Italy has had this for a few years now (people born from 1998 onwards, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-23/italy-s-1...): €500 to be spent on books, music and cultural events, so even looking at the app idea and graphics I would guess this is where it was inspired from.
Overall, I would say it was well-used considering the problem our country has with "free money" initiatives, although I definitely met some people who tried to "cheat the system" to some (smaller) extent, e.g. by using the voucher to get free high-end Kindles in bookstores.
Also, about 40% of purchases (if I recall the stats correctly) were made on Amazon, Spotify or other "big tech" corporations, meaning that while it gave a boost to the smaller economy, local businesses did not get from it as much as one could expect.
2018 statistics (for completeness' sake):
~80 % on books; a bit more than a half on e-books; often used for university textbooks
~9 % on concerts
~7 % on cinemas
1.6 % on music
1 % theatre and dance
0.3 % museums
0.3 % cultural events
That amount is related to illicit activities in 2017-2018. Compared to 2018 budged, it is ~0.2 % (800k€ out of 126M€). In 2019 the violations found were a fifth.
Is it such a waste to spend it on an eink kindle? Obviously it doesn’t sound as good but ebooks are cheaper and a kindle will last a long time. Obviously it doesn’t do much to support the local economy unless you count money going towards authors.
I had this thought too. A Kindle is a fine investment, especially because you're just going to use it to read books anyways (not many first person shooters to play on an e-ink screen).
The cheating included much more (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bonus+cultura+truffa) than expensive e-book readers. Many, with fraudolent sellers, converted the monetary bonus to cash, and spent it as they please.
In my opinion letting people spend this bonus on crap (blockbuster action movies, pop music, etc.) puts the concept of "culture" in a spot I don't really like, when we're talking about public money: while anything you artistic can be considered cultural, because I'm a boring boomer I'd like my hard earned money to be used for something better than a summer music festival.
Well used? There were plenty of tricks and companies doing shady things with the money.
When it was used within the rules, youngsters were using it to go to the movies or buy music online.
I know of some tricks from friends of friends and you can find a few newspapers articles about the bonus being used to buy playstations and other electronics or converted in cash (500€ bonus -> 300€ cash).
If there is a rule, it will be circumvented. Italy and France should think about stopping taxing young people so much, instead of wasting public money in this way.
2018 data: less than 10 % of the money has been used for music (excluding concerts) and cinemas. Please check your sources.
2.503 young people misused that during 2017-2018. Every law can be violated; that does not mean it is bad or good just because someone could behave badly.
One thing I've never understood about this position--why is university such a stark cutoff? Most everyone agrees students shouldn't have to pay for their books in K-12. We agree it's better for our society if primary and second education is not gated by a family's wealth. Not just ethnically, I think it's better for a nation's economic productivity. The whole world is getting more educated, and it does feel like a bachelors or equivalent training is what a high school diploma was 60 years ago.
jail cells? I hope you are merely waxing hyberbolic!!
If I was French or Italian, I'd be extremely offended at that implication that kids are being taught that crime is an acceptable societal and moral choice, especially just because one might not receive a government bribe because they don't meet an arbitrary age requirement.
Obviously paying for textbooks is not the breaking point, but it's a similar mentality (that society should not be responsible for its kids) that leads kids to crime when they have no marketable skills that can be used to get a job.
Why's that? 18 year olds are graduating secondary education this summer and now they have more money to spend in a society that's rapidly opening up. 19 year olds graduated last year, possibly the worst time to do so (especially given the strict lockdown in France), and they get nothing. Life obviously isn't fair but I can't help but feel for the 19 year olds.
Everyone who did not get this likely would have liked to, that's not informative criticism. That nineteen year olds had it rough last year has basically nothing to do with the article.
What they should have done is a $300 culture pass for the entire society to celebrate opening back up. If anybody should be open to such an idea it should be France.
I really wish the go to for everything hoi polloi wasn't Twitter. Twitter encourages trite, mean, and outrageous content, it's not going to have much of a variety of views that get any attention.
It infects anything.
I was listening to a podcast about my local sports team and they couldn't help but reference what they're 'not saying' relative to Twitter outrage ... repeatedly. And even address 'fan sentiment' purely through the looking glass of Twitter.
They talk about players who 'fans don't like' and yet you go to the game and you'd think that was the most popular player based on fan reaction...
Then I switch to my coding related podcast ... same thing, they address Twitter drama like it represents most coders.
It actually makes sense because during the covid crisis, there's been huge issues with student poverty (post high school). So giving out 300€ for 18 years old to buy video games when 1 year older students struggle hard to make ends meet is not taken well by some.
A 1 time 300 bucks given to all the students with a scholarship would be way more appreciated than 300 bucks given to all the 18 years old without distinction.
Yeah student loan forgiveness is a terrible idea. They should just be made dischargable after 10 years.
I've had it with the "they will immediately discharge the debt after graduation" meme. Yes, just add a delay and let them rot on the streets if they are that cheap. If people can't repay their student loans within 10 years then it was a bad deal to begin with.
Or better yet. Sue your school for a refund. Why make the rest of us pay with our tax dollars?
Hypothetically, even if we did collectively bail out a bunch of liberal arts majors, I would still want to see an extensive shuttering of half the country’s higher education institutions for hoodwinking so many people out of their time and money.
Even more ridiculous when you know that the 19 year old of 2021 were 18 year old in 2020 and they could get 500 euros with the very same "pass culture". So it's really hard to see while they would be unhappy.
I lived in France for several years, and I find it somewhat amusing how protective France is of their culture. They limit the number of foreign restaurant chains like McDonalds and Chipotle. They are protective of their language. The French dinner meal ("repas") is a UNESCO World Heritage Cultural Landmark. This "culture pass" is consistent with the French people's love of all things French.
I think it is a good thing overall. I remember the furor when McDonalds opened on the Champs Elysee. Let's be honest, identical globalist fast food plastic frontages ruin the uniqueness of places. Airports are the ultimate example, you can fly 1000's of mile and get off a plane to an airport that is virtually identical to the one you left. This is culturally banal and slowly visually homogenizing the world. The result is insane amounts of tourists heading to the few unique places left in search of differentiation
For all of Starbuck’s insistence that their franchises maintain a standard of service, I first encountered Starbucks in Seattle and didn’t completely understand the “charbucks” epithet until I bought a mocha in the terminal at DFW during a layover. How you burn coffee bad enough that you can taste it over chocolate I’ll never know.
Coffee is a lot like wine, in that the flavor varies a ton from farm to farm and batch to batch even based on small changes in the terroir, climate, or just randomness.
The central challenge to running any sort of mass food chain is to keep your product as consistent as possible. People expect the Starbucks drink they order when they get off the plane in Miami to taste exactly the same as they one they order back home in Boise.
In coffee, the darker the roast the more the individual characteristics of the beans are replaced by the flavors of the roast itself. Starbucks, and most mass coffee chains, char their roasts because it's a way to homogenize away the variance in terroir that comes from beans sourced across a wide range of farms and batches.
As an Italian, the Starbucks "espresso" I had in the UK once was by far the worst I ever tried for the price. And yes, I tried lots of espressos abroad, from cheap supermarket ones, to fast food chain ones, to essentially any popular higher end café chain.
There's a great article by Hans Magnus Enzensberger called A Theory Of Tourism which goes into this: https://mestrantroponova.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/hans-ma... [PDF, 1MB] The issue is that there's effectively no "good" level of tourism (unless you sell things to tourists I suppose).
Edit: The analysis itself starts on the third page, after comparing and contrasting two travel journals from centuries apart.
Paris has more tourists than college towns have students.
I’m not sure what Paris would look like with a negligible tourist population, but it would be quite different. Who maintains the historical buildings? Le Mėtro? Straight tax dollars alone won’t cover it without the tourist subsidies.
How incredibly bitter, you'd think tourists killed his mother. Some of the points hold true but others have changed since the 50s: guided tours and hotels are much less in vogue than they were and the advent of internet reviews applied to everything has both diluted the crowds at the "sights," aside from the world-famous ones, and allowed for more individualized experiences even in tourist-heavy areas, provided one does one's own planning. AirBnB has even returned staying in local homes to fashion, albeit through the medium of capitalism. I suspect Enzensberger would, if rewriting the essay, cast these changes as yet emptier commodities without even the humanity of a travel agent mediated by faceless megacorporations, but based on the original I don't think tourism has evolved as soullessly as he expected.
I'm not sure how much more offensive McDonald's frontage is than, just for example, Sephora. Both fronts look somewhat plain and are built into existing (and impressive) facades.
Of course, your criticism ignores that culture is more than restaurants and much more than consumerism. No matter what stores are open along the Champs-Elysees, that it connects the Arc de Triomphe and Tuileries Garden is worth more culturally than what store fronts exist along the way. That is certainly the unique bit, and probably what draws tourists.
I find it quite sad to see comments like this on HN. Is it amusing to you to see countries trying to protect themselves from absorption by the anglosphere (culturally)? That's how I read your comment - I hope I am wrong though.
Also, this measure is not really about french culture. It is about culture in general. If you visit an art museum most of time it's filled with art from everywhere. The quai Branly museum comes to my mind here, but really most museum have exhibits of foreign works.
My partner was a Velasquez fan and didn’t figure out that Spain had repatriated most of his paintings after the books she read had been printed. There was one wall in the Louvre and she was ill pleased.
When the local art museums rotate in traveling exhibits that’s more for the locals (where ‘locals’ might loosely include a few hours’ transit in all directions). But I feel a little guilty going because I know someone risked a truck full of Van Gogh or Picasso works by sending them a third of the way around the world. It’s cool but what if there’s an accident?
> They limit the number of foreign restaurant chains like McDonalds and Chipotle
I've never heard of anything like that. McDonald's are everywhere, there are new American concoctions of dubious nature making their way into the mainstream everyday and half the central streets of any given city seem to be made out of kebab joints.
I may be wrong and too I’m too lazy to search, but I think that at some point France was one of the biggest markets for MacDo. But honestly nothing can beat that kebab/swawarma thing, that stuff is the best meat for the buck you can get (and quite tasty, too). I’m surprised the kebab culture hasn’t made any big inroads in the States just yet, or it doesn’t seen that it has from half a world away.
You're surprised that Arab food is not mainstream in a country that spent the last decades being mad at Arabs, while actively carpet bombing their homes?
There isn't a hard limit. I think I should have said "discourage". I have a friend who was an exec at Chipotle. It took him two years to get permission to open the first one in Paris, in part from that sort of push back. I also remember the controversy over the first McDonalds there.
France has a huge tourist economy and weirdly the reason it does it because it's France and full of French things.
Not sure why that should be considered weird or bad. If all France had was Chipotle and the other American chains then I would have visited it once and never again rather than the 15 or so times I've been.
I generally like French culture, and also see a strong economic rationale that covers the "amusing" part.
It has a strong (and also protected) agriculture sector, from memory they're in the 10 largest in the world, and having consummers buying these products is a big deal. McDonalds is fine, but they also definitely need restaurants serving steaks with blue cheese sauce with a small glass of wine.
Language protection also had an incredible effect on the entertainment industry that was seriously struggling before (also due to how strongly it was enforced, notably with the 40% rule)
I never heard about the limit of foreign restaurants. Fast food chains like McDonalds are absolutely everywhere. The food there however is significantly better than in the US.
Definitely. In the US there are countless better alternative fast food options to McDonald's, so it's a lower class / lower middle class targeted chain. In the US McDonald's competes on price to stay in that budget range rather than trying to move upstream on price. McDonald's is to fast food in the US what dollar stores are to retail.
In foreign countries the financial targeting is different and there are always fewer McDonald's per capita. There are twice as many McDonald's per capita in the US vs France for example (and France has a lot of them at nearly 1,500); Britain has a similar ratio as France.
See also Bill C-10, currently making its way through parliament, which is trying to tax online media but also enforce a minimum amount of Canadian content:
I'm still not sure why there is a need to set a quota for content. Or for the state to subsidize it.
Entertainment is a hugely profitable business. Disney and Marvel for instance made billions of dollars of profits year after year for almost a decade. They did it by making content that people want to watch.
Why not simply... make content that people want to watch?
Considering all of the Canadians in Hollywood and on the music charts in America how exactly do you define Americanized anyway? Don’t you have a ton of European/Asian originated things in your local culture too like we do down here in America? I love IKEA and drive there in my Japanese car. I cut my fingernails every week with a great set of German tools (Wusthof or something). Tonight we’re going to watch Train to Busan peninsula on Amazon (Korean movie) because I love zombie flicks and heard good things (the first one was good!).
No, I mean Americanized. If you dropped someone in Vancouver who had never been, they'd have a hard time figuring out they were in Canada vs the US until they saw a Tim Hortons, because they would be hearing American made music and seeing American made TV while seeing a bunch of American brand stores.
The pass can be used for tickets to the cinema, museum and theatre, or to buy books, art materials, dance courses and instruments or an online subscription.
Am I being cynical in thinking the "culture" they use it on will be dominated by cinema and online and streaming stuff?
This sounds like a good initiative but I am not sure how helpful it is bundling in theatre, museum etc with more mass-market-friendly entertainment options. I note the classic French prohibition on some of the more American (ie. popular) digital choices though.
I totally agree with you, same thing happened in Italy and I believe that a state should sponsor "good" culture, especially when they use public money to do that.
But then again, I don't think I'd like to see how a state that chooses which culture is good and bad develops, let alone live in it.
Maybe the trick is to give this kind of money to people that are a bit older than 18?
For sure I'd push for the bonus to be used on local culture, and not foreign
.
I think you're just being cynical in thinking that it matters. As much as this is meant to promote French culture, it's seems like it's more meant to just give kids some money to spend on recreational stuff they might not otherwise be able to enjoy.
I do think you're being a bit overly cynical. Many kids will find a way to liquidate their money and buy cannabis. I know this, because that's what I would have done.
However, unlike software engineering, policy shouldn't be made to cover all the corner cases.
Museums in france are usually free if you live in the same town (no matter what age), and almost always free or at extremely cheap price if you're student or under 25.
The US does something similar: Those children enrolled in the fourth or fifth grade of any school can get free passes to National Parks: https://www.nps.gov/kids/fifthgrade.htm
Though it is basically "kids get in free" since other family members have to pay and you don't expect too many 10-11 year olds to travel to parks themselves.
And it finances consumption of products/events that are subject to VAT, sold by companies who pay taxes and employ people, who paid taxes who won’t be a cost for the country if they lose their job …
Yes it’s debt. But its way cheaper than it sounds once the taxes go back and it’s an investment into society and employment.
Just because arts and culture can't be measured in GDP doesn't mean they're not important. Measuring everything in economic outcomes is harmful to humanity and society. Currency is necessary, but it shouldn't be the only way to value individuals or their activities.
Except when the hard times come by - enter Corona - and you simply throw culture overboard. Just like that, as we've seen it. So much about the importance of culture.
And now imagine we'd have a proper hard times. Like war, famine and plague combined.
Im so proud of my country, in so many ways. France is a nuclear military power, and I think it is one if not the most progressive country of the 5 who have a permanent seat at the UN security council.
I'm quite curious which countries of the EU has a VAT like France.
France also exports the most brainpower in math and tech.
I know artists and entertainers have been struggling, but this method seems more effective to me than the government deciding which artists get money. Let individuals, not institutions, decide what culture they value.
I was about to say that to spend the "Pass Culture" someplace, that place will have to register and be accepted by the government. However it looks like the cultural sector is actually very broadly defined! [0]
> You can propose your activities and cultural goods on the "Pass Culture". Only condition: be present on French territory.
Problem is that it might be the case that this culture pass will only be spendable on government-subsidized venues.
In my country there already exists culture pass programs for young/poor people, but you can only use them in big/subsidized concert venues, art galleries, cinemas and museums. You can't use it in more "underground" venues/events which are too small or focused to get government grants, and in my opinion those are very important to culture as well.
Think of it like scientific research. Individuals fund short term research by buying products they want, governments fund long term research that nobody else will.
You're assuming that they haven't found some backhanded way to restrict the money to approved culture or high culture expenditures only. I'd be very surprised if you could use this pass to attend whatever entertainment/sporting events the French consider low class.
Either you're too naive or I'm too cynical. But at least one of our assumptions is wrong.
There should be a mix -- government should be able to take the long view; this only addresses things at the very end (e.g. once the exhibition has been mounted)
Well, this is a complex question and I must say that I disagree wholeheartedly.
So I live in Poland and I’ve studied film production. We were thoroughly walked through how films are financed by our national film institute and from what I understand our system was modeled after everybody else in the EU, so it’s a good example. And other types of art are financed similarly albeit with differences.
The way it works is that the film institute is financed each year with a legally mandatory payment made by media companies. I’m talking cable tv channels and the like. However as of late also VOD platforms such as Netflix must chip in (this is not taxpayer money!!!). This ball of money is then split and directed towards strengthening film culture - independent cinemas, festivals, film productions.
Filmmaker-producers then petition for chunks of this money with applications in which they must demonstrate that they have found funding from other sources (usually half), as well as acquiring preliminary interest from distributors. The institute runs this process by employing veteran filmmakers, artists, as well as academia and curators - people who have a proven track record. These committees decide, in a transparent process of deliberation, which productions from the ones submitted, they believe, are the most promising artistically and are most feasible.
This creates an ecosystem in which artists and producers are incentivized to focus on impressing those who know something about art and on ideas which have real potential in winning festival awards, not just box-office results. It’s bureaucratic, yes, but it works.
The flip side is that when individuals are the only ones to decide what culture they value, only the most idiotic super-productions from abroad will win. And money spent on those will be literally siphoned off to California - this is the real reason why Hollywood became so strong after WWII - total domination of foreign film markets. Actually, for a period of time this allowed the U.S. to culturally colonize large parts of the world, and continues today with SV.
As you would imagine in a longer term this slowly strangles the local film environment. If everyone just wants to see Star Wars, producers back out of financing riskier local projects and cinema owners turn risk down for fear of upsetting Mickey.
Now, I agree with this idea of giving people a culture allowance - culture should absolutely not be only decided by crusty veterans and “experts”. And 19 year olds often might not normally have the money to vote at the box office. Being a cinema-goer is an identity, a habit, something that has to be fostered and encouraged to exist early on. And it positively affects people’s mental well-being. These kinds of incentives are great to hear about. But also France already has an incredibly strong ecosystem for financing art and a resilient culture of embracing domestic creators.
When I compare all this to the barren “free-market” corporate wasteland in the US I’m just saddened. An average family has to pay through the nose for an extremely limited selection, to then be bombarded with product advertising. It’s just monopoly power at it’s worst and it’s culturally debilitating.
And when you visit a European Fest, especially one of the big five it just blows your mind that in fact, literally thousands of amazing films are made, but they’re simply locked out of mainstream distribution.
The thing about art is that often you might not even know you will like it before being exposed to it. Customer doesn’t always know what’s best, and blindly following audience desires creates a shallow culture.
> These committees decide, in a transparent process of deliberation, which productions from the ones submitted, they believe, are the most promising artistically and are most feasible.
Having built websites and various products under the direction of business committees, I don't trust a committee to simply choose a tasteful color and style for a "submit" button on a contact form, let alone choosing between between different film ideas. It's probably even worse if the committee is made up of "industry experts" and "academia".
> And when you visit a European Fest, especially one of the big five it just blows your mind that in fact, literally thousands of amazing films are made, but they’re simply locked out of mainstream distribution.
To me this is a really great and key point. The culture exists.
There's probably hundreds or thousands of unknown good films released every year in just about every country. You don't need official committees of academia or industry experts to decide which film production should be prioritized. Dedicated artists find a way to produce what they want to.
The bigger issue is distribution. There's Netflix, Hulu, and a few other places where people generally watch movies. These corporations are essentially deciding what a vast majority of the culture most people will get exposed to.
Is there a better way for people to simply find out what culture they're missing out on?
Every single one of these fantastic European films at festivals does go through this process with the experts and relies on institutional funding at some point. This fantasy about dedicated artists finding a way at great sacrifice is simply naive and in my humble opinion typically American in it’s “pull-up by your own bootstraps” way.
I’m sure your experiences with a committee in your job were awful, but in general it all depends who is on it, how honest they are and whether they can be trusted when it comes to merit. Companies that build products aren’t a good parallel to institutions which are built to protect culture.
So, the film institute I described above runs a process in which the committees are split up into sub-committees. And the producer petitioning for financing gets to choose which particular set of people they want to be evaluated by. So if you’re making a documentary you might want to direct your proposal towards a committee of documentary filmmakers you know and respect. It’s designed to prevent this kind of “decision by committee” effect we know so well.
And then there come additional layers of complexity. Most of the time producers first apply for “development” funding, usually small sums directed towards fleshing an idea out, paying a screenwriter, paying for scouting trips, pre-roll footage. At the point at which you’re applying for the big bucks, you’ve already developed the concept well enough that it has some appeal. This is usually necessary to convince an investor to risk actual money to begin with.
And then even then there is even more complexity layered in because often incentives are designed to encourage international co-production efforts. We would never have Yorgos Lanthimos or the Romanian New Wave if the rules for these institutions did not allow producers from Greece and Romania to take advantage of the European Film Fund.
It’s all part of the process because you can’t just hand money out to people who don’t know what they’re doing. Art and culture have to be verified like anything else that we want to exhibit quality.
There are many parallels to start-ups and start-up culture to be found here. You might say: ”nobody should tell me how my start-up idea should be because I have this vision.” But if you want money from an accelerator, you’re going to have to encounter some sort of evaluation process. And usually a big part of that will be some experienced committee or board asking you to thoroughly explain it and verifying that you can in fact pull it off. Here in Europe we often trust the institutions and experts to do this part.
I dunno, distribution regulation is definitely key, you can still find just about everything that is made somewhere online. But nothing about the modern internet makes it easy to find out, and I suspect that this is by design.
debt to % gdp is a meaningless number, it literally means nothing. Real interest rates are negative. You're actually doing the savers a favor by borrowing the money.
These kinds of things make me angry. Lots of good French workers paid for those passes and will not get to enjoy the benefits because they aren't 18. I'd say if my country ever does this I will migrate to a worse place. Except that would be a lie. Hopefully they won't though.
Plus, from the article, I got the impression that the government will dictate what it can be spent on. I’m skeptical that for instance, Muslim art by French artists will be seen as French by whatever committee decides what is French. But I haven’t lived in France in 30 years. I lived in the very north almost Belgium and, though I was a child, attitudes at the time were definitely not inclusive. I hope to be pleasantly surprised.
When you build colonies in the Muslim world how do you expect Muslims not to be part of your culture? And what does Muslim art have to do with this, when Muslims are the 5% of French population? Do you think French culture should be inherently Catholic (~40%)? Or atheist/agnostic (~40%).
Moreover, if you re read the article I think you'll see that you can spend the bonus as you like.
You’re making my point (I think) - I was using the Muslim angle as an example of an integral part of France that some might wish to exclude or diminish. Are you free to consume art from any French person or are you free to consume art from only what a committee deems French? As far as rereading the article it says there’s an app and you can spend the money within it but presumably the content within is vetted. It also says major French platforms like canal+ but that’s it. It does explicitly rule out Netflix, Disney, Spotify and more. So it’s definitely not anything.
The good french workers paid for the soon to be workers to be cultured enough, in the hope they'll become good french workers and sustain the next generations.
Welfare, helping each other, not being an egoist you know
This isn't welfare, you know. Perhaps live in a country that has it to learn what it is. It serves the purpose of not letting people starve. It's not about this kind of decadence.
Hypocrits. French authorities are enemies of culture (unless culture means big-budget productions). About a decade ago they passed HADOPI law which outlawed "missecurising your Internet access" (which obviously means nothing) because that's the only legal loophole they could find to fine people for ALLEGEDLY downloading protected torrents. That is despite the fact that a serious study ordered by HADOPI itself showed that sharing cultural goods for free had significant positive impact on cultural commerce as well.
More local authorities are constantly harassing or outright closing down artistic spaces (not the fancy ones for bourgeois) like in Toulouse where MixArt Myrys in Toulouse which is also home to a local hackerspace and non-profit Internet Service Provider (tetalab and tetaneutral respectively).
And as somebody pointed out elsewhere in the thread, this culture pass used to be 500€ previously. All in all, as a french person i dare say, fuck this government (and any other, really).
> you can't really use it as an argument to fuck the current one.
Except this government and the previous ones have mostly EXACTLY the same policies on pretty much everything (more police/business, less healthcare/education), including the copyright mafia. The lobbies are still the same people, too.
This new government has also implied HADOPI didn't go far enough and they'd make a new law to further criminalize video streaming consumption (HADOPI only criminalizes the assumption of p2p sharing on Bittorrent protocol specifically).
> What they're doit here is good and a net positive.
What they're doing here is putting a bandaid on a cancer. Abolish copyright, redistribute wealth massively, and invest in emancipatory education (alla Montessori) and you'll get much better results. But they're not interested in making things better for the people, only in diverting public money into the pockets of their business friends from the cultural sector. For that, giving away 500 credits (not actual euros) that can be used on cultural contents approved of by the industry/government (not independent artists) is fairly effective.
The culture pass used to be 500 euros, for about 2K people per year (anyone turning 18 yo, only in Nievre). It's now 300 euros for anyone turning 18 yo in all of France, about 800K people.
Trying to paint that as regression is stretching the truth pretty hard.
Everybody needs culture, and few people « need » programming beyond those with a a natural disposition for that sort of activity. And I don't know how that's a point relevant at all the subject of the thread.
I downvoted your comment until I read it more charitably, as "the most pressing need for young people is meaningful employment, and the government would be better off focusing on that". It kinda reads like you think culture itself is a waste of time and people should just get to work.
To clarify your point, with which I agree - without a good work environment which promotes excellence and the development of the country through industry and technology, there will be no one to support the art in a few years. Having a passion for art and culture is not enough if you don't have the means to promote, consume and sponsor it yourself.
No one said this measure prevents them. What I'm saying is that the work climate in France, which the government could influence, doesn't allow for excellence. A proof of this is the obvious lack of high tech companies from France. There is also no startup scene, there are no FAANGs, no unicorns that were sold for billions of dollars/euros, nothing like that. On the other hand there are a lot of french engineers outside France doing wonderful work.
There is no FAANGs in France because France is part the EU, and the anti-trust laws try to protect competition between smaller actors spread in 27 countries.
It can be argued whether it's good or bad (people keep asking for 'the Airbus of X' while the Commission plays its part and prevent such actors from emerging.)
However, as usual, don't placate US expectations on other parts of the world.
You would not say that Michigan needs to create a culture of education, because all the FAANGs are in California.
Also, the financing culture (and maybe structure ?) seems to prevent the pretendo-valuations of "unicorns". I guess companies here have to go to such extremes as "making products that earn money". Yuck.
I'm curious what would qualify as a "startup-scene" for you, though ? I'm living in a tech-hub in France, so I can tell you there are startups, but what is your threshold for a "scene" ? Number of employee ? Size of campuses ? Number of meetups ?
FAANGs are FAANGs because of the possibilities of immense profit margins and cash flow due to computing power and automation offering near zero marginal costs.
There are a lot more people with money that speak English than French, so it’s almost inevitable that best strategy is to start with the English speaking markets. Once you hit it big there, there’s no stopping you worldwide. Except China, who also has a ton of rich people.
I agree for some of the faangs (google who has to deal with contents in multiple language, Facebook maybe ?) ; However I'm not sure a french customer is costing that much more to Amazon because of i18n. Regulations, that petty thing about "paying taxes", etc... are probably stronger factor.
Thanks, I don’t know a lot about the situation for young people in France, I do meet a lot of French people in Germany who have moved for work, I’ve even heard of French startups and tech companies opening offices in Berlin purely to hire.
There's a sort of never ending hysteria (I've heard it for decades) about brain-brain supposedly caused by taxes, administration, « backwards French culture » and basically any other liberal fever dream stuff you can pin on a country.
But in reality French people more or less emigrate the least in Europe.
Overall, I would say it was well-used considering the problem our country has with "free money" initiatives, although I definitely met some people who tried to "cheat the system" to some (smaller) extent, e.g. by using the voucher to get free high-end Kindles in bookstores.
Also, about 40% of purchases (if I recall the stats correctly) were made on Amazon, Spotify or other "big tech" corporations, meaning that while it gave a boost to the smaller economy, local businesses did not get from it as much as one could expect.