Um, hikikomori are a hotbed of creative works, though. Your entire premise is false. I don't know that you could get reliable statistics proving this claim, but Japan likely has the highest number of creatives per capita of any country in the world, and a ton of them are NEETs who spend their time drawing fanart or writing trashy webnovels. The vast majority of this creative work isn't commercially successful, of course, which is part of why they're NEETs.
> "NEETs who spend their time drawing fanart or writing trashy webnovels"
And you expect the voting public to be persuaded to support UBI because of the immense societal value of an tsunami of gooner fanart (yes, I do have some passing familiarity with the sort of output Japanese NEETs generate) and "trashy webnovels"? I'm pretty sure that when the person I'm replying to talked about "the incredible artworks [and] literature ... that would spring into existence", that's probably not what they were hoping for.
I'm not commenting in any way on UBI, as I try to avoid having strong opinions about topics I don't have expertise on. My only stake in this matter is addressing the patently false claim that NEETs are not creative, when the exact opposite is true which perhaps is incidentally harmful to the argument you were building against UBI given that you staked it on an inversion of the truth.
That you boil it down to "gooner fanart" reflects entirely on yourself and what you view. I believe this is known as "telling on yourself". The overwhelming majority of the artistic output is actually not lewd; somewhere in the region of 85-90% of what gets published is SFW. Not only that, a pretty considerable amount of output is in fact professional-quality; if anything keeps them from being professionals, it's merely the fact that they spend their time creating what they want to see in the world. Being an actually professional artist generally entails creating what other people want to see in the world; specifically what a critical mass of people willing to pay want, which renders commercially viable art to a limited subset of possibilities, mostly only possibilities that appeal to the lowest common denominator if you want to ensure the safety of your income.
You could indeed say that literature is a weak point relative to the very high quality art, music, games, etc, in the NEET cultural sphere, but it's because people aren't trying to be literary. There is simply a subcultural preference, among both creators and consumers, for easier-to-digest writing. The forms of creativity people take an interest in don't have to match the exact ones you value in order for them to have merit. People read and write trashy webnovels because they like trashy webnovels, and that's fine too. It is still an expression of creativity all the same. And some small percentage of those trashy webnovels do go on to be extremely commercially successful, so even if that's your cynical metric for creative value to society it would still be incorrect to say they don't have value.
Can it really be a 'hotbed' if there is no demand (or even maybe awareness) of the works? That just seems like a hobby done for selfish reasons.
Quoting GGGP:
>There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it, not for some financial reward. Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met.
As it happens, the Japanese internet is absolutely rich with content created by individuals, most of it done for the sake of love for creative work rather than financial motivation. I spend much of my free time either consuming it or contributing to the pool of such work myself. The entire point of this discussion thread was about the potential for creativity if you were to unshackle it from the demands of financial self-sustenance.
As an aside, I believe this phenomenon manifested as strongly as it has in Japan because of the extremely low cost of living relative to the level of economic development; a studio apartment can be had for less than the equivalent of $200 USD per month, and many parents can afford to and are willing to pay this price to get the NEETs out of their house. In essence enabling them, not that they want to enable their adult children to depend on them but the burden is small enough that they can tolerate it.
I have no problem with people doing whatever they want, but if nobody else values it, there’s no ‘contribution’ to society, art, or anything else.
People valuing something is not at all the same as people spending money for it. For one, there is always competition with an abundance of freely available material. At the very least, you’d have to compare with a situation where nothing of the sort whatsoever would be freely available, and that’s very hard to do.
That being said, I’m skeptical of UBI being workable as well.
I think that's an unbelievably cynical worldview, one I don't agree with at all, but within that view: what of the things people value, but which they do not pay for? Much of the tech of the world is built on the free labour of FOSS developers. Are they not contributing to society because they are not compensated for their contributions?
I contribute to FOSS, and everything from issue reports to branches and pull requests are indications of a project’s value! True value is difficult to measure, but there are many projects which contribute no value.
It's quite possible to be creative while not contributing to society or whatnot.
A crappy sand castle from a eight-year old that will be torn down when the tide comes in is not really contributing to anything useful, but can be quite creative.
I never disputed the fact that shut-ins can be ‘creative’, but instead focused on ‘hotbed’. I would characterize artistic failures as being more ‘original’ and perhaps ‘creative’ than successes, but they still lack value (to anyone but the creator). Regardless, this seems pointlessly semantic.
Counterexample:Ignaz Semmelweis, who discovered in the 1840s that hand-washing dramatically reduced deaths in childbirth. The medical establishment rejected his findings, and he was institutionalized and died tragically, vindicated only after his death.
Surely this was a contribution even if not valued at the point of making it.
Even given the other objections to your argument, there are an extraordinary number of examples of now-very-appreciated artists, writers, etc whose work was not valued at the time they were creating it.
All hobbies are selfish, that's kinda the point?