France's 18-year-olds given €300 culture pass
bbc.com
bbc.com
Overall, I would say it was well-used considering the problem our country has with "free money" initiatives, although I definitely met some people who tried to "cheat the system" to some (smaller) extent, e.g. by using the voucher to get free high-end Kindles in bookstores.
Also, about 40% of purchases (if I recall the stats correctly) were made on Amazon, Spotify or other "big tech" corporations, meaning that while it gave a boost to the smaller economy, local businesses did not get from it as much as one could expect.
I know of some tricks from friends of friends and you can find a few newspapers articles about the bonus being used to buy playstations and other electronics or converted in cash (500€ bonus -> 300€ cash).
If there is a rule, it will be circumvented. Italy and France should think about stopping taxing young people so much, instead of wasting public money in this way.
I disagree even with the use within the rules.
I don't think society should pay for students' university books.
Why not? You will have to pay for their jail cells if they don't get the education experience they need to compete in a global economy.
If I was French or Italian, I'd be extremely offended at that implication that kids are being taught that crime is an acceptable societal and moral choice, especially just because one might not receive a government bribe because they don't meet an arbitrary age requirement.
Then society should stop accumulating savings beyond what is reasonable. There are two sides to every discussion.
Young people are not likely to earn money a lot, or at all in France, and so their income tax is 0%...
https://www.blevinsfranks.com/news/article/French-taxation-i...
Up to €10,084: 0% (a student job would not make more than that)
€10,084 – €25,710: 11% (a young person without a university degree would not probably earn less than 25,710)
-- https://www.ilpost.it/2018/06/20/bonus-cultura-editoria-ital...
I love my e-ink displays though :)
In my opinion letting people spend this bonus on crap (blockbuster action movies, pop music, etc.) puts the concept of "culture" in a spot I don't really like, when we're talking about public money: while anything you artistic can be considered cultural, because I'm a boring boomer I'd like my hard earned money to be used for something better than a summer music festival.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200521225211/https://pass.cult...
Edit: in 2020 the pass was not available in the whole country.
A 1 time 300 bucks given to all the students with a scholarship would be way more appreciated than 300 bucks given to all the 18 years old without distinction.
I've had it with the "they will immediately discharge the debt after graduation" meme. Yes, just add a delay and let them rot on the streets if they are that cheap. If people can't repay their student loans within 10 years then it was a bad deal to begin with.
Hypothetically, even if we did collectively bail out a bunch of liberal arts majors, I would still want to see an extensive shuttering of half the country’s higher education institutions for hoodwinking so many people out of their time and money.
It infects anything.
I was listening to a podcast about my local sports team and they couldn't help but reference what they're 'not saying' relative to Twitter outrage ... repeatedly. And even address 'fan sentiment' purely through the looking glass of Twitter.
They talk about players who 'fans don't like' and yet you go to the game and you'd think that was the most popular player based on fan reaction...
Then I switch to my coding related podcast ... same thing, they address Twitter drama like it represents most coders.
Considering all of the Canadians in Hollywood and on the music charts in America how exactly do you define Americanized anyway? Don’t you have a ton of European/Asian originated things in your local culture too like we do down here in America? I love IKEA and drive there in my Japanese car. I cut my fingernails every week with a great set of German tools (Wusthof or something). Tonight we’re going to watch Train to Busan peninsula on Amazon (Korean movie) because I love zombie flicks and heard good things (the first one was good!).
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/bill-c10-user-generated-con...
Entertainment is a hugely profitable business. Disney and Marvel for instance made billions of dollars of profits year after year for almost a decade. They did it by making content that people want to watch.
Why not simply... make content that people want to watch?
Its just that French Canadians buy their own culture.
I've never heard of anything like that. McDonald's are everywhere, there are new American concoctions of dubious nature making their way into the mainstream everyday and half the central streets of any given city seem to be made out of kebab joints.
In France it's usually the worst meat available, aggregated with salt and spices to hide the horror.
McDonald's has the best meat I'm aware of and they've gone to great lengths to wash their shit food image.
In foreign countries the financial targeting is different and there are always fewer McDonald's per capita. There are twice as many McDonald's per capita in the US vs France for example (and France has a lot of them at nearly 1,500); Britain has a similar ratio as France.
Edit: The analysis itself starts on the third page, after comparing and contrasting two travel journals from centuries apart.
I’m not sure what Paris would look like with a negligible tourist population, but it would be quite different. Who maintains the historical buildings? Le Mėtro? Straight tax dollars alone won’t cover it without the tourist subsidies.
But it is a functioning capital city, most of what goes on there isn’t related to tourism.
Museums sure were empty last year when I was there.
The central challenge to running any sort of mass food chain is to keep your product as consistent as possible. People expect the Starbucks drink they order when they get off the plane in Miami to taste exactly the same as they one they order back home in Boise.
In coffee, the darker the roast the more the individual characteristics of the beans are replaced by the flavors of the roast itself. Starbucks, and most mass coffee chains, char their roasts because it's a way to homogenize away the variance in terroir that comes from beans sourced across a wide range of farms and batches.
Of course, your criticism ignores that culture is more than restaurants and much more than consumerism. No matter what stores are open along the Champs-Elysees, that it connects the Arc de Triomphe and Tuileries Garden is worth more culturally than what store fronts exist along the way. That is certainly the unique bit, and probably what draws tourists.
Well, the Sephora was a draw for my sister :)
Also, this measure is not really about french culture. It is about culture in general. If you visit an art museum most of time it's filled with art from everywhere. The quai Branly museum comes to my mind here, but really most museum have exhibits of foreign works.
When the local art museums rotate in traveling exhibits that’s more for the locals (where ‘locals’ might loosely include a few hours’ transit in all directions). But I feel a little guilty going because I know someone risked a truck full of Van Gogh or Picasso works by sending them a third of the way around the world. It’s cool but what if there’s an accident?
What? It's also a notoriously hard market to get into.
Not sure why that should be considered weird or bad. If all France had was Chipotle and the other American chains then I would have visited it once and never again rather than the 15 or so times I've been.
It has a strong (and also protected) agriculture sector, from memory they're in the 10 largest in the world, and having consummers buying these products is a big deal. McDonalds is fine, but they also definitely need restaurants serving steaks with blue cheese sauce with a small glass of wine.
Language protection also had an incredible effect on the entertainment industry that was seriously struggling before (also due to how strongly it was enforced, notably with the 40% rule)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_McDonal...
Am I being cynical in thinking the "culture" they use it on will be dominated by cinema and online and streaming stuff?
This sounds like a good initiative but I am not sure how helpful it is bundling in theatre, museum etc with more mass-market-friendly entertainment options. I note the classic French prohibition on some of the more American (ie. popular) digital choices though.
However, unlike software engineering, policy shouldn't be made to cover all the corner cases.
But then again, I don't think I'd like to see how a state that chooses which culture is good and bad develops, let alone live in it.
Maybe the trick is to give this kind of money to people that are a bit older than 18?
For sure I'd push for the bonus to be used on local culture, and not foreign .
All those owned by Paris city are free to all, always: https://www.parismusees.paris.fr/en
Though it is basically "kids get in free" since other family members have to pay and you don't expect too many 10-11 year olds to travel to parks themselves.
If that money was a gift to all 18 year olds in Denmark, each would receive 120 euros a day.
The testing effort will go on at least until August, each 18 year old would then be 28.800 euros richer.
Yes it’s debt. But its way cheaper than it sounds once the taxes go back and it’s an investment into society and employment.
Except when the hard times come by - enter Corona - and you simply throw culture overboard. Just like that, as we've seen it. So much about the importance of culture.
And now imagine we'd have a proper hard times. Like war, famine and plague combined.
I'm quite curious which countries of the EU has a VAT like France.
France also exports the most brainpower in math and tech.
Either you're too naive or I'm too cynical. But at least one of our assumptions is wrong.
I hope I'm wrong.
> You can propose your activities and cultural goods on the "Pass Culture". Only condition: be present on French territory.
That's awesome.
In my country there already exists culture pass programs for young/poor people, but you can only use them in big/subsidized concert venues, art galleries, cinemas and museums. You can't use it in more "underground" venues/events which are too small or focused to get government grants, and in my opinion those are very important to culture as well.
Still better than nothing of course.
So I live in Poland and I’ve studied film production. We were thoroughly walked through how films are financed by our national film institute and from what I understand our system was modeled after everybody else in the EU, so it’s a good example. And other types of art are financed similarly albeit with differences.
The way it works is that the film institute is financed each year with a legally mandatory payment made by media companies. I’m talking cable tv channels and the like. However as of late also VOD platforms such as Netflix must chip in (this is not taxpayer money!!!). This ball of money is then split and directed towards strengthening film culture - independent cinemas, festivals, film productions.
Filmmaker-producers then petition for chunks of this money with applications in which they must demonstrate that they have found funding from other sources (usually half), as well as acquiring preliminary interest from distributors. The institute runs this process by employing veteran filmmakers, artists, as well as academia and curators - people who have a proven track record. These committees decide, in a transparent process of deliberation, which productions from the ones submitted, they believe, are the most promising artistically and are most feasible.
This creates an ecosystem in which artists and producers are incentivized to focus on impressing those who know something about art and on ideas which have real potential in winning festival awards, not just box-office results. It’s bureaucratic, yes, but it works.
The flip side is that when individuals are the only ones to decide what culture they value, only the most idiotic super-productions from abroad will win. And money spent on those will be literally siphoned off to California - this is the real reason why Hollywood became so strong after WWII - total domination of foreign film markets. Actually, for a period of time this allowed the U.S. to culturally colonize large parts of the world, and continues today with SV.
As you would imagine in a longer term this slowly strangles the local film environment. If everyone just wants to see Star Wars, producers back out of financing riskier local projects and cinema owners turn risk down for fear of upsetting Mickey.
Now, I agree with this idea of giving people a culture allowance - culture should absolutely not be only decided by crusty veterans and “experts”. And 19 year olds often might not normally have the money to vote at the box office. Being a cinema-goer is an identity, a habit, something that has to be fostered and encouraged to exist early on. And it positively affects people’s mental well-being. These kinds of incentives are great to hear about. But also France already has an incredibly strong ecosystem for financing art and a resilient culture of embracing domestic creators.
When I compare all this to the barren “free-market” corporate wasteland in the US I’m just saddened. An average family has to pay through the nose for an extremely limited selection, to then be bombarded with product advertising. It’s just monopoly power at it’s worst and it’s culturally debilitating.
And when you visit a European Fest, especially one of the big five it just blows your mind that in fact, literally thousands of amazing films are made, but they’re simply locked out of mainstream distribution.
The thing about art is that often you might not even know you will like it before being exposed to it. Customer doesn’t always know what’s best, and blindly following audience desires creates a shallow culture.
Having built websites and various products under the direction of business committees, I don't trust a committee to simply choose a tasteful color and style for a "submit" button on a contact form, let alone choosing between between different film ideas. It's probably even worse if the committee is made up of "industry experts" and "academia".
> And when you visit a European Fest, especially one of the big five it just blows your mind that in fact, literally thousands of amazing films are made, but they’re simply locked out of mainstream distribution.
To me this is a really great and key point. The culture exists.
There's probably hundreds or thousands of unknown good films released every year in just about every country. You don't need official committees of academia or industry experts to decide which film production should be prioritized. Dedicated artists find a way to produce what they want to.
The bigger issue is distribution. There's Netflix, Hulu, and a few other places where people generally watch movies. These corporations are essentially deciding what a vast majority of the culture most people will get exposed to.
Is there a better way for people to simply find out what culture they're missing out on?
Every single one of these fantastic European films at festivals does go through this process with the experts and relies on institutional funding at some point. This fantasy about dedicated artists finding a way at great sacrifice is simply naive and in my humble opinion typically American in it’s “pull-up by your own bootstraps” way.
I’m sure your experiences with a committee in your job were awful, but in general it all depends who is on it, how honest they are and whether they can be trusted when it comes to merit. Companies that build products aren’t a good parallel to institutions which are built to protect culture.
So, the film institute I described above runs a process in which the committees are split up into sub-committees. And the producer petitioning for financing gets to choose which particular set of people they want to be evaluated by. So if you’re making a documentary you might want to direct your proposal towards a committee of documentary filmmakers you know and respect. It’s designed to prevent this kind of “decision by committee” effect we know so well.
And then there come additional layers of complexity. Most of the time producers first apply for “development” funding, usually small sums directed towards fleshing an idea out, paying a screenwriter, paying for scouting trips, pre-roll footage. At the point at which you’re applying for the big bucks, you’ve already developed the concept well enough that it has some appeal. This is usually necessary to convince an investor to risk actual money to begin with.
And then even then there is even more complexity layered in because often incentives are designed to encourage international co-production efforts. We would never have Yorgos Lanthimos or the Romanian New Wave if the rules for these institutions did not allow producers from Greece and Romania to take advantage of the European Film Fund.
It’s all part of the process because you can’t just hand money out to people who don’t know what they’re doing. Art and culture have to be verified like anything else that we want to exhibit quality.
There are many parallels to start-ups and start-up culture to be found here. You might say: ”nobody should tell me how my start-up idea should be because I have this vision.” But if you want money from an accelerator, you’re going to have to encounter some sort of evaluation process. And usually a big part of that will be some experienced committee or board asking you to thoroughly explain it and verifying that you can in fact pull it off. Here in Europe we often trust the institutions and experts to do this part.
I dunno, distribution regulation is definitely key, you can still find just about everything that is made somewhere online. But nothing about the modern internet makes it easy to find out, and I suspect that this is by design.
€56bn in interest payments a year alone and 106% debt to gdp. Massive exposure to Italian debt crisis. It's not going to end well
Moreover, if you re read the article I think you'll see that you can spend the bonus as you like.
Welfare, helping each other, not being an egoist you know
More local authorities are constantly harassing or outright closing down artistic spaces (not the fancy ones for bourgeois) like in Toulouse where MixArt Myrys in Toulouse which is also home to a local hackerspace and non-profit Internet Service Provider (tetalab and tetaneutral respectively).
And as somebody pointed out elsewhere in the thread, this culture pass used to be 500€ previously. All in all, as a french person i dare say, fuck this government (and any other, really).
What they're doit here is good and a net positive. And local authorities are that, local, so not really the same guys.
Except this government and the previous ones have mostly EXACTLY the same policies on pretty much everything (more police/business, less healthcare/education), including the copyright mafia. The lobbies are still the same people, too.
This new government has also implied HADOPI didn't go far enough and they'd make a new law to further criminalize video streaming consumption (HADOPI only criminalizes the assumption of p2p sharing on Bittorrent protocol specifically).
> What they're doit here is good and a net positive.
What they're doing here is putting a bandaid on a cancer. Abolish copyright, redistribute wealth massively, and invest in emancipatory education (alla Montessori) and you'll get much better results. But they're not interested in making things better for the people, only in diverting public money into the pockets of their business friends from the cultural sector. For that, giving away 500 credits (not actual euros) that can be used on cultural contents approved of by the industry/government (not independent artists) is fairly effective.
Trying to paint that as regression is stretching the truth pretty hard.
Unfortunately for them, it is not easy to start a business anymore.
Everybody needs culture, and few people « need » programming beyond those with a a natural disposition for that sort of activity. And I don't know how that's a point relevant at all the subject of the thread.
And therefore, all the cinemas, concerts, theatres, museums etc. are closed. For more than a year. Uhm.
But in reality French people more or less emigrate the least in Europe.
It can be argued whether it's good or bad (people keep asking for 'the Airbus of X' while the Commission plays its part and prevent such actors from emerging.)
However, as usual, don't placate US expectations on other parts of the world. You would not say that Michigan needs to create a culture of education, because all the FAANGs are in California.
Also, the financing culture (and maybe structure ?) seems to prevent the pretendo-valuations of "unicorns". I guess companies here have to go to such extremes as "making products that earn money". Yuck.
I'm curious what would qualify as a "startup-scene" for you, though ? I'm living in a tech-hub in France, so I can tell you there are startups, but what is your threshold for a "scene" ? Number of employee ? Size of campuses ? Number of meetups ?
There are a lot more people with money that speak English than French, so it’s almost inevitable that best strategy is to start with the English speaking markets. Once you hit it big there, there’s no stopping you worldwide. Except China, who also has a ton of rich people.