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It's awfully hard to discern a point in this rambling piece. But I'm not sure what she expects. She and other liberal arts students constantly complain about t

• dylandrop 13y ago
  Teachers get paid basically nothing to do their work. So should no one be a teacher just because it pays poorly? Absolutely not. I don't know about you but I'd hate to live in a world with no artists. I agree with you that she should know what she's getting into, which is why everyone I know has always told me that if you want to be an artist, you've got to love what you do (FYI, I'm not an artist). But just because our society doesn't reward artists monetarily doesn't mean artists don't have a right to complain about it. Sometimes the free market doesn't solve everything.
  • Luc 13y ago
    > I don't know about you but I'd hate to live in a world with no artists. There's no risk of that since they're willing to work for next to nothing. It not a good choice as a profession, but otherwise it is quite an attractive occupation.
    • k-mcgrady 13y ago
      There are plenty of people willing to work for close to nothing. That doesn't mean it's right to pay them close to nothing.
      • sejje 13y ago
        The idea that so many choose it implies they aren't being paid "close to nothing." Probably they are being "paid" something other than money, and that's what's so attractive to them.
  • yummyfajitas 13y ago
    I don't know about you but I'd hate to live in a world with no artists. Prices are determined at the margin, not in aggregate. The question is whether you'd hate to live in a world with one fewer artist. I think we could manage. I.e. if the first 10 artists in the world increase wealth by $100k/each, and the 11'th artist increases wealth by $10k (due to diminishing marginal returns), then the price of an artist will be $10k. That's how much society loses if one artist quits. The remaining $90k x 10 artists is captured by society as consumer surplus. (This is true of all professions with competitive employment markets.)
    • dangerlibrary 13y ago
      Do you really believe that the job market for artists satisfies all of the underlying assumptions of the economic model you are using? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition#Basic_structural_characteristics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition#Basic_struc... Infinite buyers and sellers (infinite patrons)? Homogenous products (all artists are fungible)? No barriers to entry and exit (anyone can stop what they are doing and become an artist, tomorrow)? Two semesters of undergraduate economics can make you very confident in things that are utterly wrong, if you're not careful.
  • sejje 13y ago
    My friend, who is a teacher, makes over $25/hour, which is generally considered a pretty good wage. Certainly it's not "basically nothing."
• parennoob 13y ago
  > Yet they're the same people who scoff at and disparage people studying finance or computer science This times 1000. For an example of this attitude, just go through artist-turned-hacker Maciej Ceglowski's [1] essay "Dabblers and Blowhards" (http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm), with the last line: "But you, sir, are no painter. And while you hack away at your terminal, or ride your homemade Segway, we painters and musicians are going to be right over here with all the wine, hash, and hot chicks." Make no mistake, I personally think Maciej is without an ounce of malice, and often writes tongue firmly in cheek. Yet the attitude he displays in this essay does exist in reality in a lot of liberal arts majors, like the author of this piece. I'm never sure whether to be angry, or just amused at the airs of people like her who have never had to deal with actual, grinding poverty, and expect the world to fall into their laps. [1] Ceglowski (@baconmeteor) is the founder of Pinboard.
  • yen223 13y ago
    Luckily, nobody here scoffs at liberal arts students!
  • Confusion 13y ago
    Unfortunately your comment is entirely irrelevant, because neither you nor your parent seem to have read the article. Get off your hobby horse.
  • onetwofiveten 13y ago
    Did you really come away from that article thinking that the author expected the world to fall into her lap? She's an artist who has worked hard for her success but is humble about it. She uses her own experiences as an example to talk about social problems, unfairness and entitlement. How is that expecting the world to fall into her lap? Why should someone have to experience grinding poverty before it becomes reasonable to discuss the attitudes of the very wealthy? Do the very wealthy have to experience grinding poverty before we take their opinions seriously? Because last time I checked, money was still power.
• 21echoes 13y ago
  > But any strawberry picker knows hard work alone is a fast road to nowhere > Those with money usually think they deserve it. But most people who make the world run—who care for kids, who grow food, who would rebuild after natural disasters and societal collapse—will never be rich, no matter how hard or well they work, because society is constructed with only so much room on top. > I thought of the workers busting their backs lifting boxes at warehouses, while an electronic tracker yelled at them to work faster. Are their egos too big? > I got my first job at a candy store when I was 14. I worked in the stockroom. I would open a box, take out a smaller box, put a rubber band around the smaller box, and put it back inside the big one. I lasted two days. This job, I remember thinking, does not make use of my intellectual abilities. When I did need work, I went straight into the naked-girl industry. did you even read the article? it's extremely myopic of you to say that this is about "liberal arts students". congrats on the upvotes for continuing the STEM circlejerk, tho.
  • deleted 13y ago
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• chipsy 13y ago
  It's awfully hard to discern a point in this rambling comment. But I'm not sure what the commenter expects. They and other HN commenters constantly complain about "liberal arts students against the 1%", but they're the ones who chose to go into a field which the market rewards for poor and ethically questionable work. Yet they're the same people who scoff at and disparage people who achieved financial success in a much more challenging business. The author claims her success was because of privilege, not because of choices she made or didn't make. Ultimately, we have to confront the fact that not everyone can be a tech slave. It's easy to hire "app" programmers, so if you choose to study that, it may be because it's a gravy train, not because it's your choice. Welcome to the free market.
  • sejje 13y ago
    > It's easy to hire "app" programmers, so if you choose to study that, it may be because it's a gravy train, not because it's your choice. > if you choose...it's [not] your choice How could it be any more your choice, when you literally put the decision in the same sentence?
• Confusion 13y ago
  Did you read the same piece I did? She's not complaining about the 1%, she's not disparaging people to study finance or computer science and she's taking full responsibility for the choices she made. Her point is entirely different. It's two points actually: * You need money to get more money * Once you have money and manage to keep getting more of it, it's easy to feel entitled to this situation and not recognize how fortunate you were to end up there
  • daliusd 13y ago
    I don't have access to original article and I wonder what's the point of making those points? I do not agree with those points but let's ignore that now. Let's say you are in that good position? What does it mean to recognize that you are fortunate? Should you be thankful to somebody? If yes how should you express that? Or should you simply enjoy the fact that you are fortunate because if not you someone else will be in your position? Or maybe not? How to measure how much fortune is in there?
    • Gravityloss 13y ago
      If we assume that one of the values of a society is to give chances to a middle class life even people who are born into poor families, then if you actually discover that it is not often possible, maybe you can change something that it becomes possible. You could do things like vote for politicians who drive for lowering the cost of education. From another angle: if you keep saying that "it's easy to become middle class even if you are poor", then the article has points that say it's actually not the case. The article also argues that rich people don't understand their advantageous position.
      • daliusd 13y ago
        Education is free in my country. Situation with university degree is slightly different but still you can get degree for free if you really want to. Maybe that's why I take things like that for granted. It shouldn't be easy to become middle class. Our planet can not sustain that with current technological level. But again "middle class" might mean different things for different people. As well I'm pretty sure that rich people understand what position they are in if we speak about sustainable assets.
• sbt 13y ago
  > Welcome to the free market While I consider myself a proponent of the free market, I think my work as a programmer blinds me to how much rent seeking underlies other high earning professions in the US. Doctors, lawyers, financiers, accountants don't really operate in a free market, rather they work in a system that is better understood as defined by laws. The reason all these fields (with exceptions for parts of medicine) are so lucrative, is because they have thrived in a system mandated or failing to be regulated by law. It is naive to think that said groups do not wish to sustain and propagate that privilege. Market adaption is an important force, but one that for all practical purposes exists within a framework society has created. I am expecting Americans to slowly get to terms with this reality as the economy recovers after long period of credit expansion and it dawns on more people that it has always mostly been a zero sum game. EDIT: grammar
  • AutoCorrect 13y ago
    right, and the decades of classroom time they put in, and the complexity of their field has NOTHING to do with how much they get paid. There will be some bad actors in any group, but to paint both groups with such a broad brush is doing a disservice to the ones that engage in those professions because they have a passion for the law or want to heal people.
    • simbolit 13y ago
      Well, "nothing" is a strong word, but I know people who put in decades of classroom time in the (actually quite complex) field of philosophy, and they don't earn shit. I agree on not painting broad brushstrokes. But there are some discernable patterns.
    • glesica 13y ago
      Do I really need a person who went to school for "decades" to swab my kid's tongue to see if she has strep? Do I even need a person with "decades" of education to then write out a prescription based on the lab results (that I could probably read myself with 5 minutes of reading online)? I doubt anyone would seriously say that a heart surgeon doesn't deserve big bucks for performing heart surgery. But most highly-paid people in the medical profession aren't doing heart surgery. For the most part, they're getting paid by hiding behind regulations that say they can't be replaced by people with less education who would work for less. Same goes for the legal profession, to some extent. The fact that you can't represent clients in court without passing the bar is both a consumer protection (we don't want scam artists bilking clients) AND a subsidy to the legal profession. It may be a subsidy we are "OK" with, but don't deny that it is a subsidy.
• fit2rule 13y ago
  >It's awfully hard to discern a point in this rambling piece. The point is: its expensive being poor. The rich receive so many more benefits and rewards in their world, simply for the fact that they 'are rich' and thus 'have more potential' than the poor. Until we realize that the poor are kept there by the wealthy, we'll never solve income-inequality in the world. Without such 'rich bubbles' existing in our society, there is no hope for us all to rise.
  • yummyfajitas 13y ago
    Can you explain the mechanism by which the rich keep the poor there? (If the answer is simply "insufficient wealth redistribution", what is the right amount of wealth redistribution? I.e., at what amount of redistribution do we declare that the wealthy have done enough, and the problem must lie not with them?)
    • fit2rule 13y ago
      The rich get a lot of things for free that most people would have to pay large amounts of money for .. such as free glasses of sekt while waiting for the plane, or gift bags when you enter the host bar, and so on. By just accepting this as a matter of 'life as a rich person', the rich do indeed steal from the poor - those bags had to get paid somehow, the sekt doesn't just bottle itself. I recently attended a large art opening in a very wealthy city. The party was full of millionaires and billionaires. Everywhere: free food, free drinks, free everything. I felt more connection with the waiters and servers than I did with any of the rich people enjoying the fruits of all the servers work .. What I think has to happen is that the rich have to realize that their privilege has to be shared, and they simply have to share it as much as they can. This dividing line between 'me and them' has to disappear. I don't think that wealth-redistribution by the government is any sort of solution; what has to happen is that society has to enlighten itself to the point where these greedy, self-indulgent people do not get created by societys' institutions. I tipped the waiters, anyway. Nobody else in the room did.
      • yummyfajitas 13y ago
• flexie 13y ago
  Molly Crabapple, the writer of the column, is an accomplished artist and writer and has probably made more money in her career than most programmers her age. I'd say there is plenty of room in the world for artists like her.
  • loblollyboy 13y ago
    "Artists like her" - aka extremely talented (and attractive) ones. Talent and/or good looks will usually make room for you in any field. That said, why the fuck not do art if that's what you want to do? It would be stupid to go 100k into debt for it, but better the world has happy, talented artists than bad, unhappy programmers.
• greendata 13y ago
  You do realize she is doing likely doing very well in the free market? CS is lucrative at the moment but than can and probably will change soon.
  • mercer 13y ago
    Why do you think that will change? I'm expecting the CS market to be doing well for at least a decade (unless there's some kind of apocalypse).