[Imnimo]

>The randomly selected applicants

Why would you want to randomly select here?

[mikkupikku]

That's the best way to do it. Otherwise all the money will go to the rich brat children of politicians/etc who are socially connected to whoever they put on the selection committees.

[digiown]

I'm not sure that's true. What kind of rich brat will go through the trouble of all that for a couple hundred euros a month?

Random isn't a bad way of doing it in any case though.

[gus_massa]

I agree that it's a problem. But how do you prevent it from been overflowed by people like me that can't draw a circle with the bottom of a bottle?

[seneca]

Mostly because the kind of people who run and advocate for programs like this are actively hostile to the idea of merit. Prioritizing talented people would be antithetical to them.

[mikkupikku]

Prioritizing merit would be fine if there was some way to measure merit empirically, and if that measure couldn't be gamed by anybody with money and/or connections. But this is for artists, so...

[anigbrowl]

I bet you also think government shouldn't be picking winners and losers.

[AngryData]

Why wouldn't you? How do you define merit to artists? Many of the greatest artists of all time lived their entire lives in poverty and desperation.

[energy123]

To not have selection bias so you can measure the effects

[left-struck]

Random selection is possibly the fairest way to select almost anything, depending on your definition of fair.