11 ms·
Arts contributed $763B to US economy – more than agriculture or transport (2018)
- onetimemanytime 8y agoCan't really compare the three fields: transportation is key to everything, people need to go to where they generate revenue. So does merchandise. Agriculture, can't eat a painting, can we? Nor can we use the art money to buy wheat from Russia long term. so apples and oranges.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- angry_octet 8y agoExactly, you have to have transport and agriculture to enable that level of art. Likewise, tourism, education, construction. It is really a meaningless comparison in one sense. But it does make sense in terms of things like trade disputes: why put tariffs on ordinary steel/aluminum to prop up an inefficient and undercapitalized industry, when that imposes massive costs on a much bigger industry like construction? Or alternatively, one should look at the linkages between industries, and see what the choke points are.
- Nasrudith 8y agoAll three are commodities and thus replaceable. No nation technically has to have any of the three but in practice they all do. Relying on external imports for agriculture has generally been a poor idea for any nation which can avoid it for reasons of blockade/siege vulnerability and stability and price stability but it is in fact perfectly possible to sell art and buy wheat from Russia or anybody else on the market longterm.
- mc32 8y agoThe arts is s broad category dominated by radio, tv and the film industry, as well as books and music and such. It’s not so much your artist in lofts and buskers on the street.
- gumby 8y agoDoes this include TSA inspections at airports?
- wazoox 8y agoAir to breathe didn't generate much money, but try doing away with it. This sort of headline is complete nonsense. Market size is completely orthogonal to actual importance. Likewise prices. Expensive and rare things like Ferraris or Jeff Koon's flowers aren't more important than free things like air, water springs and insects.
- winningcontinue 8y agocame here to use the exact example but didn't see the headline soon enough to beat you to it. This is why I read the comments first before I click on any bait links.
- codingdave 8y agoBut that isn't the point. This is a politically motivated article trying to counter the dialogue surrounding the cuts in arts funding. It isn't saying we cannot live without arts. It is saying that we don't want to, and based on its value to our economy, we don't need to.
- TulliusCicero 8y agoExactly. It's like looking at how little people spend in total on drinking water and deciding that this means it's not very important to the economy.
- hwillis 8y ago> The economic impact analysis comes as the NEA is facing severe cuts under U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposed budget, and one year after the agency staved off the threat of total elimination by his administration. Did you somehow read the article to be saying that we should immediately stop driving trucks and growing food? It's an extremely practical story. It's not about what humans need, but what the US specifically exports and how investing in those industries is important to our economic future. Investing in more transport (aside from fixing failing infrastructure) or agriculture will not result in much of a return. People don't consume more food because there's more available. They do consume more culture. > Expensive and rare things like Ferraris or Jeff Koon's flowers aren't more important than free things like air, water springs and insects. TV, film and books, mainly. But the NEA is budgeted at 150 million (set to be cut to 29 million) for returns of 763 billion, with 4.9% growth. Investing in the arts is incredibly profitable and great for the economy. It's all worthless if the ocean covers the plains, but 150 million is practically nothing when it comes to the environment. The taxes from whatever portion of 763 billion that the NEA's budget fostered is surely higher than the 150 million dollar input.
- ralusek 8y agoWithout reading the article, gonna go ahead and guess this is largely TV, movies, and video games. Do ads and marketing count as art?
- crazy_monkey 8y agoYES! TAKE THAT FARMERS! KILL THE FARMING SUBSIDIES! EVERYBODY EAT PAINT INSTEAD!
- colechristensen 8y agoWho spends more money on art/entertainment than groceries?
- meruru 8y agoI would be interested in a breakdown of spending by different demographics. Personally, my grocery spending is pretty low, but art/media spending is almost nonexistent, unless you count my ISP bill.
- rch 8y agoIt seems like they would indeed count at least a portion of your ISP bill, as it relates to media streaming services.
- benj111 8y agoThey mention agriculture, not groceries. Farmers don't get paid anywhere near the retail price. And that's excluding all the processed food where the farmers get even less as a proportion.
- colechristensen 8y agoThey mention broadcasting, art-related retail, and several other things associated with facilitating trade instead of creation. If you include art galleries and bookstores, you should include restaurants and grocery stores right? The USDA has a chart of household expenditures: food=13%, transportation=16%, entertainment+alcohol=6.2% https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/Charts/58275/agfood-sector_fig02-002-fw_350px.png?v=8130.7 https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/Charts/58275/agfood-sector_... Looks like the NEA and the USDA are making reports that make their own sector shine. One talking about household expenditures, the other GDP "contribution". I know I could not convince anyone (or myself) of the significance of the different measurements, but when it comes to "X is bigger than Y", the takeaway for the average reader, the headline and report ring false.
- benj111 8y ago
- Babiker 8y agoHow have they narrowed down billions generated down to 1/10 of a billion or $0.6B, when what the definition or "art" is not set in stone?
- jumelles 8y agoMore information here: https://www.arts.gov/news/2018/arts-contribute-more-760-billion-us-economy https://www.arts.gov/news/2018/arts-contribute-more-760-bill... There is a lot that's classified as art here, and rightfully so. Film, TV, Broadway, music, photography, art schools, sculpture, jewelry, architecture, musical instruments...
- stunt 8y agoUnfortunately everything that comes on top of your mind when you hear Art is probably at the end of list. Entertainment and Media are dominant.
- meruru 8y agoI don't think it's unfortunate that oil paintings don't generate much money. Hopefully books would be at least halfway up the list though.
- azeotropic 8y agoGosh, if it's such a vibrant economic sector, maybe it doesn't need a government subsidy.
- tropdrop 8y agoPlease refrain from bringing down the discourse to a "reddit style" battle of controversial sound bites. Something in the scope of a well-elucidated argument/claim (complete with interesting insights and/or evidence) about why art/transportation should receive no government grants, however, might be welcomed here.
- cphoover 8y agoyou say "subsidy" I say "investment"... Generally you want to keep investing in things that make you money.
- azeotropic 8y agoThe NEA spends 1 out of every 5 dollars on its own bureaucracy, rather than art. Is the NEA good enough at 'investing' that they can justify a 20% management fee? That's laughable. Nobody seems to appreciate the central contradiction in the argument of this article. People can apparently 'invest' their money in the arts without any guidance from Washington, so why not return the 150M budget of the NEA to the apparently art-loving public and let them allocate it as they see fit?
- cphoover 8y agoPeople can invest their money in science and technology... Why do we need the government to invest in that? See how silly that argument sounds...
- azeotropic 8y agoIt doesn't sound silly at all? The NIH is pretty poor at allocating research funds, and extremely bloated. The grant application process is kafkaesque, to the point where most investigators must hire an FTE just to deal with NIH paperwork. Private foundations (e.g. HHMI, Wellcome Trust) already do a much better job. There's less overhead, less make-work for beauracrats, and overall higher-quality science. I don't have first-hand knowledge of other disciplines, but I doubt that it's much different. Certainly SpaceX, Blue Origin, Orbital ATK have moved from design to implementation faster than NASA with the SLS (where 3 of every 4 dollars are spent on overhead).
- nickthemagicman 8y agoHacker News visitors don't seem enthused by this
- spamcamel 8y agoI really don't understand why. The point of the article is to simply convey that "art" is a larger part of the economy than many people realize, and that maybe we should think twice about cutting funding for the NEA. Not sure why that makes everyone so defensive here.
- erikig 8y agoMy initial thoughts were: Such is the fate of efficient economies (like the US) that have effectively turned farming and logostics into specialized utilities Quickly followed by: Try enjoying your arts and entertainment when you are hungry and have to walk to the venues.
- gabbygab 8y agoWhy compare a broad category like arts with narrow category like agriculture? Why not compare something general like arts and with something general like food? Could it be because the contribution of the food industry dwarfs the arts industry? Or compare something specific like "instrument market" with something specific like agriculture? Also, isn't contribution defined by how we arbitrarily choose to measure it? Do we ( or should we ) assign the value or portion of the value of the goods transported to the transportation system?
- drumttocs8 8y agoIt would be more honest to use "Entertainment"
- loopasam 8y agoindeed, from the cited article (https://www.arts.gov/news/2018/arts-contribute-more-760-billion-us-economy https://www.arts.gov/news/2018/arts-contribute-more-760-bill...): The arts saw a $20 billion trade surplus, leading with movies and TV programs and jewelry.
- sametmax 8y agoYes, a lot of movies or video games block busters, no matter how pretty they are, are closer to a rollercoaster than to a van gogh painting. Indeed, you may have a lot of fun in the rollercoaster, and it may be aesthetically pleasing, but it's not made with an artistic intent as much as a desire to make the audience feel good and spend money. You can call anything "art", so it's not like we can state precisely what fall out of the category. Plus I think the intent make things clearer: do you create music for the music, or do you reuse a well known working formula hopping to sell a lot of air time ? You can mix both, of course. But when ROI is measure by those producing the thing, it's more a product than a piece of art.
- beat 8y agoThat's not art? The whole point of art is to make someone feel something. And a big part of getting people to feel is playing on familiarity - for example, how much rock music can be traced directly or indirectly to Chuck Berry? Almost every guitarist has been affected by him. We all mine Chuck Berry riffs, and thus the audience can latch on to our original music and have a spark of recognition. Product "or" art? It's not either/or.
- dingo_bat 8y agoI feel something when I use Linux. So classify systems programmers as artists?
- 8y ago
- lazyjones 8y agoI've always suspected that CNN is a work of art...
- maxxxxx 8y agoIf you added up all the contributions different sectors claim to be making to the economy you would probably end up with a GDP that’s 50 times as much as it really is.
- JoeAltmaier 8y agoArtists amount to 1.8% of the American workforce https://www.princeton.edu/culturalpolicy/quickfacts/artists/artistemploy.html https://www.princeton.edu/culturalpolicy/quickfacts/artists/... Farmers, 0.05% http://infomory.com/numbers/number-of-farmers-in-us/ http://infomory.com/numbers/number-of-farmers-in-us/ Not surprising that art is a bigger industry? Unsurprising, with ~40X the number of people involved, arts produced 4X the revenue.
- xgbi 8y agoCan an artist draw 1000 paintings like a farmer can (automatically) milk 1000 cows per day? I am under the impression that farmers have automated pretty much everything that is automatizeable in their workflow. Artists still have to put pen to (virtual nowadays) paper and spend time on each and every piece of work. Same for other forms of art (be it furnitures or scupltures or animations and video). So yeah, I don't think you can compare easily.
- dv_dt 8y agoAndy Warhol had an art factory. More modern artists dabble with machine learning. It makes one wonder how we will value the art when we get to a case where an artists trained avatar lives on beyond them.
- lostgame 8y agoI’m working on this very thing.
- nabla9 8y ago> Can an artist draw 1000 paintings like a farmer can (automatically) milk 1000 cows per day? Record artist can sell millions. Visual artist can sell copies of his works. Writer writes a book once and just copies. It's seems that art scales and automates better than farmers.
- InclinedPlane 8y agoArt can be electronically and digitally reproduced and distributed. An artist today can have their work presented to literally billions of people in seconds, a distribution feat that physical goods can never hope to match.
- wtdata 8y agoI think (now for quite some time) that is exactly the kind of elitism presented in this title and article, that is driving the average citizen away from mainstream politics.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y agoThis article is making an argument that because broadcast TV, film generate billions of dollars, that the government should continue to fund the NEA. Is there anybody who believes that if the NEA was completely defunded that it would cause the output of broadcast TV or film to go down? This is like arguing that government should subsidize yoga instructors because healthcare is such a huge part of the economy, and yoga is part of the healthcare industry.
- writepub 8y agoIf 2% of the workforce is comprised of artists, would it suffice to cap student loans to art majors at 3% or 4% of the student population? At what point does a student loan become unviable to the lender, given real world statistics? Why isn't it a factor in actual loan issuance. Further, why is there massive rhetoric around student loan forgiveness, if the economy has no need for certain professions beyond a threshold (which is apparently 2% for arts). Do we want to educate people in certain majors on tax dollars, when the labor market has no demand for it? Also, do we want to encourage kids going into degrees, without a thorough cost:benefit analysis of what they are getting into?
- paulie_a 8y ago>Also, do we want to encourage kids going into degrees, without a thorough cost:benefit analysis of what they are getting into? They do
- georgeecollins 8y agoI can't tell if they included video games / interactive entertainment in this. If they didn't, it would be an even bigger figure. There is a huge bias against the entertainment industry in a lot of America. On Fox, if they use Hollywood as an adjective it is a pejorative. Meanwhile our culture exports are the envy of the rest of the world, who subsidize and protect hoping to catch up.
- maxk42 8y agoThis is disingenuous. They're comparing the entire entertainment industry to the manufacturing portion of the agriculture industry. If you include agriculture's entire impact after the manufacturing step, you'll find the retail and food services industry that arise from it contribute $5.75 trillion to the economy. [1] That dwarfs the arts and entertainment industries by several times. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/197569/annual-retail-and-food-services-sales/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/197569/annual-retail-and...
- evgen 8y agoAnd if you are going to add the entire food chain to agriculture then we will add the telcos and consumer electronics industries that depend on content consumption and the tertiary industries like advertising and marketing that draft off the economic engine of content delivery. I think that in the end it is going to be the case that arts and entertainment have a far larger footprint than food over the past few decades.
- rdlecler1 8y agothere is a very broad definition of the arts here. It’s really the entertainment industry: >But the largest economic impact nationwide came from the usual suspects: broadcasting, which generated $127 billion in economic activity; followed by the motion-picture industry, which accounted for $99 billion; and non-digital publishing, with $77 billion of economic activity. The “arts-related retail trade”—which includes everything from art galleries to book stores—generated $51 million in 2015. But the arts-related retail trade employed 767,000 people to “provide arts and cultural goods and services,” making it the second-highest-employing industry in the arts and culture sector.
- muktaakash 8y agoAnyone, who can paint or sketch manually - does know it worthy enough. This is the human consciousness agency, which no machine and AI going to replace. Every piece of expression, message, visualising, concept, idea transfer and style is different. And that makes an unique and unequal to any- a genre.