Frankly the whole article is just bizarrely defining metrics to fit the narrative.
Well, you’re just stating your narrative, with 0 metrics; why is that any better?
Just one then, there are 43 billionaires in France (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_billionaires_by_net_worth).
And there are around 40 people in the French Academy alone. That’s only a small part of French writers.
And 43 billionaires is a rather big number. Compared to Pakistan or Colombia where the comparison would be even more skewed.
Just looking down the list of academy members and grabbing some at random I see:
- Claude Dagens, 84-year-old priest
- Dany Laferrière, working writer who lives in Miami
- Jean-Luc Marion, retired professor
- Andreï Makine, working writer
- Christian Jambet, philosopher, IDK what he does to pay the bills but his last published work was an essay in 2016
It looks to me like 20% of the part of the list I examined is made up of working writers in France, i.e. one of five. So extrapolating out, we know somewhere in France there are 8 well-known people in this one group who make a living just on writing. I don’t know that that means that it is hard to make a living as a writer, but it definitely isn’t an argument that it isn’t hard to any particular level to make a living as a writer.
Again: The argument is not that writers don’t exist, it is that it is a real difficult (like astronomically difficult) field to break into and make a full-time living at. I don’t know why that statement is provoking this incredible level of resistance – maybe because he phrased it so provocatively, I guess, and ignored some plausible ways you can work as an academic and also do writing and the two can support one another, which okay, fair play – but regardless of that if you didn’t like that guy’s fairly detailed metrics, and instead are holding up this as your argument, I think you need to try again.