Talent Follows Incentives

A friend of mine used to play in a rock band. For almost a decade, he toured the country in a van, selling T-shirts, chasing small-town gigs. The music was good. The money wasn’t. Now he teaches public school in Chicago, summers off, middle-class life. He makes more grading papers than he ever did playing shows.

The economics just didn’t work. It’s almost impossible to make even a middle-class living playing in a band today.

And look, it was never easy making money in music while playing in a band. Traveling musicians have existed for centuries, minstrels, troubadours, court musicians. None of them got rich. It was a living, a lifestyle, but not a path to becoming a millionaire. It was s stable, slow-evolving tradition passed down within communities. A village had its songs. Those songs were good. But they weren't competing for excellence the way art forms do when there's something to win.

But every so often, history opens a brief profit window, a period when technology, culture, and finance align so perfectly that great art can also make you rich.

Rock in the 20th century was one of those windows. The odds of success were always slim, but the upside was real, fame, money, women, status. The rewards were visible enough that talented people who might otherwise become academics, businessmen, or employees picked up guitars instead.

Mick Jagger left the London School of Economics to form the Rolling Stones. Brian May left his PhD in astrophysics when Queen took off.

The Beatles were discovered by accident. In 1961, a teenager asked for a single in Brian Epstein’s Liverpool record shop, a small recording the Beatles had made in Hamburg. Epstein tracked them down, saw them live, and within months became their manager. But the Beatles already understood the stakes. They knew rock music could make you rich and famous. They weren’t playing just for beer money, they were chasing the new reward structure of their era. It’s doubtful they would even start a band today, the incentives are not there anymore.

That profit window is now closed.

The industry that once turned songs into fortunes has flattened into an endless stream of content. Album sales and label advances, once the backbone of a musician’s income, have been replaced by fractions of a cent per stream, by touring, merch, and sync licensing.

The total pie has shrunk, and the middle class of music has disappeared. A 2018 Citigroup report found that musicians’ share of U.S. music-industry revenue collapsed from 27% in 2000 to just 12% in 2017. It’s even less now.

It gets worse, young people, the drivers of discovery for new music, are finding fewer and fewer new musical artists to listen to.

“Real Artists Do it for the Love”

A common objection I hear for my incentives drive talent argument is: “But real artists don’t care about money; they create because they must.”

True. There will always be great obsessives. You can find them all over YouTube.

Generally. without strong incentives, the types of people who go into an art form are the obsessives, the already wealthy, and the side-hobbyists.

But with strong incentives, however, you get all of those plus the ambitious and talented who are weighing options, the pragmatic geniuses leaving school, the people with raw ability who need a reason to commit ten thousand hours. Money, fame and status are great motivators. You lose the person who could have been great at something else.

When the money fades, the pool narrows again. What’s left is continuity, steady, earnest work, but rarely the kind of concentrated brilliance that makes an era unforgettable.

The Golden Era of Art

If you zoom out far enough, you see that great art doesn’t arrive evenly through time. It comes in bursts, brief eras when an art form suddenly attracts a dense concentration of talent. The reason why they attract talent? Incentives. When people see a clear path to reward, money, fame, patronage, immortality, the best minds of a generation rush in. For a few decades, talent pools concentrate. Then the incentives shift, and the migration moves elsewhere.

Strong incentives explain why some eras simply produced better art.

The 18th century had its composers. Europe’s courts and churches paid musicians directly, creating stable careers for the gifted. Bach, Handel, and Haydn all held salaried posts under princes and bishops. When that patronage system weakened, Mozart and Beethoven invented something new, the freelance composer. They sold tickets, published sheet music, and courted wealthy subscribers. Here is Mozart writing to his Father about his explicit goals for fame and money. This was possible.

The 19th and 20th century had its novelists. Industrial printing, mass literacy, and the serialized press made writing a middle-class (or wealthy mans) profession. Charles Dickens serialized The Pickwick Papers and became a household name. He was a businessman as much as an artist. Balzac, Eliot, and Dostoevsky all thrived in this ecosystem. Dostoevsky wrote The Gambler in two months because he had to,he was broke. But people were reading novels then, writing could pay your bills and your debts. Good luck doing that today.

Even Mickey Spillane, who wrote fast-paced detective fiction, knew there was a chance of getting rich doing it. Today? Not so much.

And the rewards didn’t always mean luxury. Sometimes the prize was simply freedom. As Dostoevsky said, “Money is coined liberty.”

Where Talent Goes

Incentives change sometimes almost invisibly, without people on the outside realizing it. The shift can be subtle, and then one day you look up and the thing is completely different.

For nearly a thousand years, Catholic priests held immense power. They controlled literacy, advised kings, lived in institutions that functioned as Europe's first universities. Many families sent their brightest sons into the clergy because that's where the security and prestige were. The Church got the intellectual elite. Thomas Aquinas, Peter Abelard, Gregor Mendel. These weren't men who lacked options. They were talented and chose theology because that's where a gifted mind could thrive.

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Then society secularized. Religion declined. The same caliber of mind that once entered monasteries became academics, lawyers, scientists, businessmen. The incentive structure shifted, and the talent pool migrated with it.

The pattern repeats everywhere. Right now, some of the most talented people in the world are focused on making noses look cuter. Plastic surgery attracts doctors with the highest exam scores because it ranks among the highest-paid medical specialties. The rewards are obvious: high income, desirable lifestyle, unlimited earning ceiling, Instagram fame. A doctor who could spend thirty years studying antibiotic resistance spends it perfecting rhinoplasties in Beverly Hills instead.

The Economy and Incentives

Every society faces a choice about where to point its talent. It can let incentives drift, or it can shape them deliberately.

China and the United States have chosen different directions on this issue

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