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Comment by headmelted | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

[0]: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ireland-basic-income-arts-...

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