Wallerstein again:

There are five kinds of income: Subsistence, piecework, work-in-kind, wages and influence

- Subsistence includes gardening at home or assembling Ikea furniture - it's stuff that you would have to pay for but you aren't.

- Piecework is selling shit on Etsy, breaking up cartons of cigarettes to sell on street corners, babysitting for your neighbors, anything you make money at but not regularly.

- Work-in-kind is anything that you would normally be doing except you can't because you're earning wages so someone else is doing it for you.

- Wages are paid employment from a regular employer, either by hour or by item.

- Influence is anything you do that makes you more valuable to your community, family or larger social unit, or that makes your community, family or larger social unit more valuable compared to others.

These are not exclusive categories. Wallerstein's argument is that everyone's existence is some blend of all of this, and that they are interchangeable. For example, if you eat a lot of stuff out of your garden, babysit your kid brother and make dinners, you are participating in an economy even though you aren't drawing wages. Further, the more of a wage economy you wish to have, the more of the non-wage economy you need to address through other means. For example, the invention of washing machines, supermarkets and other labor-saving creations released a lot of potential wage-earning by freeing up work-in-kind. This tedious article

presupposes that at some point in the near future, "anything you do that makes you more valuable to your community" will replace everything else. It doesn't take much of a sense of anthropology to see that the more "first world" your economy, the more emphasis is placed on wages and the greater the de-emphasis on everything else.

So it should come as no surprise that as the available wages decrease, the utility of other forms of income come to the fore. and if you are "completely alone" your alternate income streams are thin.

And here's the thing. Civilization concentrates in cities because of network effects. The opportunities are greater. This is why cities tend to fill up with the young, and the higher the inequality, the more likely those young are sucking down someone else's wages from the hinterlands. There simply aren't many places where you can make a living as a makeup artist. Full stop. Unfortunately, those places tend to be the ones where out-of-towner rich kids suppress everyone's earnings potential.

She literally can't take a 40-hour a week job for even $25/hr because she has zero support/subsidizing from family/partner to keep her finances in the black.

...she bloody well could in Akron, Ohio. But she doesn't want to be in Akron, and I don't blame her. 'cuz the "being an extra" thing ($600? Friend of mine bought Alfred Molina for $1250; I've never seen extras paid more than $150 a day) and the "DJ at a roller rink" thing and the makeup artist thing are donezo.