Time and Money

[ysabetwordsmith]

This post talks about time and money.




The creative industries are in a terrible state at the moment.

I’ve never known anything like it, where perceived success, and making a workable living, are so rarely connected. Where people perceived as the best in their field – world class, experienced craftspeople – are struggling for money, applying for benefits, changing careers, having to leave their homes, going years without any work in their trained skillset.

It’s different for everyone, but from talking to people in my sector – writing – the situation is stark. To make good stuff you need money, because you need the free time that money buys you. Writing, like editing or practicing music, is iterative. You have to do it again and again for it to get any good. That’s what ‘drafts’ are. Which means that developing something to a level that can be sold in a competitive market to a critical audience takes ages. You can’t do it well in a few hours after work.

The old system was that traditional media – its budgets underwritten by advertising, and physical media sales, and direct audience response – would pay well. It would do so regularly enough to leave you time after every pay cheque, to make stuff on spec, develop new ideas, and go out and find homes for them.

That’s not happening now. Unemployed creatives are too stressed, or too busy serving coffee and riding Amazon delivery bikes. And the remaining employed people are burned out by working six times as hard for the smaller number of massive projects that are still available.

Add to this that the residuals model – where old stuff you’d made would keep paying you between jobs – has been thinned to a trickle. Digital repeats are paid for with an ever-dwindling one-off payment at the time of commission, if at all. And the endless content hose is filled with stuff that’s been bought on buy-out, or at a knock down rate. That’s how they afford to create the illusion of never-stemmed abundance on the various media menus, that deluge of content that viewers and listeners feel spoiled by.


In order to have the things that make life worth living, people need to be able to make a living with a reasonable subset of total hours. They need sleep and food and family.

Comments

[siliconshaman]

Oh we so need Universal Income.

[acelightning2]

Ay-fuckin-men, pal!

Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

We do, but I'm not sure people could implement it properly. Tests have been promising but small-scale. I suspect if done on a large scale, people would simply raise prices enough to make it useless. Compare with the minimum wage, which is supposed to be a living wage, but cannot afford an apartment anywhere in America.

To be useful, a UBI would have to cover housing, food, clothes, all the survival needs plus whatever else society requires people to have like a car and internet service. That adds up to a huge amount. I don't see any government finding the money for that.

Re: Yes ...

[siliconshaman]

Therein lies the difference between a Universal Income, and Universal Basic Income. The latter covering just the basics.

The test have shown that a UBI is actually cheaper than the current benefits system, since the administrative overhead (which is typically 30% to 50% of the entire cost of welfare) is so much less.

Basically, you could take the entire budget for social welfare and use that for a UBI scheme, increase what people would receive by 20% over the current system, and still make a saving of 10-20%.

No, what stands in the way is the entrenched idea that 'poors' have to somehow prove they deserve government support, and UBI smacks too much of a free 'handout'.

Re: Yes ...

[acelightning2]

Part of the problem is that the money to distribute to the "poor" people comes from working people's taxes. "Why should my hard-earned money go to pay those lazy bums who can't be bothered to work for a living? Make them all get jobs, and jobs that don't pay them enough to live on, so they have to work three soul-sucking jobs to pay the rent and buy food, just like WE DO."

The American Dream is that if you work VERY VERY HARD ALL YOUR LIFE you'll wind up being able to retire and live a life of leisure. Retire to Florida or Arizona, fish or play golf all day.... and eventually run out of money and wind up with your grandchildren paying to keep you in a retirement home.

I once attended a wedding in Florida. Everywhere I went, I saw women in their 80s doing jobs that were normally done by teenagers, like waiting tables in a diner. They retired, their husbands died, and they did what they had to do to survive.

[acelightning2]

"Creative" work - writing, composing, painting - isn't "work" in the same sense that necessary drudgery is. It doesn't make a profit, the way slaving away at a job that pays wages does. Dealing with rude selfish retail customers gives your EMPLOYER a profit, and so does factory work that might be unsafe or unhealthy. Just daydreaming about a story or a song doesn't give ANYBODY any profit, so it's not "real work". Work is supposed to be arduous, unpleasant, and exhausting, and you're supposed to be underpaid, to make you try to work longer and harder to earn more pay. And working those long hours doesn't leave you time to practice your piano technique, or to write down the story idea you got while waiting for the bus. You're allowed to have a short amount of time to eat, sleep, and do household chores, but it's preferable if you're too tired from your job to do anything but collapse in an exhausted stupor in front of the TV. Your employer likes it when everybody is too exhausted to rebel. Sleeping and having a personal life don't make profits for anybody. Just shut up and be a flawlessly rotating cog in the machinery.