Reminds me of a couple of married friends of mine. The wife played a classical musical instrument (e.g., not an electric guitar) and had her sights set on being a professional. While working towards that she did a lot of teaching/practising/etc, and her students would often say something along the lines of "I'm so envious of all this time you have to practice music! How are you able to do it?!" and her reply was always a bit of a let-down/reality check for them: "my husband works in tech."
Not quite independently wealthy, but I imagine there's a fair few artists out there in a similar position.
Everyone in silicon valley is familiar with founders that got seed money or connections from friends and family. My point is that even having a safe place to sleep isn't assured for some people, and folks should remember that when they pat themselves on the back for 'taking risks' founding a startup. Some people would be taking much larger risks than others.
I think the implication is that, as opposed to starting a romantic relationship with someone who can support you or a side hustle or etc., having a supportive family is much more passive (and somewhat a roll of the dice, but generally speaking if you were lucky/privileged enough to be born into a family who can emotionally and/or financially support you, there probably isn't much labor/effort you had to put into to make it that way).
It's for sure a huge benefit; I think their point is that it's a huge benefit that doesn't require effort (just chance, or maintenance of good communication/relationship).
2. Two people both working the job and married to each other cannot afford to raise two children.
There are some jobs which we romanticize as being this way (musicians and other artists being a big example), but are we okay with e.g. social workers all either starving, or from wealthy backgrounds?
Snark aside, it's hard to imagine how you could raise kids plural on what a teacher makes here in Seattle. Even the absolute top of the teacher salaries here, after 12 promotions and with a PhD, pay about what my very first tech job did, many years and much inflation ago. I would never have tried to raise kids on that money.
Both my parents were teachers in the South and I had everything I needed and a lot of what I wanted, including computers when they were really expensive. I even grew up in a house.
A lot of (rural) areas in the South are so poor, teachers are among the higher pay scale because they have a steady paycheck with health insurance. My area was a city though, so teachers were on the lower end.
In most places in the USA, two married social workers can afford to raise two children without starving. It's only a few expensive areas where this is impossible.
Employers in high cost areas take advantage of the informal subsidies being discussed here to underpay social workers (as well as other socially valuable occupations such as teachers). But that won't change until the workers move away or switch occupations. There's just no incentive for employers to pay living wages as long as workers are willing to accept less.
There are jobs that we pay lip service to, like musicians and teachers. But ultimately, the jobs we actually value are people in finance who make sure that our savings don't disappear.
Oh, you’re not wrong. There are lots of day-jobbing creatives that I know as well.
I’m one of them. I work a good tech job and do photography as a hobby.
Forgive me if I seemed overly focused on these folks and their lucky circumstances. If I’m being honest, I’m a bit jealous they get to spend all their time focused on their creative interests when I only get to do it part time.
If money wasn’t a requirement, I’d be out photographing every day instead of writing web code.
All in all, life is good though, so even if I’m a teeny bit jealous, I’m grateful for how good I have it in life. I’m pretty lucky, all things considered!
my partner is a working artist and, though successful, would not be able to live in our city comfortably if they weren't with me (or someone else with similar income). it's depressing, although I'm thrilled to help. it means I can't easily quit if I want to pursue another interest. it means we both have incentive to stay together even if something goes wrong romantically. neither of these points are a problem for us right now, but I am sure many artists do struggle with them.
Athletes as well. I don't see how a "husband works in tech" answer is a letdown though, as really, what's a marriage for except creating the circumstances from which to grow. Over the decades my tech jobs have supported grad students, authors, craftswomen, actresses, athletes, among others and it was a pleasure watching them level up and grow. If I were ever to be married, earning enough to support arts or athletic pursuits would be pretty ideal. They're how you make kids brilliant and not be boring.
> what's a marriage for except creating the circumstances from which to grow
This is absolutely not in line with how most people I interact with seem to view marriage nowadays, especially not my fellow university students back when I attended.
From my perspective I think younger people mostly seem to view marriage as restricting, or backward and outdated, not an opportunity for something better.
I especially think younger people don't like the idea that in order to have freedom to pursue the things you love, you might need to marry someone who supports you financially. Otherwise you will be too busy financially supporting yourself to have that same freedom.
> younger people don't like the idea that in order to have freedom to pursue the things you love, you might need to marry someone who supports you financially.
How many people have ever liked it? Hasn't it been one of the few avenues available for lots of people to pursue things they couldn't without financial help? What's a viable alternative?
It absolutely was accepted - not in terms of being supported by her labour, but “marrying up” ie marrying someone from a family of higher social standing and wealth to improve your own station was a common aspiration of a middle class man.
Before the 20th century marriage and inheritance was practically the only way to climb the social ladder and acquire meaningful wealth. It’s basically half of what Balzac wrote about.
I imagine those young people that see themselves being in a position to provide financial support might find marriage restricting, backward and/or outdated.
Maybe, but I think it's not limited just to the "breadwinner" side.
Among people I know who are my age, there is a real attitude that they should not have to attach themselves to another person. They want to self actualize without compromise, so if marriage (or honestly, even monogamy) is not something they want they shouldn't have to do it.
Part of this mentality is totally fair. No one should be forced to marry, or live monogamously or anything else if they don't want.
Where the disconnect lies is the self actualizing without compromising thing. They are often angry at the world because they cannot live their way, but often finding a supportive partner would allow them to, or at least a lot closer to what they want than when they are struggling on their own.
There are exceptions to every rule of course, and the situaton has changed significantly with all-software productions, but... If you dig deeper into many electronic music producers bio, you realize they were sort of rich-kids. First and foremost, hardware costs real money. And this is gambling money, since you typically dont know what is going to come out of that project. And secondly, you need sare time on your hand, to be able to playfully explore the space... Both things are typically hard to find with the working class.
Yup, my brother is literally doing this. He stays at home, plays video games, writes his book. His wife literally works a coal mine to fund his career.
Similar/tangent, even working in tech, I sometimes mention to folks how completely out of touch and out of reach the real estate market in the PNW is. "How?", they ask, forgetting that a single person living alone pays the full share of rent, and then only has a single income to save towards real estate.
Nearly 100% of the people I know under age 35 who own their dwelling are couples, with both employed (and an overwhelming majority of those couples have at least one STEM income in that "portfolio").
I know a bunch of classical musicians, and while they study and work hard they all have steady gigs for one or more ensembles & orchestra's.
From the outside it feels somewhat more doable to be a pro , then a band or solo-artist, since there are quite a few orchestra's around that hire people on a stable basis. Spots are limited, but it's not super hard.
This depends on the instrument and your location. If you play a popular instrument (say the violin) in a metro area with just one orchestra (some have zero!) then you ain't getting on that orchestra any way short of nepotism. If you live within commuting distance of multiple orchestras, there are more spots, but you still aren't going to be playing violin in the orchestra, and it's even possible that nepotism won't help you.
This is definitely not my area, but in other contexts I have heard of blind auditions as being a common practice in orchestras (i.e. people auditioning literally are hidden from view while they play and evaluations are then based only on hearing one play) which improved gender diversity in hiring, but not really racial diversity. How does nepotism work in this system?
It still feels incredibly easy to cheat that system if you were motivated? Pre-share the candidates order list, chosen candidate will signal with an additional three note bar on the finale, etc.
I studied and played classical into college during my engineering degree and have some insight into the realities of the profession - it's much harder than that and the pay for those stable gigs are oftentimes less than $300 / month. You're looking at one of the classic professional survivorship bias that I thought even the layman understood very well. Firstly, orchestras are in dire straights currently where programs are oftentimes supported by movie and pop media performances (see: National Symphony Orchestra playing Fantasia, Danny Elfman scores, and even freakin' Super Mario Brothers). This is a similar situation to ballet and theatre - legacy performance media I guess I'd call them. These orchestras don't pay much at all and most of the money classical musicians make are from lessons, typically the children of fairly affluent professionals, including from tech, finance, real estate, and other usual suspects of said caste. I saw grad students have to skip meals and beg and plead students to continue lessons to eat while I went off to recruiting events sponsored by tech companies where I ate food constantly and I never stopped feeling guilty even after inviting some friends to avoid pizza waste.
Some very lucky others that do well are from multiple generations of musicians that were essentially born, bred, and raised to be among the world's best and live and breathe music. There was no way I could ever compete with these kinds of folks and the hard life I saw so many talented people including professors that _are_ established after decades to live a very modest life made it clear to me that it wasn't something I should do for a living despite how much I love and respect it all. My role I feel is to support these folks now, so I go to shows, buy merch at the show, etc. and try not to take up space or attention too much and let people do what they do while trying to show appreciation for the work I was too chickenshit to ever do.
The arts and now entertainment fields are very much "tournament" style careers where given very limited public attention the winners take basically all and the remainder struggle quite a lot. It's nothing like professional fields like tech, accounting, medicine, law, or trades like construction, hospitality. In fact, any field that becomes more mass market-driven seems to become substantially more "tournament" style which has greatly impacted sex work - a top n% take an increasingly higher percentage away from an elastic but fundamentally highly dynamic demand.
The misattributed quote "find what you love and let it kill you" is the typical path of the career musician like most arts. I prefer to at least have some money to have more options to make it more fun on the way without resorting to the trap that is recreational substances.
Listen, can we all agree to stop calling any expenditure of money without a direct expectation of return a "zero interest rate phenomenon"?
"Starving artists" have existed for millenia. The arts patronage system began either or thousands of years ago, depending on who you ask. People have paid lots of money for gold jewelry basically since we figured out how to pull it out of the ground.
I saw someone call dog-walkers a ZIRP recently. No! It's just a luxury! There's a difference!
But dog walking businesses weren’t getting $1.35 billion dollar valuations before the interest rates were zero for so many years in an unprecedented way.
But the business model of "I walk other people's dogs when they don't have time to" is not a ZIRP. It's just not.
People might have hired more dogwalkers! Because ZIR might have created more affluent individuals! But that's a couple logical jumps from "dogwalking is a ZIRP"
Yeah, but that could just be SoftBank and its desire to light money on fire. I heard a podcast about a different fund who wanted to invest in a dog walking business, but SoftBank offered a huge multiple on what this group thought the company was worth.
Not quite independently wealthy, but I imagine there's a fair few artists out there in a similar position.