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Air 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 actua

by wazoox 8y ago

Air 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 ago
came 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 ago
But 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 ago
Exactly. 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.
- dantheman 8y ago
  I don't think you can say the NEA is responsible for anywhere near the 763 billion... In the article it even states that the government spends: >The government (federal, state, and local) also provided a major $101.5 billion boost to the sector, mainly in visual and performing arts education funding, according to the data. The NEA is a rounding error in government arts spending.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
Fricken 8y ago
The economy measures where humans allocate their efforts. We put more effort into the arts than we do into getting food out of the ground. It's not nonsense. Of course, there's an implicit bias that the arts are trivial, but most people these days don't do real work, they do virtual work. If you're in finance, STEM, the Arts, law, or education, your job is to move information around. People who do real, useful work with tangible value generally don't make much money.
- fock 8y ago
  If you want to judge human efforts, I think you should also factor in the actual human cost (how many manhours are in there), as well as efficiency gains due to the work performed. And I guess that in this metric a large amount of the so called arts is highly overrated compared to the typical monetary evaluation (and if you say: people enjoy art, it's generating quality of life - the 20$ spent on streaming per year/capita could as well be invested into things which help people develop themselves (such as solidary funding of highschool music education...) and create social fabric. But this is obviously very bad from an individualistic view on gains, which actually creates a lot of not so individual consumption drones.
- jimmy1 8y ago
  > The economy measures where humans allocate their efforts. We put more effort into the arts than we do into getting food out of the ground. It's not nonsense. Or maybe it's more a measure of how automated large scale farming has become? It requires less human effort?
- anoncake 8y ago
  But allocating effort to something is not the same as contributing to the economy. In a way, agriculture contributes the entire GDP to the economy: Without it, everyone starves and there is no economy.
bastawhiz 8y ago
The unfortunate reality is that in order to get many decision makers to support something, you need to show them quantitative data about its value. In a past life, I worked on the performance team at an enterprise software company. For some of our users, our main dashboard took almost a minute to load. Fixing this didn't generate any new sales or increase revenue (enterprise software like this is sold to CTOs, not employees, and the actual product quality rarely affects sales numbers). We had our PM work full time to come up with numbers supporting our argument that making the service fast decreases churn. It was a pointless exercise, but it got us the resources to help fix the problem. The sad reality is that while there are many things whose value should be intuitively obvious, the folks in charge do not always have an appreciation for them without seeing hard numbers.
- cphoover 8y ago
  Often ROI is not realized on the short-term but rather the long tail. Users may not bounce immediately... however whether they stick with a product or not over time, may be a result of how usable it is. Same with if they would recommend it to a colleague or family member over a longer period of time. These things can be harder to quantify and are often omitted in ROI analysis.
- devonkim 8y ago
  The problem with enterprise software is the same problem with most issues we see from the producer side - those doing the work are completely different in alignment and requirements / needs than those that make the decisions to purchase for those. In Agile (and devops), the greatest friction is squarely around the reality that there's a manager caste that pushes down and makes decisions with very little feedback loops or misaligned incentives by all the stakeholders involved, and this causes churn within the group. For the buyers and the users of the software, their requirements are oftentimes lost. In your scenario, users with more power over their day-to-day software will demand better software and be empowered to select alternatives, but in more traditional organizations there will be a lot less churn comparatively because users will simply put up with bad things forcibly. Almost all the "radical" software and project management practices to show up (and when implemented successfully at least) in the past 15 years aims to give more power to workers and to de-scope the role of management from pure decision-makers into a more supportive role with more intense feedback. There is a very consistent theme that organizations where these efforts fail are ones where management uses new processes and tooling to exert their existing political power to achieve results instead of also transforming themselves.
Hoasi 8y ago
I am not sure it is complete nonsense. But writing about all arts as a single entity is confusing. Even the art market itself is not a single industry. There is no satisfying definition of art. Is TV commercial art? In some cases, it may well be. Is the film industry only producing works of arts? Far from it. Why should starving artists starve if "arts" are doing so well? It must be because they don't do the kind of "art" that contributes so much to the economy.
- navait 8y ago
  Or that there are more artists than demand for art.
knowuh 8y ago
This is my favorite (and the most unexpected) Hacker News comment of all time. Thank you.
the_cat_kittles 8y ago
its funny how this comment is well received when its dismissing an argument about the significance of art. ive made the same point, but when its directed at more business/stem-y areas, people on here have a fit.
tim333 8y ago
If you want water springs and insects but also want economic growth you should be thankful that people are spending money on art and music rather than bigger SUVs, houses and jet travel. The only way really to have unlimited economic growth on a finite planet is for the money to go into that kind of stuff.
shoguning 8y ago
Exactly. Plumbing improves my quality of life way more than the internet.
miked 8y ago
The US has 338M people and they are claiming $763B PER YEAR for art. That's $2257 PER YEAR for every man, woman, and newborn infant in America. Total BS. Even if you include music and movies and TV, this is still way too high. It's also dishonest, since this is a politically motivated attempt to counter cuts in NEA funding, yet very little of TV, movies, or music is sponsored by the NEA, which just goes to show how unimportant it is except to pseudo-elites who think that a urinal in a museum is art as long as the rabble don't approve of it.
- evgen 8y ago
  Without the arts there is no content. Goodbye internet, radio, TV & films. Telcos and the consumer electronics industry? A tiny fraction of its current size. You have to be truly delusional to think that $2K per year is some sort of low-ball number for this. If anything this number is minimizing the second-order effects.
  - miked 8y ago
    You've missed my point entirely. The OP is playing a game by defining arts (clown mask on) to be all of the entertainment industry (and citing that size in the headline) while supporting an argument for (clown mask off now) the NEA, which is an organization for the Fine Arts, not Katy Perry videos and iPhone apps.

by wazoox 8y ago

winningcontinue 8y ago

came 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 ago

But 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 ago

Exactly. 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.

dantheman 8y ago
I don't think you can say the NEA is responsible for anywhere near the 763 billion... In the article it even states that the government spends: >The government (federal, state, and local) also provided a major $101.5 billion boost to the sector, mainly in visual and performing arts education funding, according to the data. The NEA is a rounding error in government arts spending.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

Fricken 8y ago

The economy measures where humans allocate their efforts. We put more effort into the arts than we do into getting food out of the ground. It's not nonsense. Of course, there's an implicit bias that the arts are trivial, but most people these days don't do real work, they do virtual work. If you're in finance, STEM, the Arts, law, or education, your job is to move information around. People who do real, useful work with tangible value generally don't make much money.

fock 8y ago
If you want to judge human efforts, I think you should also factor in the actual human cost (how many manhours are in there), as well as efficiency gains due to the work performed. And I guess that in this metric a large amount of the so called arts is highly overrated compared to the typical monetary evaluation (and if you say: people enjoy art, it's generating quality of life - the 20$ spent on streaming per year/capita could as well be invested into things which help people develop themselves (such as solidary funding of highschool music education...) and create social fabric. But this is obviously very bad from an individualistic view on gains, which actually creates a lot of not so individual consumption drones.
jimmy1 8y ago
> The economy measures where humans allocate their efforts. We put more effort into the arts than we do into getting food out of the ground. It's not nonsense. Or maybe it's more a measure of how automated large scale farming has become? It requires less human effort?
anoncake 8y ago
But allocating effort to something is not the same as contributing to the economy. In a way, agriculture contributes the entire GDP to the economy: Without it, everyone starves and there is no economy.

bastawhiz 8y ago

The unfortunate reality is that in order to get many decision makers to support something, you need to show them quantitative data about its value. In a past life, I worked on the performance team at an enterprise software company. For some of our users, our main dashboard took almost a minute to load. Fixing this didn't generate any new sales or increase revenue (enterprise software like this is sold to CTOs, not employees, and the actual product quality rarely affects sales numbers). We had our PM work full time to come up with numbers supporting our argument that making the service fast decreases churn. It was a pointless exercise, but it got us the resources to help fix the problem. The sad reality is that while there are many things whose value should be intuitively obvious, the folks in charge do not always have an appreciation for them without seeing hard numbers.

cphoover 8y ago
Often ROI is not realized on the short-term but rather the long tail. Users may not bounce immediately... however whether they stick with a product or not over time, may be a result of how usable it is. Same with if they would recommend it to a colleague or family member over a longer period of time. These things can be harder to quantify and are often omitted in ROI analysis.
devonkim 8y ago
The problem with enterprise software is the same problem with most issues we see from the producer side - those doing the work are completely different in alignment and requirements / needs than those that make the decisions to purchase for those. In Agile (and devops), the greatest friction is squarely around the reality that there's a manager caste that pushes down and makes decisions with very little feedback loops or misaligned incentives by all the stakeholders involved, and this causes churn within the group. For the buyers and the users of the software, their requirements are oftentimes lost. In your scenario, users with more power over their day-to-day software will demand better software and be empowered to select alternatives, but in more traditional organizations there will be a lot less churn comparatively because users will simply put up with bad things forcibly. Almost all the "radical" software and project management practices to show up (and when implemented successfully at least) in the past 15 years aims to give more power to workers and to de-scope the role of management from pure decision-makers into a more supportive role with more intense feedback. There is a very consistent theme that organizations where these efforts fail are ones where management uses new processes and tooling to exert their existing political power to achieve results instead of also transforming themselves.

Hoasi 8y ago

I am not sure it is complete nonsense. But writing about all arts as a single entity is confusing. Even the art market itself is not a single industry. There is no satisfying definition of art. Is TV commercial art? In some cases, it may well be. Is the film industry only producing works of arts? Far from it. Why should starving artists starve if "arts" are doing so well? It must be because they don't do the kind of "art" that contributes so much to the economy.

navait 8y ago
Or that there are more artists than demand for art.

knowuh 8y ago

This is my favorite (and the most unexpected) Hacker News comment of all time. Thank you.

the_cat_kittles 8y ago

its funny how this comment is well received when its dismissing an argument about the significance of art. ive made the same point, but when its directed at more business/stem-y areas, people on here have a fit.

tim333 8y ago

If you want water springs and insects but also want economic growth you should be thankful that people are spending money on art and music rather than bigger SUVs, houses and jet travel. The only way really to have unlimited economic growth on a finite planet is for the money to go into that kind of stuff.

shoguning 8y ago

Exactly. Plumbing improves my quality of life way more than the internet.

miked 8y ago

The US has 338M people and they are claiming $763B PER YEAR for art. That's $2257 PER YEAR for every man, woman, and newborn infant in America. Total BS. Even if you include music and movies and TV, this is still way too high. It's also dishonest, since this is a politically motivated attempt to counter cuts in NEA funding, yet very little of TV, movies, or music is sponsored by the NEA, which just goes to show how unimportant it is except to pseudo-elites who think that a urinal in a museum is art as long as the rabble don't approve of it.

evgen 8y ago
Without the arts there is no content. Goodbye internet, radio, TV & films. Telcos and the consumer electronics industry? A tiny fraction of its current size. You have to be truly delusional to think that $2K per year is some sort of low-ball number for this. If anything this number is minimizing the second-order effects.
- miked 8y ago
  You've missed my point entirely. The OP is playing a game by defining arts (clown mask on) to be all of the entertainment industry (and citing that size in the headline) while supporting an argument for (clown mask off now) the NEA, which is an organization for the Fine Arts, not Katy Perry videos and iPhone apps.