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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... costs do not matter. They tend to evaluate regimes in terms of the quality of the art that is produced, without considering the opportunity costs of that art. More and better art is equated with a better society. We are never told how ...
... cost-benefit analysis. That is, we stick with standard costbenefit methods and simply add on a value for the relevant merit good. By definition, a merit good is of greater value—for intrinsic reasons— than is reflected in individual ...
... cost. Subsidies are a good idea only if, once all effects are taken into account, their dollar-valued benefits outweigh their dollar-valued costs. The Federal Writers' Project of the New Deal supported Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, Ralph ...
... costs.14 Platitudes about the wonders of the arts do not constitute an argument for an externality at the relevant ... cost of producing that art. No further improvement in human welfare would be possible. In contrast, most subsidy ...
... cost of bidding for those activities. To provide a simple analogy, Silicon Valley is an economic powerhouse. Nonetheless the costs of bidding Silicon Valley into Connecticut would probably exceed the benefits.18 Furthermore when cities ...
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 |