Michael Rushton

Michael Rushton
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Michael Rushton teaches in the Arts Administration programs at Indiana University in Bloomington. An economist by training, he has published widely on such topics as public funding of the arts, copyright, nonprofit organizations and tax policy, and served as Co-Editor of the Journal of Cultural Economics.

Liberal Arts

(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

Should there be a tax deduction for donating to the nonprofit arts?

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

Colleges, students, and jobs: nobody knows anything

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

Reading Eleonora Redaelli’s Invisible Cultural Policy in America

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

Reading Brink Lindsey’s The Permanent Problem

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