On 27/03/2011 21:01, David Looser wrote:
wrote

In the example you give, I might expect a 'decent return'. If it happened
to be a best seller, I'd give up the day job, take a few year's salary
equivalent, and give the rest away.

There probably would not be any "rest". The likes of J.K.Rowling are few and
far between, most "best sellers" do not make more than a few year's salary
equivalent.

Well Dave P hypothesised my writing a best seller. Very nice of him, but
agreed, not likely. At my age :-)

I was sorry, BTW, that you didn't answer my question as to whether you felt
that it was always wrong to put a monetary value on talent, or if that only
applied to certain sorts of talent.


Well, this is difficult to answer*. Leaving aside the point about
whether talent is 'nature/nurture', I would say yes, it is wrong. Why:
there's never a right figure, distribution of wealth goes odd (really,
should Susan Boyle, bless etc, have netted £5m to date, plus whatever
she gets from blessed copyright?), and crucially I don't think doing
things for monetary gain is a good way of going about life. There's a
nice bit about EF Schumacher doing the rounds at the moment, and I would
go along with his 'Small is Beautiful' notions; apparently naive but,
and bearing in mind when it was written, remarkably prophetic.

Rob

* no offence meant with the delay - I'm sure I leave a lot of threads
hanging, just don't have/make time to answer.