11 ms·

They tried to call this "universal" until people pointed out it is the opposite of universal. This program is a wild distortion of what UBI is meant to be. Eve

• philipallstar 1y ago
  > audience engagement with the arts generated €16.9 million in social value, based on public willingness-to-pay for cultural experiences. If people are willing to pay for their art then artists don't need a welfare check.
  • RHSeeger 1y ago
    It is possible that there can be a gap between "the amount people are willing to pay" and "the amount artists need to live on (food, housing, etc)"
    • CalRobert 1y ago
      Sure, but you could say the same thing for teachers, foodservice workers, nurses, etc.... yet they are unable to avail of this program, for reasons I don't understand.
      • lou1306 1y ago
        > teachers, foodservice workers, nurses These are mostly employed positions, where employees have procedures to negotiate their salary with the employer (which might be the government itself). Most artists otoh are self-employed, and the government decided that the country at large would benefit from giving some of them economic support. You can argue with the modalities but the reasoning does not seem that opaque to me.
        • wqaatwt 1y ago
          I’m hypothetically a self employed Twitch streamer who has 0.5 viewers. How is that different than being an “artist” whose art isn’t consumed by anyone willing to pay for it. I kind of see the reasoning to some extent but then also e.g. “full time gardeners” if their yards are visible from the sidewalk should be paid.
      • melesian 1y ago
        Ireland started by not leving tax on income from writing on writers for specific cultural reasons -- to support and encourage writers. It's a cultural norm. Extending it to other generally penniless artists is too. When universities in other countries start running courses on Irish food service workers we can reasonably expect them to be included.
        • CalRobert 1y ago
          Perhaps valuing artists over nurses is why so many Irish nurses are in Australia.
    • philipallstar 1y ago
      Then don't count that money in a fake economic justification. Just say "the bureaucracy would like to assign people your tax money based on vague criteria" and leave it at that.
  • tmtvl 1y ago
    Could be interesting to try negative tax on works from small artists up to a certain value. So when you buy a painting from some person of little name recognition the goverment pays like 20 percent extra up to 2,000 Euro, 10 percent up to 5,000 Euro, and over 10,000 Euro taxes are paid as normal for luxury goods. Of course you'd need a bunch of bureaucracy to avoid it getting abused, but it would help artists make a living.
    • NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
      Seems like it could be an "infinite money glitch" if the artist and customer are in cahoots. Churn out alot of cheap artworks, even just fake ones, then split the profits. The bureaucracy capable of preventing this would be so onerous, would anyone still be interested in the dole for it?
  • cma 1y ago
    > If people are willing to pay for their art then artists don't need a welfare check. Copyright, and, to less extent, ticketed events, are a system of artificial scarcity, would be cool if this had a public domain aspect. At least a limited form within the nation subsidizing it.
  • nilamo 1y ago
    Most artists don't make enough, though? Isn't that famously well known? Picasso was never rolling in it, burned his paintings to stay warm, and had trouble even eating.
    • Supernaut 1y ago
      Picasso was worth $240 million at the time of his death, and that's in 1976 dollars. Plenty of artists become very, very wealthy.
      • amanaplanacanal 1y ago
        "Plenty" is kind of vague. How many in total are we talking? 100? 1000? 10k?
        • Supernaut 1y ago
          Well, how many artists are there in total?
          • amanaplanacanal 1y ago
            Hundreds of millions. Up to a billion maybe? If you mean people that actually make a living at it, not many.
        • overrun11 1y ago
          Art is highly valued it's just a winner takes most market just like sports. A tiny minority make all the money and the rest get nothing.
      • frm88 1y ago
        This seems both a) vague and b) based on a sample size of n=1. 85% of all visual artists in the U. S. make less than 25k/year [0]. Also, don't forget that most artists work in companies (again: visual art), like making story boards for anime etc. [0] https://www.contemporaryartissue.com/art-world-statistics-every-artist-needs-to-know/ https://www.contemporaryartissue.com/art-world-statistics-ev...
  • throwforfeds 1y ago
    My wife has won multiple prestigious awards for her writing (novels, memoir). She's published by huge multinational corporations you've heard of. She got paid about $100k for her last novel, which took maybe 5 years to complete. It works out to less than $20k/year, after paying her literary agent. The publisher encourages her to spend her own money on PR (~$20k). Many of our friends in the literary circles of NYC end up teaching in MFA programs (Columbia, NYU, New School), but then they have very little time for their own work and the pay isn't great (she's been offered $4k to teach a course for the semester at Columbia MFA). Of course we do have friends that have gotten $1 million advances, but that is exceptionally rare and you have to be a bestseller at that point. So, that's all to say, you can have an artist that from the outside looks wildly successful because of the awards and articles written about them, but they're in reality poor.
    • Hammershaft 1y ago
      This tracks with what publishers reported on the economics of books. https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books
      • ghaff 1y ago
        I earned about $10 for the last quarter for the second edition of a technical book I wrote--which actually earned out royalties. With rare exceptions, writing a book makes basically no sense unless you're on the clock for a company anyway and the book comes with lots of other benefits.
    • cakealert 1y ago
      > She's published by huge multinational corporations you've heard of. Publishers have an interest in publishing stuff that doesn't sell as long as ticks some other check-boxes to appear prestigious or politically correct for the time. Should society bear the costs of maintaining artists who produce things that are not in demand or have low value?
    • golergka 1y ago
      So effectively what you're saying is that institutions are willing to reward her with attention, but people are not willing to pay for her art after all?
  • tikhonj 1y ago
    There is a lot of value in reducing risk, variance and up-front costs for artists. Enough value that, to somebody barely scraping by, it makes the difference between a show/exhibition/etc being doable and not. It also changes the distribution. I'd say it's a net positive if a bunch of artists get enough money to live on their art rather than the vast majority not making enough and a tiny fraction making the most. It's just a matter of correcting for structural factors that otherwise push towards an exponential distribution of income.
    • philipallstar 1y ago
      > It's just a matter of correcting for structural factors that otherwise push towards an exponential distribution of income. Why is this a thing that needs "correcting" in any field, and why anyone would start with art, a thing my children can do with their fingers and some paint?
• andy99 1y ago
  I don’t think I support UBI but one thing I like about the concept is the absence of eligibility testing that does away with the related bureaucracy. If the bureaucratic overhead stays it’s basically just another government welfare program.
  • verisimi 1y ago
    There will surely never be a UBI that doesn't have government based eligibility testing. If you aren't a good citizen (that votes, is vaccinated, meets climate change goals, has a gov id, has a phone, etc) why would the government give you money? (Or more likely, govcoin?)
    • tokai 1y ago
      Then its just welfare not UBI.
      • aleph_minus_one 1y ago
        Who says UBI won't be welfare (as defined by you) in the end?
        • treyd 1y ago
          Because the U in UBI means "universal". Saying this as someone that isn't strongly in favor of UBI.
        • tokai 1y ago
          Look why don't you look up the concept historically and how it is used now? Its surface level stuff this. edit: To give you an answer Welfare is given to those that need it. A universal basic income is not given to those that need it, but by definition given to everyone as income.
          • aleph_minus_one 1y ago
            We can redefine the "universal" part to mean "universal to those who need it ('need' by some arbitrary regularly changing criterion)". :-)
• lucideer 1y ago
  > A key component of the total benefits came from psychological wellbeing, which contributed almost €80 million > And, as much as I like psychological wellbeing (who doesn't!) - saying that it's worth €80 million when you didn't actually get €80 million doesn't help things There are a LOT of problems with this programme, but personally, I think associating a costed economic benefit with "psycholigical wellbeing" seems good. It may make a pretty good precedence argument for other beneficial-to-society programme pilots to point to when selling their merits. The idea of a government programme appearing to prioritise psychological wellbeing seems net positive.
  • CalRobert 1y ago
    Psychological wellbeing is great! But this report was much ballyhooed in Irish media to claim that the program paid for itself when it absolutely did not. Making Tuesday free ice cream day would also improve psychological well-being, but that doesn't help pay for the program.
    • lucideer 1y ago
      > that doesn't help pay for the program My taxes pay for the programme. That is why I pay them. If the programme benefits psychological wellbeing, then it is worthwhile for me to pay for it. Whether you choose to quantify this in terms of monetary net contrib to the economy as a broad concern, or as direct public benefit, is splitting econ hairs.
• seivan 1y ago
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• ta1243 1y ago
  The UBI I support comes from a land value tax. Basically every citizen has an equal share of the land of the country, and rents it out to people who want to use it. If you use more than your fair share you pay in, if you use less you get paid.
  • vintermann 1y ago
    Yes. It's also straightforward to extend to things which are also about use of a common resource, such as taxes related to pollution (airline seat taxes, etc.) Non-transferable shared ownership is useful and right for many things.
    • IX-103 1y ago
      Would you consider skilled labor to be a common resource? If so, how would you suggest taxing it?
      • vintermann 1y ago
        Why complicate things? Existing taxes are the ones which it would be sensible to start with, and existing taxes on things which we can't easily make more of (land, air, water etc.) are the sensible things to start with of those again. Skilled labor is not currently taxed as a specific thing, and we can make more of it by educating people, so why on earth bring that up unless it's a setup for some odd rhetorical point?
  • allisdust 1y ago
    This sounds very interesting and fair. How does it address the needs of the people who create value. For example some one who might invent a transistor equivalent ? or even someone who wants to work on something that might eventually produce a social good like a new antibiotic. And how do we evaluate the resources going into that vs lets say build a Eiffel tower
  • CalRobert 1y ago
    Ireland has a stunningly regressive tax regime with respect to property - property taxes are a rounding error away from zero. In effect, renters pay (through income taxes) for local infrastructure and amenity improvements that benefit homeowners and increase home values, and none of that resultant increase in home value is captured in taxes.
• keiferski 1y ago
  It seems perfectly reasonable for a state to want to fund its own cultural legacy and production (in ways outside of the market system), and not just everyone writ large. This kind of thing is much more common in continental Europe, but for whatever reason the English-speaking world tends to have a problem with funding culture via government money.
  • rsynnott 1y ago
    > but for whatever reason the English-speaking world tends to have a problem with funding culture via government money. Unless it's sports or films, naturally; those can get essentially unlimited money.
  • CalRobert 1y ago
    My objection to this is that you're taking money away from teachers, waiters, taxi drivers, etc and giving it to artists, as though artists are somehow more virtuous people. It doesn't seem fair.
    • mikkupikku 1y ago
      Any not to any artists, but only to those the government bureaucrats recognize as being artists. I doubt they'll be paying anybody to write computer programs with artistic merit.
      • keiferski 1y ago
        Plenty of EU arts program fund digital artists...
        • mikkupikku 1y ago
          Who qualifies? The guy writing bash quines? Minecraft artists?
          • keiferski 1y ago
• fukka42 1y ago
  > I'd be more excited to see basic income for Deliveroo riders and people working in chippers. Weird line. The point of UBI is that it goes to everyone. Which allows people to choose to be a Deliveroo worker for some extra cash, an artist if that fancies them or work a traditional job for that extra moolah.
  • CalRobert 1y ago
    We agree - I think it would be great for artists, deliveroo riders (but who are we kidding, Ireland needs an underclass of poor immigrants living a precarious existence), and teachers to all benefit from UBI.
• basisword 1y ago
  >> And, as much as I like psychological wellbeing (who doesn't!) - saying that it's worth €80 million when you didn't actually get €80 million doesn't help things when it comes time to pay for the program. Surely it's an €80m saving in something like health care costs or productivity? Edit: You've really ignored a lot in that RTE article. >> measurable decline in reliance on social protection, with recipients receiving €100 less per month on average >> Participants were also 38 percentage points less likely to be receiving Jobseeker’s payments >> income from arts-related work increase by over €500. At the same time, their earnings from non-arts employment fell by approximately €280 Finally, your complaint that there's no information on how to join the program - it's a pilot. People were selected, the pilot was run, and these are the results of it. Either they'll continue with the pilot to gather data, end the scheme altogether, or open it widely based on the data they've gathered.
  • CalRobert 1y ago
    That's addressed, but it seems like it doesn't change the fact that it's a net loss """ The original cost of the pilot was €105 million, but after accounting for tax revenues and reduced social welfare payments, the net fiscal cost dropped to just under €72 million. """ The values you cite just seem like really small amounts overall compared to the cost of the program. Again, though, my core issue here is that I _want_ UBI, and what this gives us is empty tokenism (if the pilot were this successful, shouldn't we want to immediately open it to all artists?) at the same time the government has managed to produce a catastrophically bad housing crisis and a collapsing health system.
    • basisword 1y ago
      Oh I would love UBI too. That would be great. But I don't feel like that's what they're trying to sell this as. It's "Basic Income for the Arts". To me it's equivalent to various tax breaks/credits. People get 'free' money just because they've had children. Various industries get large subsidies. This seems equivalent. >> if the pilot were this successful, shouldn't we want to immediately open it to all artists It sounds like this would be the goal but it depends on what is allotted to the program in the budget. https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employment/unemployment-and-redundancy/employment-support-schemes/basic-income-arts/ https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employment/unemploymen...
• tgv 1y ago
  > basic income for Deliveroo riders UBI (which I consider not feasible) is not meant to make it easier for freeloading companies. If they want delivery personnel, they should pay them sufficiently. The "gig economy" is a large step back, right to the 19th century/ It is not the goal of UBI.
  • CalRobert 1y ago
    Right - the idea is that with a UBI a deliveroo rider would have more ability to decide they don't _have_ to be a deliveroo rider (unless they want to be of course).
• Bayart 1y ago
  France has a long standing program for artists and entertainment technicians and while the niceties can get complex the big idea is that the State guarantees a minimum level of income if you work a minimum amount of hours per year for artistic purposes (507 I think), including teaching and rehearsals.
• bko 1y ago
  > the pilot cost €72 million to date but generated nearly €80 million in total benefits to the Irish economy I don't like how these reports speak with such certainty. How do you measure "total benefits"? For one, it includes income of the artist. Yes, giving money to people generally increases their income, so it would be weird if any amount given would not be break even to the expense, unless that person decides to do less of some other activity, which I guess is possible but unlikely at least for these amounts. Then the study counts public facing artistic activity. Kind of hard to measure the value of that. I guess you could by saying "this person created a piece of art that people pay to see", but I doubt that's what they're getting at. Then satisfaction and well being. I would certainly be happy with more money. I personally don't think we have a lack of culture and art. If Ireland is at all like the US, they have more art majors (as a proxy for art creation). All artistic majors have grown considerably over the last few decades: > A new analysis from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators finds that bachelor’s degree conferrals in the arts have remained substantially above average for the past 30 years. The data also show recent growth in the number of arts degrees conferred to traditionally under-represented racial/ethnic groups. As of 2015, departments and programs in the fine arts and performing arts awarded 80,360 bachelor’s degrees, with another 7,087 awarded for the “humanistic” study of the arts (subfields such as art history, musicology, and film studies, which the Indicators tabulate along with the humanities). This figure is down slightly from the historic peak of 82,778 degrees awarded in 2013 (or 90,543, when humanities subjects are included), and above the annual figure recorded at any point before 2011. So the question is, what problem is this program trying to solve? Give rich kids that can afford to do art more money to support their lifestyle? https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2017/taking-note-how-about-those-undergraduate-arts-majors https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2017/taking-note-how-about...
  • sokoloff 1y ago
    > "this person created a piece of art that people pay to see", but I doubt that's what they're getting at. I also doubt that's what they're getting at, because if they were, there's a fairly straightforward way to, you know, pay the artist who created the art.
• hopelite 1y ago
  It’s just more fraud and abuse in various forms and degrees. Not to mention what art is deemed as worthy of receiving this money and who has the power to squander other people’s money by becoming something akin to lords that rule over people’s lives through an incentive to please them in exchange for favorite status? If it’s not only open to indigenous people engaged in art of the indigenous cultures, i.e., in this case Irish doing indigenous Irish cultural things whatever those may be, you could have some perverse injustices where, e.g., some Asian engaged in hentai pornography, living off the taxes taken from some old indigenous Irish lady who gets €500/month in old age support. But since “discriminating” in favor of survival by preserving your own culture and insisting on your own people’s survival in the west anymore, things are going to get extremely perverted, in the sense of grotesque distortion and corruption, even more than already exists. Unfortunately, it seems that all European ethnic groups all around the world have seemingly lost any and all ability to project actions into future effects or evaluate their outcomes, and seemingly have also been totally brainwashed into simply facilitating their own eradication and lost any survival instinct or will to live. This kind of wedge of using other people’s money in a system where you are not allowed to discriminate in favor of your own survival, will ultimately lead to the destruction of the civilized world, i.e., civilization itself. It’s the problem of the fat smoker, the ironic inability of the civilized world to see the inevitable long term outcomes of their self-harming behaviors… so they keep killing … only this time themself … and only slowly.
• TimPC 1y ago
  Psychological wellbeing contributes some amount of money though in systems that pay for healthcare (especially when that includes psychiatry). It's also to a degree one of the key things government spending is hoping to produce so if it is actually producing that it's a good use of funds. I do agree the program needs to make it doable to get the funds in order to become an artist since otherwise it's exclusively for rich artists who can be an artist while waiting for eligibilty.
• jillesvangurp 1y ago
  Universal Income isn't universal until everybody gets it. The bottom line is that in most countries all the basics are taken care off one way or another. Nobody really starves. There's shelter and housing of some sorts for anyone. Healthcare is taken care off as well. And if you grow old and needy you typically don't end up on the streets either. That of course costs money and is in practice fully funded mostly. True to some extent in most countries. The US is notably a bit harsh on this. And people do end up on the streets there. But by and large even there people are taken care off. My view is that society could be a lot fairer if we just formalized the status quo of all that a bit and just guaranteed it. It doesn't have to be super comfortable or amazing. But just provide some basic promise to people that, no matter what, starvation is not something you need to worry about. We'll keep you warm, sheltered, healthy, educated, protected, etc. If you want to have nicer versions of that, go and work for it and earn those things. Most people that can do that of course already do that anyway. This is not a massive change in many countries. We already have these guarantees. It's just all super complicated, wrapped in stigma, and hopelessly bureaucratic. So bureaucratic in fact that many countries actively dis-incentivize work. Work literally doesn't pay if you are on benefits. You could go out and work for a few hours but you'd just get cut on your social security and lose your benefits. When accepting work becomes risky like that, something is wrong. Germany has a great name for their social welfare benefits: "Bürgergeld". Literally citizen money. It's what you get if you are not entitled to anything else. It comes with lots of restrictions and caveats. But it's a great name. If you are a citizen, that's what you can fall back to if you have nothing else. UBI would be taking that notion and just giving it to everyone while reducing their other income by the same amount. It would add up to about the same cost. It's a bookkeeping trick. The fear of course is that people would stop working. But the positive effects would be a reduction in cost of labor for employers and a vast reduction in bureacracy needed to police the whole thing. Germany spends almost as much on unemployment bureaucracy and programs as it does on the actual benefits. UBI simplifies social security, taxation, unemployment insurances, pensions, etc. You never go all the way to zero. You might still want to insure something extra of course. But that's your choice. What we have right now is the opposite: a lot of cost and no choice. But you are taken care off either way.
• pols45 1y ago
  Ah Jaysus! Ireland’s has been running "basic income schemes" since the 6th century. "Modernity" is just a bit blind to how it worked. What we are seeing now is the secular attempts at institutionalizing it. What we now call "Pastoral Care" emerged out of the behavior of some Irish monks in the sixth century embedding themselves in local communities exchanging advice for free mead and shelter. They started writing books about its effectiveness. And so it became institutionalized world wide. So they would send a bloke to Ballykissangel, pay him to sit there, listen to the villagers’ woes on Sundays, and spend the rest of the week in the pub providing cultural enrichment. Most importantly no numbers and report were used to justify these programmes. And this is what Sociologists say is the problem with modernity. Corporate wonderland and McDonalds has convinced the "educated" numbers are somehow magic. And its easy to break that spell. Just ask a Kid to come up with a business plan to run a McDonalds. Its a super simple exercise involving costs and expenses. After they do that, ask them to scale it up so McDonalds can feed the world. Once you learn the McDonalds model cannot feed the world, the only path forward (for people who care about these things and most don't) is coming up with models that aren't built on top of numbers. There is a big reason the Church has outlasted corporations and empires. And its not numbers and reports. Its pastoral care.
  • epiccoleman 1y ago
    > And so it became institutionalized world wide. So they would send a bloke to Ballykissangel, pay him to sit there, listen to the villagers’ woes on Sundays, and spend the rest of the week in the pub providing cultural enrichment. Good lord, how do I get that job?
    • jdpage 1y ago
      Seminary, then becoming ordained as a priest, at the very least.
      • dyauspitr 1y ago
        Priests usually have to perform multiple masses a day, every day of the week.
• aydyn 1y ago
  If you look at the World Happiness Report, Ireland's scores have plummeted year over year since 2020. I'm going to go ahead and hypothesize that this program wont make a dent in that.
• NoboruWataya 1y ago
  Did "they" actually try to call it universal? I could (easily!) be wrong, but I don't recall the scheme ever actually being labelled UBI by the government, only by the media and commenters on social media. To conflate this with UBI very much misses the point. This isn't some experiment in post-capitalist utopia, it is basically a subsidy for the arts. Societies often subsidise things they want more of and that the market, for one reason or another, cannot or will not provide. As someone who paid taxes in Ireland for many years I never had any issue with subsidies for the arts. I would be happy for the government to subsidise FOSS development, too, for what it's worth (and in fact the EU does this to an extent).
• WalterBright 1y ago
  > I'm unsurprised that giving people money improved their psychological well being. I'm not so sure. There's an element of pride in working to support oneself, rather than indolence.
• chairmansteve 1y ago
  It's not basic income. It's a subsidy for artists, just like they subsidise foreign companies, the farmers, the remote islands, the irish language etc. In the USA, all kinds of things are subsidised too, EVs, oil drilling, NFL teams. Every country makes it choices.
• EasyMark 1y ago
  Can't it be a start? As people start get replaced my tech and still have the need to feed/shelter themselves, maybe piecemeal is the only way it happens. We all move into hives while billionaires become trillionaires and allow the rest of us exist under their benevolent and generous mercy.