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Comment by underpand | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with her premise that the government should fund people to have fulfilling creative careers. That's not how the world works. Creative outputs generally do not have 'efficienciecy' increases like other fields. Creative outputs are zero sum: people only have a constant amount of time to use to consume creative outputs and consumption time has already been saturated.

Efficiency upgrades for entertainment are tied to technology advancement (think the invention of TV, electronic audio devices, VR, video games), not creative output.

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The "creative" part of that sentence is purely from her (super biased) viewpoint. The idea is letting people pursue /a career of their choosing/ rather than being stuck at a low-paying job with no opportunity to change that. She wants people to choose arts, but many would choose a real-world job that interests them. (Ex. a housekeeper has a passion for political issues and wants to work in the government, but has no time/energy/money to pursue it).

I disagree heavily with this. There's been a lot of improvement in the quality and variety of entertainment too over the years not just the technology used to deliver them. If restricted to media from say mid century America post TV most people would be bored stiff by the material available.

It's REALLY easy to wind up with a dismissive attitude towards the arts growing up and working in tech but never forget how much there's a feedback loop between artistic exploration and technological advances and how even a modern 'clean' design encodes a lot of artistic choice behind the scenes.

One can both appreciate the arts and believe that taxpayers shouldn’t be subsidizing arts careers.

> Creative outputs are zero sum..

> Efficiency upgrades for entertainment are tied to technology advancement (think the invention of TV, electronic audio devices, VR, video games), not creative output.

I was largely reacting to these two lines though I also think if we're talking about large scale subsidization, ie a basic income or whatever it may become, saying we shouldn't subsidize something must mean it's significantly less valuable than other work. (Which since we're on HN generally means tech is pretty high up on the value list)

But back to the meat of what I was responding to. I disagree that entertainment is zero sum, even if a creative work isn't consumed by a particular person directly it still goes into the cultural millieu and contributes to the texture of society where it can enrich indirectly.

And the second line just reeked of dismissing the increased space for expression driven by new technologies in favor of looking at just the raw amount of consumption that can be done.

Also, art does not only have a function in terms of entertainment. Art is vital to human expression, and a very powerful tool to propose an idea or "mood".

cities would be terrible without public art for example, they would be dull, gray concrete silos of empty existance.

Oh yeah there was a lot more I'd love to say about how arts quietly improve everyone's millieu even without active conscious consumption. But I figured I'd better edit myself and not go off on a long rambling rant about the pervasive dismissal of art and the siloing of society into useful and non useful work based principally on what value can be captured, commoditized and quantified in the US in particular.

What improvement in quality? I'd argue that most improvment is due to increased efficiency of information retrieval, content creation and content delivery, all driven by technological advancement.

I agree that diversity of entertainment options is important, but we're well past the saturation point even without subsidization.

Arts is not mere entertainment.

Students with an arts rich education:

Have better grade point averages

Score better on standardized tests in reading and math

Have lower dropout rates

http://www.artsactionfund.org/pages/why

Are you saying people should pursue art as a primary occupation because it makes them better at math? That seems a bit backwards.

I'm saying the idea that the arts are frivolous is in error and I'm saying not supporting the arts impoverishes us all.

Those seem to all be effects of being rich.

You probably have the causation reversed, FWIW.

> That's not how the world works.

That's not how it works right now. Some want that future and are working to make it happen.

True, but what if being creative, or the act of creation, even if not consumed, leads to more happiness and self-fulfillment?

Edit : as an example, the explosion of lines of code accessible on the internet is a new form of expression for some people. They are not paid to do it, yet they do it anyway, because they enjoy it. Not all that code is consumed, however.

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