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.
> 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.
It's the same way that if you want to see innovation in tech, you need to keep on funding startups
If there's such a benefit to finding additional folks with extreme acting talent/potential, why is a non-market solution required?
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.
Clearly everyone can see that the system is "unfair" in almost every industry, so the question is why does everybody perpetuate this system. It seems to be that by and large, people are prepared to pay more to get more of whatever they consider "the best" and they care much less about everything else in that space.
But shift the focus away from people and to products - why are so many people willing to pay over $1000 for the latest iPhone, when they already have the previous year's phone, and a $100 phone probably does 90% of what they need.
Again, it's because people want the best they can afford, and so the market increases the price to the point that maximises the product of price and people prepared to pay that price. Sadly, for the aspiring musician that hasn't been scouted yet, the price is low and even then not many people are prepared to pay it. This is why we have record labels who scout for talent, front them some money up front, handle publicity and building an audience, hoping that one of their 100+ artists might make enough that they can pay for the rest and still make a profit.
This doesn’t just apply to the arts, if all junior dev roles are stripped away by llm’s where do the talented developers of tomorrow come from? Those who can learn the craft on their own time, those with independent wealth.
At a societal level there is a huge amount of potential talent being left on the table, and imo redistributive policies are the obvious fix. In think this is really important both from a mortal point of view and an economically pragmatic one.