alt Hacker News> Art, while cool to look at and experience, has a pretty low efficacy in terms of "motivating people to do work, or removing obstacles, to carry society forward"
Idk, the soviets didn't invest in socialist realism propaganda for nothing.
Less sarcastically, art has had an outsized influence on society and culture. Take any social movement you want, and there was probably some novel or work of art that galvanized it.
My argument isn't that art doesn't have an impact, my argument is that the artists to impact ratio is insane.
10,000 artists in, one $20k work of art out.
Whereas something like the engineer is closer to
5 engineers in, $500k of work out (and even that is pretty conservative)