ARTS AND ECONOMICS DON'T MIX

posted by James Reel

John McKay, in the Financial Times, offers a nifty analogy that demonstrates the folly of all those studies promoting the economic benefits of the arts:

Many people underestimate the contribution disease makes to the economy. In Britain, more than a million people are employed to diagnose and treat disease and care for the ill. Thousands of people build hospitals and surgeries, and many small and medium-size enterprises manufacture hospital supplies. Illness contributes about 10 per cent of the UK’s economy: the government does not do enough to promote disease. Such reasoning is identical to that of studies sitting on my desk that purport to measure the economic contribution of sport, tourism and the arts. These studies point to the number of jobs created, and the ancillary activities needed to make the activities possible. They add up the incomes that result. Reporting the total with pride, the sponsors hope to persuade us not just that sport, tourism and the arts make life better, but that they contribute to something called “the economy.” The analogy illustrates the obvious fallacy. What the exercises measure is not the benefits of the activities they applaud, but their cost; and the value of an activity is not what it costs, but the amount by which its benefit exceeds its costs.

Read McKay's brief article in full to see where he's going with this. I wrote something along the same lines six years ago in the Tucson Weekly, decrying such economic-benefit studies as a dangerous commodification of culture:

But what happens when local politicians and bureaucrats—and voters—buy into this, and then the local economy enters another of its periodic slumps? Betrayed, they will cry, "The arts didn't save us after all!" And so culture, being proved useless, will be defunded to levels even lower than the current embarrassing local norm of less than $2 per capita (which is way behind not only Seattle and Sacramento, but even Flagstaff). The backfiring economic-development argument will kill arts funding faster than any right-wing crusade against obscenity in the art museum. This is not a profitable course to pursue.

And lo, it has come to pass. The Tucson Pima Arts Council and Arizona Commission on the Arts have been defunded to the point at which they might as well not exist, for the negligible good they can now do for the state’s arts organizations.

If you’re interested, you can read my old commentary in full here.