{"id":3768,"date":"2025-04-11T09:15:33","date_gmt":"2025-04-11T16:15:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/?p=3768"},"modified":"2025-04-11T09:15:34","modified_gmt":"2025-04-11T16:15:34","slug":"what-do-to-with-the-nea-pull-the-plug","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2025\/04\/what-do-to-with-the-nea-pull-the-plug\/","title":{"rendered":"What do to with the NEA? Pull the plug?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Two opinion pieces were published this week giving different conservative takes on what to do with the NEA. I\u2019ll talk about Mark Bauerlein\u2019s New York Times<\/em> Op-Ed in the next post; here I look at the Cato Institute\u2019s Ryan Bourne\u2019s briefing paper \u201cEnd the National Endowment for the Arts<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To begin I\u2019ll skip all the way to his last paragraph, which begins:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There is no robust economic case for direct taxpayer funding of art.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

And, as I wrote in chapter two of my book on arts funding<\/a> (an ungated working paper version of the chapter is here<\/a>), it\u2019s hard to disagree. That doesn\u2019t mean there is no<\/em> case for public funding; it just means that economic analysis isn\u2019t where you are going to find it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In general, the mainstream economics approach – what you might call \u201cneoliberal\u201d – to questions of public subsidies for anything starts from the premise that markets on their own are mostly<\/em> pretty good at directing our labor and investments and consumption to their most valued uses, but sometimes they are not, and so regulations and taxes to discourage those goods and services that are overproduced, and subsidies to encourage those goods and services that are unproduced, can be a useful, if still imperfect, nudge in the right direction. Claims have been made, by academics and by people working in the arts sector, that the arts are one of those places where markets on their own fail to do enough, and so subsidies are called for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But here\u2019s the hard part: economics as a method is one that takes consumer tastes as given<\/em>: there is no judgement over whether people have good or bad taste, and as such there is no economic<\/em> argument for saying that policies should try to change people\u2019s tastes. Policy can inform<\/em> people – \u201chere are some things you might not have heard of\u201d (it is not paternalistic government policy to put a sign on a hiking trail that says \u201cwatch out, there\u2019s a really steep cliff right beside you\u201d) – but there is no economic argument for telling people that they would live a better life if they listened to this music instead of that, or that they should listen to more music at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does Bourne, who (like me) is an economist, say?<\/p>\n\n\n\n