Do economic sectors built on prepaid and "pay to play" labor exist? If so, what does it mean?

[Mr Khan]

Kasz216 said:

You forgot the biggest reason.

People CAN work for free.

Afterall, we have a safety net so people don't starve and plenty of families are well off enough that they can support people who want to work for free for a bit.

Though people did this stuff for free all the time before too... it was called a hobby. The difference was they weren't enabled to pursue it with more then part time.

Like Einstein... and for every Einstein there were a dozen more failures no doubt.

A lot of the past's scientists were rich kids who loved science and worked at it for free.  That was a case of the opposite really, a traditionally "free work" action getting monetized.

For example... Darwin.  Did Darwin even have a job?

Darwin did have a job, but he was from a different era where being from the gentleman class kind of was a job. He was sent on the HMS Beagle to be the naturalist, but also to be a companion to the Captain, since the Captain couldn't associate with the commoner crewers, so it was like science and low-grade friendship prostitution was what he was paid for

Basically we're looping back around to an era where certain people get to make leisure into a career, the only difference being it's not only people who were born rich, but also people who just have "enough" monetarily, and devote their life to their craft, maybe working McDonald's at night but running some sort of hobbyist website during the day