The Busker Principle: cultural kneecapping with economic consequences

We underpay the work with the highest social value. In the new world, this toxic trait will be our undoing.

Sep 23, 2025

Welcome to the third instalment of The Ambition Recession, where we look at the state of ambition in the world today – from Aotearoa and Australia to the wider world, traversing politics, economics, philosophy and culture.

In previous editions, we’ve looked at tall poppy syndrome and ambition traps for women. In this piece, we’ll examine ambition asymmetry across occupations – and why we’re in trouble if we can’t switch gears.

This work is fully funded by readers. If you’re a long-time reader of Wednesday Wisdom or Current Fad and you value what I bring to your inbox, pay for your subscription so I can keep writing. As professional development, it’s a claimable expense and if you’re drowning in information but starving for insight... it’s money well spent.

In this piece:

The Busker Principle
Cultural kneecapping
Soft power and creative exports
How to switch gears
The Busker Principle is poison, let’s bin it

The Busker Principle

It’s a sunny Sunday morning at the market. A scruffy musician, perched on a stool, strums his guitar and croons along. Couples strolling past stop to listen, smile, and tap their feet. Kids race up between songs to drop a coin in the open guitar case, beaming with flushed pleasure when he thanks them over the mic. The vibe is joyful, stitching strangers together, just for the morning, as we gather to hear him play.

The busker’s guitar case is open for cash tips, but there is no way for the cashless to contribute. Striking up a chat between songs, Cam and I suggest he puts a QR code out next time, so people like us can tip him for his work.

The man sitting next to us interjects swiftly: “Don’t do that,” he advised the busker firmly. Turning to me, he explains: ‘It’ll take away from the music.“ We argue, briefly. The busker shrinks in embarrassment. He will almost definitely not print a QR code now.

This is the Busker Principle: bringing joy to the world is reward enough. To pay would cheapen the impact. Besides, art and music are not work - not the kind we pay or are paid for.

In the not-for-profit sector, it’s called the ‘purpose penalty’ - the paycut for choosing meaning over money. In 2025, there’s an almost inverse relationship between social value and income. Nurses, teachers, bus drivers - the same people we designated most essential a few short years ago - strike for fair pay, while our elected leaders gaslight them out of their poverty.

Cultural kneecapping

Of all sectors, it may be creative industries who are most familiar with voluntary labour, subsidising their audiences’ participation by performing for free or even paying from their own pocket. According to Steven Youngblood, General Manager Strategy, Insights and Impact at soon-defunct Toi Mai, “NZ artists tend to use ticketing to manage access, not revenue.” According to some reports, the 2023 production of Wicked relied almost completely on unpaid actors, dancers, and musicians - despite ticket prices up to roughly $90 and total audiences in the tens of thousands. This is the industry standard.

In May, I attended an Auckland Writer’s Festival panel titled “Being a New Zealand Writer Today.“ For an hour, New Zealand’s most respected literary voices told aspiring writers their best hope was to be broke and unrecognised. It’s just an honour to be literate, they shrugged, smiling modestly. We’re grateful for half a pencil and a wonky desk. (Paraphrasing mine.) The message was clear: financial success from your writing is unrealistic. Writers should expect to struggle.

The panelists were talented, generous creatives with collective decades of persistence and production. Their pragmatism wasn’t malicious; nor was it gatekeeping. It was a warm-hearted warning, a survival mechanism that keeps them writing in an ecosystem limping along with meagre resources.

When writers and artists are told to expect nothing, we all lose. We lose entertainment, sure. But we also lost the perspective and stories of those who can’t afford to create our national story infrastructure for free. We lose access to diverse points of view, shared values, and empathy across class and culture.

Colm Toibin, Laureate for Irish Fiction and vocal supporter of writers’ bursaries. Source: Auckland Writers Festival

It needn’t be this way. In countries like Ireland and Iceland, culture is treated as infrastructure. Creatives can receive a salary to dedicate themselves to their work. Ireland, with the same population as New Zealand, has produced four Nobel literature laureates and multiple Booker prize winners. The Dublin Literary Award, funded by Dublin City Council, is the most lucrative fiction prize in the world, valued at €100,000. Writer bursaries and tax exemptions make writing a valued profession of national pride. In Iceland, with a population of just over 400,000, millions in literary funding has created the ‘Icelandic book flood’, lifted the average person’s reading rate to 2.3 books per month, and saved indigenous language publishing.

In New Zealand, national broadcasters will call you a hua after you become the youngest person in history to win the Booker. We will spend $70 million to snivel for more Lady Gaga concerts people can’t afford, but not properly fund a creative sector that makes and exports brilliance of its own. (To put that figure into perspective, Creative New Zealand’s entire annual budget, from all sources, comes to just under $70 million.)

To the market man and panelists both, I suggest: admiration without compensation is exploitation. Expecting people to produce creative assets like music, art, film, or writing for free, and criticising them for attempts to be paid, dampens enthusiasm to do necessary, world-changing work.

And necessary, world-changing work, it is. Creative work is the fabric of civic life. It builds cohesion, equity, and identity - the stories that help us see ourselves in one another. When we underfund it, we don’t just lose out on potential GDP. We lose national pride, shared understanding and, as increasingly recognised internationally, soft power.

Soft power and creative exports

A report released last week from Toi Mai, produced by economist Shamubeel Eaqub, has the numbers: New Zealand’s creative sectors contribute $13 billion to GDP every year and support around 100,000 jobs. In a press release from Toi Mai, Eaqub explains: “The world loves our creative sector and is buying our creative outputs. It is our fourth largest commodity export at $3.6 bn in 2023, bigger than fruit, wine and seafood, sitting behind only dairy, meat and forestry. It is also a highly productive sector, with each worker producing $346,000 a year when adjusted for hours worked – slightly higher than agriculture and much more than the national average of $197,000.“

In a country hamstrung by dependence on high-input, low-productivity, environmentally ravaging primary sectors, these are numbers worth paying attention to. Dr Clare Robinson, Toi Mai’s Chief Executive, is frustrated. “To put the size of the economic prize in perspective: while New Zealand’s primary industries are impressive, they can only feed 40 million people annually – compare that to the creative sector, which can reach 5.3 billion global consumers (66% of the world’s population) through digital screens and platforms.”

The gap, according to Eaqub’s research and the subsequent New Dawn report from Toi Mai, is in our skills and investment. In this, we lag embarrassingly behind our international counterparts, which might explain why we lose our most innovative people and companies, and have to borrow technology skills from temporary migrants. “Once companies get to nine employees, they leave New Zealand.“ explains Youngblood. “Then when you look at our tech workforce, 45% of them are on working visas.“.

The rest of the world has twigged to the new frontier of cultural ‘soft power’ and is backing it with effort and investment - the UK has even established a Soft Power Council.

The superstar in this space is South Korea, who have tripled the value of their cultural exports in the last decade. We didn’t take the Hallyu (Korean Wave) seriously to start with, when our kid’s bedrooms were filled with ear-worms like Gangnam Style and Baby Shark. But Academy Award winning films like Parasite and record-breaking shows like Squid Game have cemented Korea’s position as a leading cultural force. This soft power strategy, which began after the Asian financial crisis of 1997, is the result of well-funded and highly targeted policy intervention. The South Korean government has been strategically investing in creative industries, establishing dedicated government ministries, Councils and funding, offering tax advantages, subsidies and diplomatic passports, and operating as an aligned and consistent messaging machine across government - even taking K-Pop group BTS to perform at the UN General Assembly.

Unlike Korea, New Zealand would be starting from a position of relative strength. Travelling for work, when people discover I’m a Kiwi, they generally mention three things: the Lord of the Rings, the natural environment, and the haka. Cultural and environmental capital. It’s why the government take a kapa haka group on trade missions: because our culture is our most powerful asset and point of difference.

Globally, people already rate what our creative sector produces - which is richer than many Kiwis probably recognise. An explainer report published by WeCreate (an alliance of New Zealand’s creative industry associations and organisations), outlines success stories such as the New Zealand video game industry, which has produced:

“consistent double-digit annual growth, and average worker productivity surpassing NZD $499,500, underscoring it’s robust contribution to the national economy. The annual exports of the industry now exceed staples like pharmaceuticals, iron and steel, and wood pulp in importance for New Zealand.”

Gaming companies like PikPok and Black Salt Games have a huge global audience, with over 97% of the industry’s revenue generated through exports. WeCreate point to diverse success stories like Les Mills, (who’s programmes run in 22,000 gyms across 110 countries), comedian Rose Matafeo, Auckland-based advertising agency Special Group (named the World’s Best Creative Agency) and luxury jeweller Alice Herald as examples of the breadth and potential of New Zealand creatives.

Productivity continues to plummet as unemployment rises and GDP shrinks, but the now-disestablished Productivity Commission was clear, for years, about the way forward:

Support Kiwi firms to export high-value products
Diversify markets
Improve skills training
Shift policy to capture global opportunities
Pivot away from dependence on raw inputs like labour and natural resources toward outputs generated by innovation and technology.

Toi Mai Chief Executive Dr Claire Robinson is unequivocal: “New Zealand is currently squandering its significant competitive advantage in the creative sector by fragmented thinking and broken policies – compare this with competitors such as Singapore, Australia and the UK that are deliberately positioning creative industries as core economic drivers and reaping tangible economic rewards.”

We’ve seen what the team of five million can come together and do when called for it. One wonders why our Prime Minister is recording videos begging Taylor Swift to visit us, when he could be backing a creative economy people are lining up to buy the outputs of.

How to switch gears

Here’s what the government can do, according to the experts in this space:

Actively lobby for New Zealand’s creative interests in regional and global trade environments. This would include things like removing outdated export restrictions such as limited license numbers for videogame exports or onerous registration for creative professionals, shifting requirements like bricks-and-mortar foreign presence, and harmonising IP regulations to keep creative assets.
Develop a creative export strategy and invest in support programmes, like South Korea and the UK have. Establish a dedicated Minister, and Ministry, to lead the implementation across government and industry. Take the ‘Amplify’ strategy just released and turn the volume dial up to 100 on all the goals and targets. Aiming for a 10% bump across metrics in a space with exponential potential is embarrassing. Think bigger.
Walk the talk, bringing creative exporters on trade missions, and promote cultural and creative businesses in international formats. Establish trade relationships with global platforms, a la Denmark and Australia, and shift the dial on tax and regulation.
Proudly ‘pick winners’ a la South Korea and implement subsidies, incentives, and support for creative industries. Pay creatives for producing great work. Make a creative career an alluring, lucrative prospect, not a Sunday side hustle for a tired office worker.
Overhaul a broken skills training ecosystem to build better local talent with skills that industry are looking for, to stem the flow overseas of local companies and reduce reliance on temporary imported labour.

Here’s what you can do, according to me, now that I’ve spent more hours down this rabbit hole than expected:

Be a visible, vocal supporter of local creatives. Don’t expect things for free.
Go to gigs, and pay for them.
Tip your local busker.
Buy New Zealand literature.
Spruik New Zealand films and shows.
Push back against tall-poppy, small-fry bullshit whenever you hear it spoken.
Make cool stuff and loudly, proudly flash it around.
Price your cool stuff with confidence and authority.
Encourage your stuff-making friends to do the same.
Drop this old-school ‘reading, writing, rithmetic’ approach to education the dinosaurs are trying to bring back and encourage your kids to learn Te Reo, paint, draw, make music and write stories.
Remember how much you loved doing all that at primary school, drop the idea that you’re “not the creative type” and do stuff like that yourself.
Don’t let the economic recession capture you into inadvertently supporting a cultural recession. These things aren’t nice to haves. They’re our value, our identity, our pride, and our economic future.

Wellington’s beloved Tree Man, posing with my latest book. Two creatives spruiking each other’s goods.

The Busker Principle is poison, let’s bin it

Telling our buskers that payment would spoil their music is an insidious cultural pathology, poisoning everything it touches. If you love what you do, says the spectre of the man-at-the-market, you shouldn’t be paid for it.

The poison leaks across our society and economy, weakening our potential and threatening our future. It undercuts creative, care and purpose work, justifying their poverty by romanticising sacrifice. It kneecaps writers, musicians, artists by conflating struggle with authenticity. We lose access to unknown swathes of cultural and creative contribution by making it financially impossible to participate. Then, our government reinforces the Busker Principle by importing culture instead of backing our own, showing the world we’d rather be spectators than creators.

The Busker Principle puts our ambition into recession. Individually, we learn to lower our sights and be grateful for scraps. Structurally, impactful work is disincentivised and hamstrung. Nationally, we kill long-term prospects for pride, prosperity and identity in favour of small-time survival.

The Busker Principle isn’t just unfair. It’s dumb, fiscally irresponsible, and profoundly anti-ambition. It keeps us poor, sends our creative talent away, and puts us in the cheap seats clapping for others instead of occupying the main stage. Countries like Ireland, Iceland, Korea, and the UK are building wealth, influence, and identity, while we’re pissing and whinging.

We need better. It’s time to back ourselves, put our money where our mouth is, and reward innovation, creativity and social value in our economy. Have some ambition, for god’s sake.

This work is fully funded by readers and takes many hours of research, writing, and editing. If you’re a long-time reader and you value what I bring to your inbox, pay for your subscription so I can keep writing. As professional development, it’s a claimable expense and if you’re drowning in information but starving for insight... it’s money well spent.