[giantg2]

This has nothing to do with subsisting while learning your craft. This is about a supply and demand difference and the inequality in entertainment roles. If you have too many actors, then the nobodies get paid next to nothing while the famous people get the lion's share. And many of those nobodies never make even close to earning a living because the supply side is saturated and the demand side doesn't want to pay for that art. You have to have buyers.

[MrJohz]

Class in this context is referring to the actors' backgrounds, i.e. parental incomes, rather than their own income. There is an issue if you have to be born to a rich family in order to take on a career like acting, and right now, at least based on the evidence, that appears to be true: you need a sufficient safety net to be able to survive for a long time on basically no income while you practice and work low-paying gigs until you finally break through. For some people that just isn't possible.

A social safety net means that more people have the ability to try out risky careers - not necessarily that more of them will succeed, but that the pool of applicants will be larger and include a wider proportion of the population.

[rahimnathwani]

Should we also subsidize lottery tickets?

[MrJohz]

Does society benefit from there being lots of lottery winners from a variety of backgrounds? I think there is a big difference between having a thriving arts landscape and having a thriving landscape of people who won the lottery.

[rahimnathwani]

Why would your proposal result in a 'thriving arts landscape'?

[MrJohz]

It comes back to the Stephen Jay Gould quote:

> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

If you widen the pool of applicants, you've got a better chance of finding the best actors, musicians, writers, etc. And you also get a wider variety of stories to tell. Monocultures are dangerous, be that in the workplace, in politics, in academia, or in the arts. Ensuring that more people get a chance to enter these fields keeps them healthy and active, and prevents them from devolving into navel gazing.

It's the same way that if you want to see innovation in tech, you need to keep on funding startups and small companies. If instead you just constantly subsidise Google and friends, you'll never get that next great thing, you'll just get more of the same.

[rahimnathwani]

  It's the same way that if you want to see innovation in tech, you need to keep on funding startups

Right, and there's a market mechanism for funding risky startups.

If there's such a benefit to finding additional folks with extreme acting talent/potential, why is a non-market solution required?

[wombatpm]

Lotteries are already a tax on people bad at math