We would not have our Guardians grow up among representations of moral deformity, as in some foul pasture where, day after day, feeding on every poisonous weed, they would, little by little, gather insensibly a mass of corruption in their very souls. Rather we must seek out those craftsmen whose instinct guides them to whatsoever is lovely and gracious; so that our young men, dwelling in a wholesome climate, may drink in good from every quarter, whence, like a breeze bringing health from happy regions, some influence from noble works constantly … [Read more...]

I read a story yesterday about the attempts to make a local arts tax in Portland, Oregon slightly less bad, and since I used to teach about this sort of thing I thought it might be worth giving my personal quick-and-dirty checklist on local earmarked taxes for the arts. Here are questions anyone wanting to propose such a tax ought to ask themselves: What are we trying to achieve? The answer cannot just be “yay arts!” because you are going to be asking locals to pay more in taxes and they rightly will want to know what it is for, … [Read more...]

Yes, Minister ran on BBC television in the early 1980s, the early Thatcher years (I’ll come back to the importance of this). I enjoyed it at the time (I was pretty young), and recalled it when I went to work in government myself in the 1990s. Canada has a UK-style Westminster parliamentary system, with more of a permanent staff of senior bureaucrats than in the US where political appointments play a much larger role (If you are following the debacle in the UK parliament right now, note that Olly Robbins, the very high-ranking official at the … [Read more...]

I’ve always been skeptical of the idea that simply engaging with a lot of narrative fiction will make people more ethical, or more generally empathetic (which is not the same thing), or will increase the depth of their political understanding. There isn’t any evidence for it, and too many counter-examples of well-read jerks and political cranks. But don’t the stories told in novels, films, plays and operas have moral and political content? Yes, the author will bring some sort of moral framework to what they compose, and assume that … [Read more...]

(Kudos to the art director who chose that American flag done with handprints - it’s perfect). I enjoyed reading Becca Rothfield’s “Listless Liberalism” in The Point, in which she reviews Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, and Cass Sunstein’s Liberalism, and also asks the question of why the aesthetics of a liberal society, barely addressed in either of these books’ defenses of liberalism, seems such weak tea: There are reams of writing about fascist military parades and socialist-realist murals, yet there … [Read more...]

I was at a seminar yesterday given by Professor Philip Hackney of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, given (via web) at the Marxe School at Baruch College, on “Tax Policy Toward Arts Nonprofits: Democracy or Plutocracy?” It’s a good question! I won’t try to summarize what Professor Hackney said (if a link to a video recording is ever posted, I will link to it here. UPDATE: here it is). But it sparked me to try to articulate my own take. I’ve come at this from a few angles in the past - here is an article I wrote for the … [Read more...]

In my past life I spent some time in university administration, and one of my jobs at this public university was to take proposals for new degree programs that the university had approved of to the state board of higher education, for their necessary approval. In those proposals we had to include a section on forecasts for employment demand for graduates of the program, and there were a few quasi-official agencies who would produce such numbers. One of my PhD fields was labour economics, and I knew, and kept quiet about, the fact that … [Read more...]

This recent book is open access, here. And my full review in the International Review of Public Policy is also open access, here. My review begins: There is an old joke: An American tourist is visiting Oxford for the first time, and on his first morning signs up for a guided walking tour. The group sees the Ashmolean Museum, the Bodleian Library, the beautiful college quadrangles, and they pass beneath the Bridge of Sighs, before finally going for a pub lunch at the Lamb & Flag. At lunch the tourist asks the guide: … [Read more...]

Brink Lindsey takes his title from one of my favourite essays, John Maynard Keynes’s “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (which I wrote about here). Keynes, in 1930, wondered what lives might be like in our present. There are three big predictions in the essay, interrelated, of which I would say he got two right, which ain’t bad. The first right prediction was about how the world’s material wealth would continue to grow, such that by this time we would be much more affluent in aggregate terms. We would … [Read more...]