From a perspective of economic efficiency, you could argue that art production is inefficiently low because artists can’t capture the value they create. But I think there’s a stronger opposite effect where people get fooled by survivor bias into making art anyway, which makes art production inefficiently high. (For example, unsuccessful musicians are everywhere.) It might be better for society to add incentives against creating art, so people switch to other pursuits more likely to make them and others happy.
The inability-to-capture-value problem isn’t just for art, it’s for basically everything. The idea that even monopolistic profit maximization gets that big a percentage of surplus is based upon all the customers being similar. For my favorite art (including music, movies, TV shows, books, blogs, etc), even I paid ‘full retail’ for all of them, I’d be paying multiple orders of magnitude less than my consumer surplus for them, which is why I don’t worry too much if 80-90% of my purchases (in both time and money) are duds.
There are two issues then. One is that the vast majority of marginal artists are not actually live to create something of net value, and producing more bad art is actively bad since it takes mindshare and market from good art, so taxation on the margin might still be good. So I think it comes down to how well-sorted artists are here. If the marginal artists are the ones on the verge of quitting tax is good, if not tax is bad.
(The other is that the same inability-to-capture applies to almost everything else that isn’t very commodified. I think I mostly bite that bullet and say that yes, we don’t properly encourage (and often actively discourage) doing non-commodity things that produce value, and that’s sad, with art just being a special case of that.)
Crowdfunding approaches as seen e.g. in Kickstarter or Patreon have recently made it a lot easier for artists to capture significant amounts of value for their efforts. (This could still be supplemented though, e.g. via after-the-fact prize awards for especially impressive art.) It’s interesting to think of what comparable approaches may be applicable to goods and services that are very much unlike art, and where value may nonetheless be hard to capture efficiently.
1. Society ought to discourage economically inefficient activities. At least, it ought not to encourage inefficiency. It may not do this perfectly, but this is still a desiderata; special pleading for some activity, saying that some other activity or market is far more economically inefficient, is not a good reason.
2. If some good a can be created to fill a need, and there is an existing & available good b that fills that need equally well, then it is economically inefficient to use a and not b.
3. Consumers of new art would be equally satisfied by existing art.
4. By 2 & 3: it is economically inefficient to produce new art.
∴ By 1 & 4: Society ought to discourage new art
In short: old stuff is as good as the new, and it’s cheaper; so making new stuff is wasteful.
A pattern of Bryan Caplan’s work is to demonstrate, much like Hanson does, how observed human behaviour can be modeled as rational, but we often don’t notice, and the reason why is because the cause of the observed behaviour is a truth we don’t want to admit about ourselves. This is what gets you conclusions like how it’s rational for people not to vote, or the real reason most Americans pursue post-secondary education is mostly to acquire a credential for signaling purposes. The first part of Caplan’s heuristic is to find an alternative explanation for observed behaviour at first perceived to be irrational. If we follow the assumption human behaviour can be modeled on some level, even if individuals aren’t always aware of it themselves, as a rational economic agent with some value function, goals or whatnot.
This is what comes to mind when I read Gwern’s explanation. It could be the case people are acting perfectly rational in their consumption of art because there is some value in how people consume art that isn’t accounted for in prices or current economic explanations. It could just as easily be the case the professional art world is full of pieces selling at inflated prices for all manner of silly reasons. That is the prevailing hypothesis of anyone I’ve ever discussed the subject with.
Unless you consider variety to have its own value, which I do. I disagree with just about all of that post’s fundamental premises.
I don’t think society should discourage economic inefficiency, at least not beyond the inherent discouragement that comes with unprofitability; I agree that unprofitable activities shouldn’t be actively subsidized, but I don’t see why they should be actively suppressed either. If someone had a lot of money to burn and wanted to fund some vanity project with no real artistic value, or just decided to give money to writers and painters and filmmakers to do whatever they wanted even if it had no public appeal, I don’t see anything wrong with that. And if instead of one independently wealthy sponsor, it was several thousand fans contributing $20-50 each for a studio to make a new season of the trashy show they liked, all the better.
And I certainly don’t think that people would be meaningfully better off with a smaller variety of art to consume, even if it meant a higher proportion of better quality are. I consider plenitude of options to be a good thing in itself. Besides, quality is extremely subjective anyway, which means that at least some people would be left with less art that they personally consider enjoyable.
But the assertion that I find most objectionable is the idea that people waste too much time consuming art and media already. Let people do what they want.
Unless you consider variety to have its own value, which I do.
Yes, but does most new art really increase variety, in a broadly-acknowledged sense? It’s not at all clear that it does: even most of the OP is about how art- and design tendencies are getting more uniform rather than less, and variety is if anything being done away with. I think if we truly care about variety, by far the best bang for the buck is had by promoting availability of existing works from previous eras, and to some extent (especially in new media where there isn’t as much of a history to draw from) by specifically encouraging new art from less-represented geographical locales, social groups, political outlooks and the like. But this is not what usually happens when we subsidize new artworks.
That’s a fair point, and I agree with both of your solutions: We should promote the availability of works from past eras, and encourage more new art from underrepresented cultures and groups. But I don’t think there’s any need to discourage or reduce the creation of new art overall. There seems to be a concern that truly beautiful works of art will get buried under a flood of disposable pop culture trash and forever lost in the glut. I’ll admit there might be some truth to that, but for the most part, I think it’s a greatly overblown fear. Shining jewels are bright enough to stand out on their own merits.
Also, I don’t really want a world where all art is high art. There are times when I’m in the mood for low art, sometimes I just want to sit back and enjoy some shallow comedy or mindless action movie. I enjoy a good steak, but that doesn’t mean I never want to eat hamburgers or cold cuts again.
“Low vs. high art” is indeed a key dimension of variation, and both have a role to play in a complete arts ecosystem. For that matter, sometimes it is really hard to place works of art on the ″low vs. high” spectrum: for instance is a still life painting “low” or “high” art? Historically it was considered the lowest-status genre of them all in visual art, yet in practice, ‘still lifes’ heavily feature values such as symbolism and abstraction in their settings, that are very prominent, indeed even distinctive, features of “high” art!
Yeah, society might be spending the right amount of effort on art for personal pleasure. But I still think it spends too much effort on creating art for sale, judging from how many people are trying and failing to sell their art, not just create it...
From a perspective of economic efficiency, you could argue that art production is inefficiently low because artists can’t capture the value they create. But I think there’s a stronger opposite effect where people get fooled by survivor bias into making art anyway, which makes art production inefficiently high. (For example, unsuccessful musicians are everywhere.) It might be better for society to add incentives against creating art, so people switch to other pursuits more likely to make them and others happy.
The inability-to-capture-value problem isn’t just for art, it’s for basically everything. The idea that even monopolistic profit maximization gets that big a percentage of surplus is based upon all the customers being similar. For my favorite art (including music, movies, TV shows, books, blogs, etc), even I paid ‘full retail’ for all of them, I’d be paying multiple orders of magnitude less than my consumer surplus for them, which is why I don’t worry too much if 80-90% of my purchases (in both time and money) are duds.
There are two issues then. One is that the vast majority of marginal artists are not actually live to create something of net value, and producing more bad art is actively bad since it takes mindshare and market from good art, so taxation on the margin might still be good. So I think it comes down to how well-sorted artists are here. If the marginal artists are the ones on the verge of quitting tax is good, if not tax is bad.
(The other is that the same inability-to-capture applies to almost everything else that isn’t very commodified. I think I mostly bite that bullet and say that yes, we don’t properly encourage (and often actively discourage) doing non-commodity things that produce value, and that’s sad, with art just being a special case of that.)
Crowdfunding approaches as seen e.g. in Kickstarter or Patreon have recently made it a lot easier for artists to capture significant amounts of value for their efforts. (This could still be supplemented though, e.g. via after-the-fact prize awards for especially impressive art.) It’s interesting to think of what comparable approaches may be applicable to goods and services that are very much unlike art, and where value may nonetheless be hard to capture efficiently.
gwern made a similar argument in “Culture is not about Esthetics”:
A pattern of Bryan Caplan’s work is to demonstrate, much like Hanson does, how observed human behaviour can be modeled as rational, but we often don’t notice, and the reason why is because the cause of the observed behaviour is a truth we don’t want to admit about ourselves. This is what gets you conclusions like how it’s rational for people not to vote, or the real reason most Americans pursue post-secondary education is mostly to acquire a credential for signaling purposes. The first part of Caplan’s heuristic is to find an alternative explanation for observed behaviour at first perceived to be irrational. If we follow the assumption human behaviour can be modeled on some level, even if individuals aren’t always aware of it themselves, as a rational economic agent with some value function, goals or whatnot.
This is what comes to mind when I read Gwern’s explanation. It could be the case people are acting perfectly rational in their consumption of art because there is some value in how people consume art that isn’t accounted for in prices or current economic explanations. It could just as easily be the case the professional art world is full of pieces selling at inflated prices for all manner of silly reasons. That is the prevailing hypothesis of anyone I’ve ever discussed the subject with.
Unless you consider variety to have its own value, which I do. I disagree with just about all of that post’s fundamental premises.
I don’t think society should discourage economic inefficiency, at least not beyond the inherent discouragement that comes with unprofitability; I agree that unprofitable activities shouldn’t be actively subsidized, but I don’t see why they should be actively suppressed either. If someone had a lot of money to burn and wanted to fund some vanity project with no real artistic value, or just decided to give money to writers and painters and filmmakers to do whatever they wanted even if it had no public appeal, I don’t see anything wrong with that. And if instead of one independently wealthy sponsor, it was several thousand fans contributing $20-50 each for a studio to make a new season of the trashy show they liked, all the better.
And I certainly don’t think that people would be meaningfully better off with a smaller variety of art to consume, even if it meant a higher proportion of better quality are. I consider plenitude of options to be a good thing in itself. Besides, quality is extremely subjective anyway, which means that at least some people would be left with less art that they personally consider enjoyable.
But the assertion that I find most objectionable is the idea that people waste too much time consuming art and media already. Let people do what they want.
Yes, but does most new art really increase variety, in a broadly-acknowledged sense? It’s not at all clear that it does: even most of the OP is about how art- and design tendencies are getting more uniform rather than less, and variety is if anything being done away with. I think if we truly care about variety, by far the best bang for the buck is had by promoting availability of existing works from previous eras, and to some extent (especially in new media where there isn’t as much of a history to draw from) by specifically encouraging new art from less-represented geographical locales, social groups, political outlooks and the like. But this is not what usually happens when we subsidize new artworks.
That’s a fair point, and I agree with both of your solutions: We should promote the availability of works from past eras, and encourage more new art from underrepresented cultures and groups. But I don’t think there’s any need to discourage or reduce the creation of new art overall. There seems to be a concern that truly beautiful works of art will get buried under a flood of disposable pop culture trash and forever lost in the glut. I’ll admit there might be some truth to that, but for the most part, I think it’s a greatly overblown fear. Shining jewels are bright enough to stand out on their own merits.
Also, I don’t really want a world where all art is high art. There are times when I’m in the mood for low art, sometimes I just want to sit back and enjoy some shallow comedy or mindless action movie. I enjoy a good steak, but that doesn’t mean I never want to eat hamburgers or cold cuts again.
“Low vs. high art” is indeed a key dimension of variation, and both have a role to play in a complete arts ecosystem. For that matter, sometimes it is really hard to place works of art on the ″low vs. high” spectrum: for instance is a still life painting “low” or “high” art? Historically it was considered the lowest-status genre of them all in visual art, yet in practice, ‘still lifes’ heavily feature values such as symbolism and abstraction in their settings, that are very prominent, indeed even distinctive, features of “high” art!
That assumes that all the reward from art comes from the success, but many forms of art are pleasing in themselves, hence therapeutic art.
Yeah, society might be spending the right amount of effort on art for personal pleasure. But I still think it spends too much effort on creating art for sale, judging from how many people are trying and failing to sell their art, not just create it...