[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?

[MrJohz]

It's not just market mechanisms that ensure risky startups get funded. It's also decisions in government about how to tax those sorts of companies and investments, what sort of writeoffs they have available to them, what safety nets are available for people investing, etc. It's not as simple as just having the government take its hands away and let private enterprise get on with things — the government needs to actively reward the behaviour it wants to see.

There is of course a market mechanism deciding which actors achieve success — the employment market. It doesn't make sense to get rid of that. But government interventions are what fuels innovation — otherwise the market will simply stagnate as the largest entities in it capture it and prevent any growth or change from happening.

[wombatpm]

Lotteries are already a tax on people bad at math