". That's a (mostly foreign) media thing.
> which already has a bunch of other artists' grants and supports
I imagine most governments do it to some degree, but the question is how straightforward those grants are to get by someone who legitimately warrants one. Is there a lot of bureaucracy to get through in Ireland? do you often meet creatives receiving such a grant? traveling on it abroad?
IMO exempting from tax is qualitatively different from just giving an artist money to live off of, which is what surprised me in those French/Swiss programs.
One must either already be successful and business-savvy enough to earn money from one’s art or have a job/a sponsor, which defeats the point to some degree.
I’m aware governments offer grants where they sponsor art, but from what I know the requirements and amounts of paperwork make it not really interesting to someone without established fame or connections.
There are also grants (see https://www.artscouncil.ie/available-funding/ for instance, and local authorities and things have their own), but this thing seems like an interesting addition, and far less complex to administer.
The only redeeming feature for me is that the scope is so limited... to some number of artists... because an unbounded program would just be an incentive for all unemployed people to lie about being artists... By limiting the numbers means you have to have a crtierion whereby people are accepted. Another program I like is apparently India pays chess. grand masters a bit of a living stipend so they can focus on their chess? I think such things can be better uses of money than the typical wasteful expenditure of government programs... in this case the money goes to people most likely to use it in good ways or people who have shown merit. To become a chess GM is exceptional. Just like being a serious artist as a lifestyle.
I've never really looked too closely at the idea of UBI, although I like the concept. I always assumed that any money you earn would then be deducted from future payments. With completely arbitrary numbers, let's say UBI was 1000€/month and I earned 500€ in a particular month, then next month my UBI payment would be reduced by that amount. If I earned 1500€ my next UBI payment would be zero, but the excess 500€ would not be rolled over. I may have completely misunderstood how UBI is supposed to work though.
I believe most implementations do not do that. That could lead to a disincentive for work, since you would need to make the entire amount of the ubi payment before your labor is benefiting you.
It is usually a flat rate for everyone, no matter the income. If you want more money, you sell your labor like normal
Sadly, this is the way it works in the UK. Welfare payments are cut by any increases in your pay. So a person who might be offered overtime for some extra money has no incentive to take it because their total take home stays the same but with the latter they miss out on spending time with their family/resting etc.
"a basic income pilot program that would award SELECTED arts workers €10.50 ($11.90) per hour."
Selected is the key word. I imagine it would be only a handful that are paid to be full time artists, while the remainder might get funding for specific projects or periods of time.
That's a terrible way to implement UBI. It causes the dreaded welfare trap where people are incentivized to do nothing. UBI should be unconditional. This makes it much easier to implement, removes the stigma, and most importantly avoids the welfare trap. You want people who rely on welfare to be encouraged to become self sufficient, not trap them in dependence.
Welfare traps are a policy feature for company owners who employ a lot of people. It's a strong disincentive for employees who are trapped to ask for a raise.
Nonetheless when they appear their presence is typically (naively) chalked up to simple incompetence.
>Welfare traps are a policy feature for company owners who employ a lot of people.
It's simpler than that. There's not even a need to speculate about outside meddling.
No bureaucrat or appointee ever got a promotion or got more resources at their disposal for getting people off of government services and shrinking the relevance of the program. If you start with the program serving 10k people budget negotiations, getting those job reqs, etc, etc. will be harder if the program is so good that next year there's only 9k people on it. There's a massive incentive to just not give a shit about giving people a bridge to actually get off of welfare because why would any organization actively give a shit about creating a pathway toward making itself less relevant.
>No bureaucrat or appointee ever got a promotion or got more resources at their disposal for getting people off of government services and shrinking the relevance of the program.
If business runs government then it's in their interests to keep benefits systems stingy, capricious, hard to navigate and unpredictable as it makes people more reliant on their employers.
Removing it altogether would probably trigger riots but the frog can certainly be boiled.
Is the welfare trap real though? I suspect it may be for tiny minority, but imo most people would prefer to actually do something than sit on their ass and collect money for nothing. Again I may be grossly naïve in this area.
It is absolutely real and the biggest cliffs are for those already working full time.
Here's an example showing how someone making 31k per year needs to find a job making 80k a year to increase their net income.
Regarding who this impacts:
Approximately 35% of Americans make <31k and would see their quality of life go down if they took a job paying >31k.
Another approximately 40% of Americans earn between 31-80K and would be better off financially if they took a pay cut to 30K (at least in the short term). They get to see those making less living better.
OK, that is a different kind of welfare trap. Something similar occurs in the UK, where earning more money from an employer can reduce benefits payments and you end up worse off in real terms. However I was really asking about the welfare trap of "get money for doing literally nothing", which I personally believe is a nonsense that only a tiny minority would be happy doing.
I always assumed that any money you earn would then be deducted from future payments
Not directly, at least not in most described implementations. Most implementations say that, if you qualify, you get 1000€/month every month no matter how much you earn. Now a lot of people add a secondary mechanism where some or all of that money gets clawed back, indirectly via increased income tax, if you earn 'too much', but the base idea is the 1000€ gets deposited into your account every month no matter how much or little you earn.
The rationale for this is a), not do disincentivize doing extra work and b) to simplify the system as much as possible and remove the need to spend a lot of extra time and effort on means testing, fraud detection, handling complaints etc.
2,000 hours at 40 hours/week is 50 weeks. As a European, that sounds really really high.
I believe around 1,700 is the real average for all of EU, for instance. That is not enough of course to change the result much (at 1,700 hours they would need €107 or just above four times the earmarked amount), I just wanted to point it out.
My figure of 2,000 was estimating the hours you’re paid for, including holidays, not the hours worked, matching Australia’s model for salary, where the figure is normally reckoned annually. It’s still definitely a touch on the high side (standard in Australia is 7.5h/day, which multiplied by 5 days per week and 52 and a bit weeks per year comes to 1,950 hours per year or a little more), but not by much—around 2.5%, rather than 11–12%.
I think that's the way to go. I really enjoy art, especially music. There's a lot of money in the market, but most artists really struggle to make a living. The superstars get rich.
With a basic income for artists, everyone profits:
- Artists can be more creative and independent, because they don't need to monetize their work.
- People can enjoy art regardless of their social status and the money in their pocket.
- Society has a richer, more diverse and creative culture.
Hopefully these artists can use this opportunity to create a following in the NFT market, which is rapidly growing and could possibly lead to a massive expansion in annual spending on art.
How often does a new James Joyce arise out of government subsidies?
We spend much more money on art than in 1920, yet the art quality does not seem to have improved proportionately, indeed it possibly went down. That might or might not be causal (possibly talented people do not choose to be artists anymore), but it is still worrying.
There is a lot of gatekeeping around art and professionals tend to declare opinions of amateurs for null and void, but as a reader I still miss a new Oscar Wilde.
We spend much more money on art than in 1920, yet the art quality does not seem to have improved proportionately, indeed it possibly went down.
I think it's hard to say because there's so much art above a basic quality bar now that it's next to impossible to experience, curate or judge a significant amount of it, even within a category.
We are so overwhelmed with creative output that even watching every "highly recommended" TV show or movie we're recommended on Netflix would be a fulltime job, let alone the hidden gems, or the millions of books published each year. You'd hope that someone would find the next Oscar Wilde and shout about it, but I don't like the odds.. especially as the gamut of what is considered good literature is now broader than ever before.
I frequently find some amazing new music that isn't popular and shout about it a bit but no-one really cares. There's too much music, tastes vary too much (what I find amazing could well seem like total crud to everyone else), and most people prefer to listen to what they already know over and over rather than keep digging for something new.
I mean, commercial art today is a lot better than commercial art in the 20s. Find some old radio recordings if you don't believe me. And that's where the money goes. We don't spend dramatically more on, say, literary novelists than they did in the 20s; that continues to be a thing that people do out of passion rather than for money, so you wouldn't expect the rate of production to have gone up very much.
> Martin emphasized the importance of aiding artists in continuing their work. “The minister is conscious of the value that this sector brings to all Irish citizens,”
What about the work of health workers, delivery people, drivers, employees in supermarkets, cleaners, constructions workers, etc.?
Several of those groups have much stronger lobbies in Ireland than artists do, I would argue.
Live music and theatres in particular have been almost totally shut down here since March 2020. I'm struggling to think of any other sector that has been so badly hit during the pandemic.
Iceland has had this for quite some time. It's usually a hot topic in the media every year.
I think it was started in 2009 after the 2008 financial crisis which hit Iceland particularly hard
https://is.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listamannalaun
Because art is easy to appreciate universally ( anyone can like music or a painting), and software is not. It's an abstract thing for most people.
I do think it'd be a great idea to have grants / subsidies / UBI for FOSS developers. The EU is slowly walking in that direction with donations and funding a big bounty programme for FOSS they directly use.
If we’re using universality as a benchmark, more people can appreciate the advances in technology facilitated by Linux, Postgres, Git, and WordPress, than they do a lot of art, which can be culturally or linguistically specific, obscure, or highly subjective in general.
Unless you’re talking about very specific art and very specific software, I don’t think universality is a strong argument.
Yes, but people know about Justin Bieber. They can understand his latest hit, they can sing and dance to it. How many people know about Linux and what it enables?
I mean... if that's the intention it's a bit on the optimistic side. Irish artists as a group, even those who benefit from the artists' tax exemption and various grant schemes, are not exactly known for being pro-government. I'm not sure that artists in any democratic country are; arguably artists being generally pro-government would be a rather bad sign.
Is it right to call this UBI? In Norway we have supported artists economically since at least the mid 1800s. Playwrights like Henrik Ibsen got paid by the government after decisions by the Parliament.
This is payment for contributing specifically to the cultural enrichment of the country while UBI as a system has no strings attached.
Same in Iceland. We have something called "artist salary" where every year a handful of artists are selected to essentially be paid by the government to practice their craft. Opinions are however divided as there's always this debate about who is deemed worthy and who is not.
This sounds very similar, but I think they'll have the same problem; who decides what art is worthy of being supported?
But not everybody gets to become an 'entrant' from what I gathered. From the article it sounds like you at the very least have to be "working in the fields of arts, culture, audio-visual, and live performance and events" to even apply. Does the truck driver who likes to jam with his mates in the garage or the nurse who paints water colors to relax in the evening get to apply? probably not.
Most governments (including the Irish government) have supported artists to some degree in the past, through grants, etc. I think the main difference is that this is intended to be broader support and not tied to specific projects.
So, we have degrading social nets, public education and public health. But we should fund people for "doing what they love" because it has "positive externalities" (left undefined).
I am a doctor and I hate it. Please fund my passion, so I can stop doing that and bring positive externalities to society.
> So, we have degrading social nets, public education and public health. But we should fund people for "doing what they love" because it has "positive externalities" (left undefined)
This is a false dilemma. We obviously should do both.
As someone who lives in Ireland and who pays taxes a lot of people on HN would say are outrageous, I support this wholeheartedly and would gladly pay even more taxes if such a program were extended and become truly universal.
I would, of course, continue to do what I do because I love it.
I didn't quite understand this part: "The committee’s top recommendation was the creation of a basic income pilot program that would award selected arts workers €10.50 ($11.90) per hour." They will be payed €10.50 on top of very hour that they work or will they get that money for every hour that they don't work? Do they count artists to work 40 hours per week?
Why is it so often "artists" that receive this kind of public funding? Why not open source developers? Hear me out, this isn't the "my hobbies are more important than your hobbies" kind of argument.
Art is almost always exclusively used for consumption. That doesn't make it worthless: it has value to the people who enjoy consuming that kind of art. But when an artist creates a work of art, that's the end of the chain – there's typically nothing that can build on that work, no other work that is enabled by this work.
The case is different for open source software, for example. Not all OSS is used productively by other people, but some of it is, enabling other work in sometimes completely different fields. For example, the Linux kernel and other OSS components which provide a versatile and free (as in free beer) operating system, have facilitated the creation of an incredible amount of value all over the world, in many different domains. Many of those thus facilitated works have themselves enabled other works, and so on. It's a source of value creation chains, not the end of one.
So, why start a grant program *cough cough* "UBI" for artists, but not for open source developers?
> Art is almost always exclusively used for consumption ... Not all OSS is used productively by other people
If anything it's the opposite: there is more demand for software than art.
True, for most niche single-developer OSS projects is very difficult to gain an user community. But for a random musician/sculptor/painter it's even worse.
234 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadIt's always nice seeing countries look to support their artists in building their cultural heritage.
These feel more like government artist in residence grants.
The gov itself seem to speak about a basic income. :) Media...
But, at the end of the day it's still worth close to nothing, right?
I enjoy art and music as much as anyone else but the reason those professions are so poorly paid is because the supply outstrips the demand considerably[1]. What value is there in asking taxpayers to pay for an increase the supply when there's already too much supply?
Sure, paying people for doing what they love even when you are going to, in effect, throw away whatever they produce is madness.
[1] I play guitar and sketch/paint. Of the other people (who do these things) that I have regular contact with, no one can make money of the things they produce. My rough guess is that for every 1000 musician/art supply, only 1 is demanded.
Or it may not. We can't tell objectively, because there is no metric to measure.
I suppose my point is, if you cannot tell that there is a benefit at all, why leap to the assumption that it's a large enough benefit to pay 25m euros for.
In its current form art market is looking more like tax break/deductibles market.
If anything, we need the ultra rich to fund this kind of thing based on their taste. That worked well in the past with the court musician/composer and patronage.
There are so many problems with this UBI idea. The medium is one that comes to mind. We have largely moved on from paint on canvas to video the way we moved on from sculpture in stone to paint on canvas.
Does the artist have the artistic freedom to start a youtube channel with the money? I would suspect not.
Most likely this goes to propping up outdated mediums of expression and will lack the complete freedom needed for a true artist to really express themselves.
Then of course you have to contend with those gaming the system to free roll by collecting old toilets from the trash to work on their homage to Duchamp masterpiece.
I suspect there is reason for the starving artist archetype.
Maybe the artist is making under-appreciated contributions, or maybe their work is just not good. It's subjective, which means criticism is subjective too, but it seems a poor place to start with any UBI scheme executed in good faith.
I would think it would have more value as an experiment to start with some of the poorest people in a society and then measure their quality of life and economic contribution throughout and after the programme. If you could show a net-positive economic contribution during the programme, and a net-negative contribution before and after (as unlikely as I suspect that is to achieve) it would make it substantially easier to get popular support for UBI.
Many artists that are highly valued today weren't in their times, with many dying destitute or never selling anything of note. Current valuation isn't a predictor on later appreciation.
But that's precisely the point of the subsidy. Society as a whole already expresses value judgements, every day, through money. If an artist is valued, he is successful and accumulates money, so he doesn't need subsidies; but the fact that an artist is valued or not-valued today, we know, is a poor indication of their overall value in the long run. Maybe their art will explode in value after death, maybe he will start a movement that will generate better artists and designers...
The point of universal income, surely, is exactly to remove the immediate value judgement from the equation. UBI is supposed to pay everyone, regardless of what they choose to do (except for raping and murdering, I guess; but ironically, convicts are among the first to actually "enjoy" an UBI of sorts already, although to the price of their liberty). In this sense, starting from art actually makes the most sense.
> it would have more value as an experiment to start with some of the poorest people in a society and then measure their quality of life and economic contribution
The minute you start measuring economic contribution, you are not really in UBI territory anymore - you are just subsidising the market at its fringes. That's already done in social democracies, in practice, through various means.
Art is something that may only be valued highly ex post facto, and which takes a long time of intensive training to get started...
I’m just saying that there are easily hundreds of creative activities people do every day just for the love of it. Each of them could be artistically appreciated later. Narrowing in on this one subset, especially with taxpayer funding, seems not only unfair but also uninformative at large (we learn little about the economic impact of UBI as the U is missing here).
As others have said though, this appears to actually be an artist’s grant labelled as UBI, which makes the whole thing moot (these have been around for a long time with allocated funding).
This isn't intended to start a UBI scheme, that's an embellishment from the article title. From the article text:
"The scheme [...] is meant to assist those working in the fields of arts [...] who suffered economically as the global Covid-19 crisis surged in-country."
From another source [0], it's also time-limited to 3 years.
I think the less hype reading of the news is that artists are struggling through COVID so the government is offering support to ensure they don't lose a good chunk of the industry.
> one could also argue that the reason a given artist is struggling is because their work is not highly valued in the first place.
Art that's not valuable now could very well be found to be valuable later. Van Gogh died broke and essentially unknown but now he's one of the world's most well-known artists.
[0]: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ireland-basic-income-arts-...
If we had a true healthcare free market starting from scratch right now the money would go into blood panel sampling and building massive data sets to use machine learning algorithms for classification.
If I had a full quarterly blood panel sample that went into a database in 5-10 years the most trivial random forest would crush my doctor as far as classification.
Pushing 50 my visits to the doctor are not going to look that much different than when I was a kid in 1980 for my entire life.
Instead, with this bullshit system my doctor doesn't even want to do a full panel once a year. The government is not going to pay for that.
Even better, imagine a $200 dollar home device to do a full blood sample once a month with a $20 subscription fee for analysis. 2-3 years from now would be incredible.
Just impossible to have happen with this wonderful healthcare system the collectivist love so much.
Those people who have already managed to turn it into a fulltime job are more than sufficient to ensure that arts and culture exist. What exactly do you expect to see when more f/time practitioners are added to the existing mix?
If I single out musicians - where I am on the west of Ireland, the cultural impact largely comes from street buskers and trad sessions in small pubs - not the profitable acts filling a stadium once every 5 years.
Given that the local scene is a honeypot for tourists, where as stage tours breezing through town probably extract more than they bring, it might actually be an overall profitable investment - even if the individual artists aren't.
No, it's hardcore keynesism. You're still sustaining demand in the market for all their necessities, from food and toilet paper to brushes and smart LEDs; and you are supporting the overall quality of life in the country, which passes also through people getting involved in art in various ways (as critics, consumers, etc). The fact that you may or may not get valuable output at the end is relatively irrelevant; in the end, a couple of resulting unicorns could probably repay the whole operation just by publicity and goodwill flowing to Ireland.
The inflation targeting thing was an attempt to solve the problem in a less micromanaged way. In practice you still got the usual wealth concentration cycle that everyone knows from history.
Taxes should be spent in a manner that serves society and its people. The sharing of art benefits everyone. Even art you don't like benefits you, because there is a good chance an artist you like will be influenced by it. If you want a thriving art scene you need people making art. Much of it might get thrown away and never reach an audience, but gems will emerge from it.
Even if one takes a completely selfish approach to art (ie, only art that I like is good art), there is benefit in having more artists making more art. As someone who does not live in Ireland I enjoy some art made in Ireland. So even I benefit from Ireland supporting its artists.
This is a positive externality for landlords and a negative one for tenant. It's a zero-sum game between the two groups.
And rent-seeking is a net negative for society.
Even for tenants, it's not as simple as you suggest; most renters would rather live in a gentrified area than a run-down, crime-ridden one (which is exactly why rents are higher). Arguably the only category of people who definitely lose out are long-term, low-income renters with no protections, but they are relatively rare in Ireland.
Gentrification has its problems for sure but I know several people who grew up in formerly run-down areas that are now gentrified, and they would never want to go back to the way things were.
When "taxpayers" refuse to subsidize non-taxpayers, they run the risk of those non-taxpayers murdering them; the "value" is that it directly prevents death and revolt.
Some people just simply don't agree that people should have to die simply because there are too many people, either because they're (directly or indirectly) worried about revolt or because they're "good people" who think people have a right to life, dignity, and happiness.
But some people don't: either because they lie to themselves about what the ramifications of their decisions will be (or are simply ignorant to it), or because they believe in destiny -- that god, for example, wants some people to live and others to die.
What a peculiar thought: Is an artist still an artist if they stop being an artist?
> Come on, the alternative to taxpayers subsidising artists isn't that artists face a choice between death or revolt.
No of course not, yet artists committing suicide for being unable to create their art isn't exactly unheard of. And what I said is exactly true if you maybe think about things a little differently.
The reason for that is of course the impossibility of objectively judging the value of a work of art. It's all subjective, and hence "emperor's new clothes" kinds of situation are commonplace. Also, subjectivity heavily supports no-skill fields like conceptual or performance art - why work 10+ years to learn how to paint properly, when you can do abstract paint splatters, and instead work on marketing it, building a clique (an "art movement") with like-minded allied "artists" instead?
IMO it's all fair game until taxpayer's money are involved. I for one don't want my taxes to be paying a small fortune for an empty piece of canvas, the "artist"'s canned shit or a "performance" of an "artist" sitting on a stool and peeling potatoes.
we are all artists in that way.
I don't play or paint, but in my country I take care of some vineyard a couple of centuries old, at my expenses.
Of course I also enjoy the wine made from them and make no money out of it, I lose a little bit every year.
Should I be included in those that "build the cultural heritage" of my country, given that my country is the world's largest producer of wine?
Or am I simply adding a few thousand liters of wine to an already massive production, basically adding almost nothing to our "cultural heritage"?
This feels like the government employing 2000 people and telling them to do nothing in particular.
Also it seems the payment is set to the Irish minimum wage of €10.50 p/h. I would love to know what an actual minimum wage worker thinks of this scheme.
Are we still doing coffee and subway artists?
Nobody told them anything close to that. Any research towards basic income tells us that people continue working close to as much as before. So this seems like a really unnecessary combative comment.
Regarding minimum wage workers, one thing can be bad, while the other is also bad. So not really an argument.
As in not being given a task or directive for their income.
I'm not saying they're told to literally do nothing.
I am curious about the research in this field. Living in Israel I see the Ultra-Orthodox being payed for studying the scriptures and they work much less than their secular peers. Knowing corrupt countries, I know of tons of people employed by the state and local authorities just to give them jobs - it is a sign of malfunctioning and corruption usually - and they often do nothing in their job.
What those examples have in common is that they create a class of people dependent on a party or on some politician to eat their meal. This entrenches tribalism and corruption.
Also there is a very big difference between "universal basic income" - which would be an extension of human rights accorded to all, and paying some "artists" money. The former may be the evolution of the latter but there is no way to be certain. I am not familiar with Ireland but I suspect it is a trick of some party to secure thousands of certain votes, and probably even to use them for propaganda (I want to see those artists expose critical views of the party that gives them money..).
> Multiple studies of where basic income was tried in the real world found it to reduce work.
> For example, "Manitoba, Canada experimented with Mincome, a basic guaranteed income, in the 1970s. In the town of Dauphin, Manitoba, labor only decreased by 13%, much less than expected" [1]. There are plenty of others.
So not "any research". The research you think of are probably academic and/or pilot studies, which is absolutely not UBI.
But I think the parent wrote in a hurry. It should probably have said "without demands or restrictions".
This is wrong in so many ways. It will encourage people to basically pretend they're doing some kind of art even if they're not.
If someone is a real artist imo, they will manage. It will be part-time but eventually they will get better and can start making money out of it, and if not then well it can just be their hobby right? Why am I not supposed to be paid for making my own garden look good? Is it art or hobby?
Except that's not what actually happens. People working a full time job (or more than one job) don't have the time or energy to also be a part-time artist until they make it. This is especially true for people who have other responsibilities like raising children or caring for elderly relatives. Leaving it up to "the market" only works if a single part time job is enough to live on, and it isn't.
UBI for artists means they can work a little less to make time for making art. Society is essentially paying them to make art. That makes society better. Ireland has decided it's a worthwhile investment.
I'd love to live in a society where everyone is paid to do something they love, to make society better, but doing it for artists to start with is a great first step.
And giving a couple of bucks to individual artist will somehow make them able to go toe-to-toe with the Disney juggernaut how exactly?
If marketability is what's missing, then why not give free airtime to all artists on national radio/TV broadcasters instead, this way the whole county can hear/see them, and then the audience will decide if they like them or not.
You can apply your argument to european SW companies. Because local companies lacked "marketability" we are now all dependent on US tech for everything despite having some local alternatives. However, the governments giving free money to local tech companies (which many received through various EU grants) wouldn't have improved the outcome much as the customers voted with their wallets (or with their private data) to use those US tech products and not local alternatives (like how many now use iPhones and not Nokias, Blackberrys or Ericssons).
I feel it's the same with art. Consumers will vote with their wallet or their attention and consume content that they enjoy or gives them dopamine hits regardless of its origin or financial backing. So if no consumers and no patrons like your art, why should the government just give you free money except for reasons of national pride and sovereignty maybe?
Handing out a few bucks to artists will not fix the main issues of why artists and all low wage workers can't survive anymore in today's cities, namely, unaffordable housing.
Europe's biggest cultural centers (London, Paris, Amsterdam, etc.) have turned into the playground of foreign billionaires, real estate speculators and >six-figure income law-, management-consulting-, finance- and tech- bros, with rents skyrocketing, so how are artists or anyone else low on funds supposed to survive in these environments?
This artist-grant money will not fix the core issue as it's like trying to stop a flood with a paper tissue.
You're representing this as a dichotomy. It's not though. Governments have enough resources to do more than one thing at a time.
They have resources, but reality has show they lack the will to properly use them as those in charge are more concerned about winning these popularity contests called "elections" rather than taking radical actions to do any meaningful change. So it's a lot less riskier for their careers to sit back and kick the can down the road while starting projects that sound good on paper and wins them sympathy ("new law wants to help struggling artists") but accomplish nothing meaningful in the end (CoL, inflation and wealth inequality will keep rising, wages will stagnate). Rinse and repeat.
Lots of things that society has collectively decided are they would like to have aren't possible in a free market. Roads are a good example. If people had to buy their own roads you might have freeways but towns would be dirt tracks. Roads would be wildly different around the country. Signs wouldn't be unified by design. It'd be awful. The military is another example. If people actually had to buy military things in a free market you'd have a fragmented market of tiny militias and absolutely no national defence infrastructure. The list of things that are only possible to pay for in a socialized way is very long.
There's no reason why increasing the supply of art beyond the limited amount that the free market will provide isn't another thing that would make society better.
Don't get me wrong, I'm an art enthusiast myself but I think that if someone is really passionate, they will go out and look for a sponsor themselves that's how it worked over the ages and our cultural heritage as a civilization is quite rich I'd say.
This is especially true for people who have other responsibilities like raising children or caring for elderly relatives.
But that's how every side hustle works, you have to get organized and manage your time well, having children is not an excuse.
Well yeah obviously it was.
> Certainly better than tolerating the open secret that many of them weren't' "actively looking for work" when claiming the dole.
I agree there. The real move forward is the (re)acceptance that certain sectors of society are a poor fit for the salaried-work/commercial-enterprise model. It's the good part of socialism, which should be par for the course in an European social democracy - the fact that we don't expect it anymore is a very sad result of 30 years of political decline in the West.
Well, yeah. The community gets offered free money, and receives the news well. All others aren't so enthusiastic.
What were you expecting?
"Our survey says that shouting inanities in a regional accent is valuable to culture" - Singing of the Bonesaws
3 years × 2,000 hours per year (estimate of full time employment) × €10.50 per hour × 2,000 people = €126 million, five times as much as is earmarked (even ignoring administrative costs). Perhaps it’s 400 rather than 2,000, perhaps it’s not full-time, perhaps the mention of the top recommendation of €10.50 is a red herring and not what’s being implemented (one must admit that €2/hour doesn’t sound so impressive), perhaps something else?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWYIkhJdOZI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxjkvjHn6Qg
But we all have such moments, she just did it publicly a few times and with that, a meme was born.
She received more death and rape threats than any other female MP, for example.
Somehow there were more memes for fluffing her figures in one interview than the future leader got for hiding from a journalist in a fridge a week or so later.
You don't have to look far beyond the people in power right now to see politicians making stuff up or saying things that are completely untrue. Why is Diane in the firing line? She's not even an Irish politician.
- https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jun/14/abuse-of-di...
- https://thegreatcritique.wordpress.com/2019/12/03/tories-nee...
>It's a fairly well documented fact at this point
I don't know how an opinion can be a well documented fact.
I digress though. The mention of her here perpetuates a lazy stereotype about a politician in a different country. It adds nothing to the discussion and seeks to make a politician of a different country appear stupid.
However, slapping the phrase UBI on your program while it’s trendy is a genius way to “rebrand” something most governments already do. Politicians are the best marketers.
There's statutes and case law that make it unwise for real marketers to make claims the way politicians do.
For a country that wants to start a similar program, mislabeling it (because of course it is not actually universal) as “UBI” could be strategic—make people comfortable with the term that could later be expanded to involve actual UBI with less controversy.
Or water it dowm so that people can't ask for actual UBI.
Note that the Irish government, which already has a bunch of other artists' grants and supports, is _not_ calling it "universal". That's a (mostly foreign) media thing.
> which already has a bunch of other artists' grants and supports
I imagine most governments do it to some degree, but the question is how straightforward those grants are to get by someone who legitimately warrants one. Is there a lot of bureaucracy to get through in Ireland? do you often meet creatives receiving such a grant? traveling on it abroad?
One must either already be successful and business-savvy enough to earn money from one’s art or have a job/a sponsor, which defeats the point to some degree.
I’m aware governments offer grants where they sponsor art, but from what I know the requirements and amounts of paperwork make it not really interesting to someone without established fame or connections.
They are certainly accomplished liars.
It is usually a flat rate for everyone, no matter the income. If you want more money, you sell your labor like normal
Selected is the key word. I imagine it would be only a handful that are paid to be full time artists, while the remainder might get funding for specific projects or periods of time.
Nonetheless when they appear their presence is typically (naively) chalked up to simple incompetence.
It's simpler than that. There's not even a need to speculate about outside meddling.
No bureaucrat or appointee ever got a promotion or got more resources at their disposal for getting people off of government services and shrinking the relevance of the program. If you start with the program serving 10k people budget negotiations, getting those job reqs, etc, etc. will be harder if the program is so good that next year there's only 9k people on it. There's a massive incentive to just not give a shit about giving people a bridge to actually get off of welfare because why would any organization actively give a shit about creating a pathway toward making itself less relevant.
This isnt complicated.
>No bureaucrat or appointee ever got a promotion or got more resources at their disposal for getting people off of government services and shrinking the relevance of the program.
I can remember a number of such examples where there were incentives this being just one: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/30/cruel-...
If business runs government then it's in their interests to keep benefits systems stingy, capricious, hard to navigate and unpredictable as it makes people more reliant on their employers.
Removing it altogether would probably trigger riots but the frog can certainly be boiled.
Here's an example showing how someone making 31k per year needs to find a job making 80k a year to increase their net income.
Regarding who this impacts:
Approximately 35% of Americans make <31k and would see their quality of life go down if they took a job paying >31k.
Another approximately 40% of Americans earn between 31-80K and would be better off financially if they took a pay cut to 30K (at least in the short term). They get to see those making less living better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap#/media/File:Welfa...
Not directly, at least not in most described implementations. Most implementations say that, if you qualify, you get 1000€/month every month no matter how much you earn. Now a lot of people add a secondary mechanism where some or all of that money gets clawed back, indirectly via increased income tax, if you earn 'too much', but the base idea is the 1000€ gets deposited into your account every month no matter how much or little you earn.
The rationale for this is a), not do disincentivize doing extra work and b) to simplify the system as much as possible and remove the need to spend a lot of extra time and effort on means testing, fraud detection, handling complaints etc.
Contrary to what everyone says in this thread, this is the crappy way welfare exists in the UK
I believe around 1,700 is the real average for all of EU, for instance. That is not enough of course to change the result much (at 1,700 hours they would need €107 or just above four times the earmarked amount), I just wanted to point it out.
52 weeks x 5 days/week= 260 working days
260 - 20 (minimum paid holydays) -20 (other reasons, national holidays, etc) = 220 working days
220 x 8 = 1760 hours/year, this could vary - maybe - up to 1800 hours depending on a number of factors, but not more.
Salary average is also misleading, there is a fair amount of inequality in European salaries and total compensation, a median would be better suited.
- Some beneficiaries would otherwise be on jobseekers' allowance (208 eur/week)
- Many beneficiaries would not be full-time, and might be mixing this with a part-time job
- Many beneficiaries will drop out of the programme and get a normal job
With a basic income for artists, everyone profits:
- Artists can be more creative and independent, because they don't need to monetize their work. - People can enjoy art regardless of their social status and the money in their pocket. - Society has a richer, more diverse and creative culture.
Norway has had a stipend programme for writers for some time.
Interesting question: how does not "prove" to be an artist, and a needy one at that? At the moment it's a lottery.
We spend much more money on art than in 1920, yet the art quality does not seem to have improved proportionately, indeed it possibly went down. That might or might not be causal (possibly talented people do not choose to be artists anymore), but it is still worrying.
There is a lot of gatekeeping around art and professionals tend to declare opinions of amateurs for null and void, but as a reader I still miss a new Oscar Wilde.
I think it's hard to say because there's so much art above a basic quality bar now that it's next to impossible to experience, curate or judge a significant amount of it, even within a category.
We are so overwhelmed with creative output that even watching every "highly recommended" TV show or movie we're recommended on Netflix would be a fulltime job, let alone the hidden gems, or the millions of books published each year. You'd hope that someone would find the next Oscar Wilde and shout about it, but I don't like the odds.. especially as the gamut of what is considered good literature is now broader than ever before.
I frequently find some amazing new music that isn't popular and shout about it a bit but no-one really cares. There's too much music, tastes vary too much (what I find amazing could well seem like total crud to everyone else), and most people prefer to listen to what they already know over and over rather than keep digging for something new.
What about the work of health workers, delivery people, drivers, employees in supermarkets, cleaners, constructions workers, etc.?
Live music and theatres in particular have been almost totally shut down here since March 2020. I'm struggling to think of any other sector that has been so badly hit during the pandemic.
I think a good comparison might be home carers or stay at home parents. Very hard to have a regular income from these also
They're the ones paying taxes so that the government can then redistribute the money to unemployable artists.
They have salaries. The artists really didn't have a salary beyond the dole.
I do think it'd be a great idea to have grants / subsidies / UBI for FOSS developers. The EU is slowly walking in that direction with donations and funding a big bounty programme for FOSS they directly use.
Unless you’re talking about very specific art and very specific software, I don’t think universality is a strong argument.
Linux and thus Android would like to have a word with you.
And i say this with an Ubuntu daily driver.
The unsaid part: "recipients are supposed to publicly laud the government": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_painter
Ireland has the sanest political system I've ever seen in person.
This is payment for contributing specifically to the cultural enrichment of the country while UBI as a system has no strings attached.
This sounds very similar, but I think they'll have the same problem; who decides what art is worthy of being supported?
If the number of entrants exceeds the number of allowances, they are randomly selected. It's written in the article.
Most governments (including the Irish government) have supported artists to some degree in the past, through grants, etc. I think the main difference is that this is intended to be broader support and not tied to specific projects.
I am a doctor and I hate it. Please fund my passion, so I can stop doing that and bring positive externalities to society.
This is a false dilemma. We obviously should do both.
As someone who lives in Ireland and who pays taxes a lot of people on HN would say are outrageous, I support this wholeheartedly and would gladly pay even more taxes if such a program were extended and become truly universal.
I would, of course, continue to do what I do because I love it.
Art is almost always exclusively used for consumption. That doesn't make it worthless: it has value to the people who enjoy consuming that kind of art. But when an artist creates a work of art, that's the end of the chain – there's typically nothing that can build on that work, no other work that is enabled by this work.
The case is different for open source software, for example. Not all OSS is used productively by other people, but some of it is, enabling other work in sometimes completely different fields. For example, the Linux kernel and other OSS components which provide a versatile and free (as in free beer) operating system, have facilitated the creation of an incredible amount of value all over the world, in many different domains. Many of those thus facilitated works have themselves enabled other works, and so on. It's a source of value creation chains, not the end of one.
So, why start a grant program *cough cough* "UBI" for artists, but not for open source developers?
If anything it's the opposite: there is more demand for software than art.
True, for most niche single-developer OSS projects is very difficult to gain an user community. But for a random musician/sculptor/painter it's even worse.