Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts FundingPrinceton University Press, 2009 M01 10 - 216 pages Americans agree about government arts funding in the way the women in the old joke agree about the food at the wedding: it's terrible--and such small portions! Americans typically either want to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts, or they believe that public arts funding should be dramatically increased because the arts cannot survive in the free market. It would take a lover of the arts who is also a libertarian economist to bridge such a gap. Enter Tyler Cowen. In this book he argues why the U.S. way of funding the arts, while largely indirect, results not in the terrible and the small but in Good and Plenty--and how it could result in even more and better. |
From inside the book
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... better than his King Lear, and even harder to persuade others of our decision or define what such a ranking would mean. How many Gershwin songs sum up to a Shostakovich symphony? Is a Haydn string quartet better than a Hemingway short ...
... better, vis-à-vis the era of Beethoven, than if we just compare the best composer from each period. We have many talented composers today, in many different musical fields, even though today's best composer is not the equal of Beethoven ...
... better art is equated with a better society. We are never told how many bags of potato chips, or how many antipoverty programs, we should sacrifice to receive another great artistic performance, or how we might hope to find out such an ...
... better off, are hard to come by. So for most practical purposes, applied welfare economics boils down to wealth maximization. But then we must wonder why wealth is such a supreme value. Even Richard Posner gave up his wealth ...
... better. Furthermore these pictures yielded enjoyment in the interim. Nonetheless the most acclaimed arts program in U.S. history—the WPA—was not an overwhelming success in economic terms, if we compare it to alternative investments.13 ...
Contents
1 | |
The Genius of the American System | 31 |
Are They Too Conservative? | 65 |
4 Copyright and the Future of Decentralized Incentives | 101 |
5 Toward a Beautiful and Liberal Future | 133 |
Notes | 153 |
References | 169 |
Index | 189 |
Other editions - View all
Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding Tyler Cowen No preview available - 2010 |
Good & Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding Tyler Cowen No preview available - 2006 |