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> People seem to think only money has value. Your either don't understand or don't want to understand what people are commenting about here. Of course nobody t

> People seem to think only money has value. Your either don't understand or don't want to understand what people are commenting about here. Of course nobody thinks that only money has value. If only money had value, why would anybody exchange money for, say, a bread? What many people are wondering about, is whether the value of the money paid by tax payers to artists, equals the value of what they give to the tax payers in return. Because if it would be equal, then one might wonder why they apparently are not able to sell their art for the same amount of money.

picture 8mo ago
There are many things that are valuable to people, but which they would rather not pay for. They include public goods and externalities, like infrastructure and education and a reasonable amount of military. It makes a lot of sense that people would rather enjoy art for free if they had the option, and since the majority of art experience can be easily duplicated and transmitted, why pay for it yourself? There is also another benefit of art stimulating further intellectual and creative development of a society, perhaps yielding second order benefits that are hard to quantify. Thus overall, it can make a lot of sense for government to pay for art as a society.
ryanjshaw 8mo ago
I also wonder why the tax payers who care can’t contribute directly to a fund, and keep government out of entirely.
- komali2 8mo ago
  Then it would be a popularity contest and depend on the artists' ability to market themselves in a capitalist space. The one with the best TikTok channel would get the money. That doesn't lead to having diverse, interesting, and challenging art.
  - ryanjshaw 8mo ago
    How does the government solve this problem? Why can’t a private organization replicate that? How was art produced previously without the existence of these programs?
    - komali2 8mo ago
      > How does the government solve this problem? The same way it solves all problems: poorly, yet better and more fairly than corporations do. > Why can’t a private organization replicate that? Private organizations are driven by profit motive. Profit motive is usually in a negative correlation with fair results in these sorts of situations. If you mean a church or non profit, then, because those don't represent a region of people, and there's no petition mechanism to change their behavior if they're bad. "We'll stop giving them money" great so you're back to my original point then: profit motive. > How was art produced previously without the existence of these programs? Hard to say, but there sure is a lot of it, from as long ago as ten thousand years, so personally I think it's safe to say there were lots of reasons beyond either an S Corp or 501(c) buying popular art, or a liberal democracy funding it.
      - ryanjshaw 8mo ago
        I didn’t really follow your argument about non-profits. Clearly the artists somehow managed to convince government to support the scheme, why can’t the same people form a non—profit and convince ordinary members of the public to support the same scheme in a non-profit structure? That way we have a smaller government, lower taxes, and the people who care can directly spend their money on addressing this problem - rather than have their money going to taxes where it might be spent somewhere they don’t agree with! Nobody has to argue about money being spent on things they don’t care about. Everybody is happy.
        komali2 8mo ago
        > I didn’t really follow your argument about non-profits. I assumed that was an angle people were going for: charities and non profits rather than governments. I'm not convinced the artist fund happened because artists were good lobbyists with transferrable sales skills, just socket in either Big Government, Big Church, or Big Nonprofit and they'll happily churn away art. Seems it's more a government initiative, sourced by the public out of a desire for more art, or to live in a society where artists can focus on making arts. Personally I thought the whole point of improving automation and increasing productivity was so that we could all just hang out and paint or make music or whatever. > That way we have a smaller government, lower taxes, and the people who care can directly spend their money on addressing this problem - rather than have their money going to taxes where it might be spent somewhere they don’t agree with! It doesn't make sense to only privatize art, then, because all things that taxes are spent on are things some people don't care about. What you're arguing for is a total privatization of everything, and functionally the elimination of government (since some people won't want their taxes to go to, for example, the police or military or even the president's burger budget). So, an anarcho-capitalist argument. Some people would be very happy in that world. Most wouldn't. If you specifically want to single out art and ok with, idk, roads and fire departments being funded by taxes, then that just means you disagree with your neighbor about the kind of society you want to live in, since the only way to build a society based on your values in a liberal democracy is through government - private markets are concerned only with profitability, which is often negatively correlated with having a fair and comfortable society.
  - shwaj 8mo ago
    That’s not what they’re saying. Only the funding source would change; the funds would still be split evenly to anyone who meets the criteria of being an artist.
    - ryanjshaw 8mo ago
      Thanks. That was exactly my question.
    - komali2 8mo ago
      Ok, well that problem has just been solved already by Ireland. What's your argument to do it some other way?
      - shwaj 8mo ago
        I’m not arguing anything, I was just trying to clear up confusion. However, it’s not clear to me that Ireland has “solved” the problem.
- jmye 8mo ago
  Because we use taxes as a process to crowdsource funding more effectively. That's literally the entire basis for it. Might as well ask why "only the taxpayers who care about a new highway can raise funds to buy it" and then we're back in some weird, system of no central government because someone can always claim "why not just like, let people donate money" because it's a simplistic cliche that appeals deeply to people who aren't quite clever enough to work out just how much they've benefitted from the system as it's been constructed.
  - ryanjshaw 8mo ago
    > simplistic cliche that appeals deeply to people who aren't quite clever enough Is this passive aggressive insult really necessary? > Because we use taxes as a process to crowdsource funding more effectively I’m sure you will agree that not everything that everybody wants can get funded. The debate here is how to draw the line. I think critical shared physical infrastructure occupying a limited valuable resource is nothing like art, so I’m struggling to follow your argument.
    - jmye 8mo ago
      > Is this passive aggressive insult really necessary? I think simplistic cliche's deserve derision - if you don't like that, perhaps don't use them? It's hardly a shot at the writer to suggest that what he wrote is mediocre. > I’m sure you will agree that not everything that everybody wants can get funded. The debate here is how to draw the line. No, your argument was that I should fund things myself directly. I pointed out that that's an inane and boring argument. If you want to debate other things, then do that in the first place. > so I’m struggling to follow your argument. It might help if you re-read your own arguments first, instead of trying to make them into new ones. Things people want funded by the government get funded when they vote for them to get funded either directly or via representatives - if you don't like those things, there is a clear way to change the algebra. In no case is suggesting people just like, "pay some extra taxes, man" a useful are additive observation.
  - buzzert 8mo ago
    > we use taxes as a process to crowdsource funding more effectively Effectively? It doesn't seem to me like most western governments allocate this funding "effectively" at all. How do we increase the accountability?
komali2 8mo ago
Nobody pays to view a mural, but a lot of people view it, and property values go up as a result. It cost the artist time, effort, and money to make it, and if you hire an artist specifically to make a mural, it's prohibitively expensive for an individual. Better to amortize the cost across the population and have public works. Like we do for infrastructure. Seems to work just fine.
- philipallstar 8mo ago
  Isn't this arguing indirectly for national taxpayers to prop up the value of certain properties? Why not just have a local collaboration with a local artist and people pay directly?
  - jimnotgym 8mo ago
    Because they would all refuse, presumably? Like they would refuse to fix the road, because that would benefit everyone not just their greedy selves.
    - philipallstar 8mo ago
      Yes, local roads are usually taken care of by local taxes. Why would Manhattan's road improvements be paid for by rural Virginians?
      - komali2 8mo ago
        That's just an arbitrary separation. Both places benefit from the federal highway system that allows goods to be delivered across State lines. Both benefit from the maintenance of shipping lanes, the national power grid, the submarine cables connecting them to Europe and Asia, the... This is why hyper privatization will fail: it's impossible to separate out all the intricately intertwined systems in such a way that people are throwing pennies in a million directions to pay exactly enough to each stakeholder involved in the functioning of their society.
AdamConwayIE 8mo ago
You don't have to wonder whether or not it returns value to the tax payer. The Irish government already monitored the pilot program for two years, publishing all of the details and findings. [1] "The headline finding from this social CBA is that for every €1 of public money invested in the pilot, society received €1.39 in return" This came about as a mixture of greater economic activity from participants, cultural impacts that saw public-facing artist activities increase, and improvements to wellbeing of participants that reduced their requirement for psychological interventions by the state. The state also predicts that the further roll-out of this program will benefit consumers with lower prices for artistic works, as there will be more supply overall. The scheme has been quite popular here in Ireland. Given the history of Ireland when it comes to art (both in the sense of spoken and written word, and in other mediums), it makes sense to introduce a scheme like this to safeguard and uplift those who produce art. [1] https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-culture-communications-and-sport/publications/basic-income-for-the-arts-pilot-scheme-reports/ https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-culture-communications-a...
- closewith 8mo ago
  Thanks for linking the CBA. I hadn't seen that before > "The headline finding from this social CBA is that for every €1 of public money invested in the pilot, society received €1.39 in return" Okay, so if you read the CBA, the net fiscal cost of the pilot was: * Gross pilot cost (2021–2025): ~€114 MM * Tax revenue: ~€36 MM * Social protection savings: ~€6.5 MM * Net fiscal cost: ~€72 MM So for every €1 of public money invested in the pilot, society received 37¢ in fiscal return. So it's an unambiguous fiscal cost, a net loss. Of the "Total monetised benefits", €80 MM of the benefit was in "wellbeing gains", as measured by the WELLBY test, which is calculated based on a single survey question: > “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays, where 0 is "not at all satisfied" and 10 is "completely satisfied"? The €80 MM in "wellbeing gains", which is the sole decided of whether this pilot was a net positive or a net negative to society, is because on average, the 2,000 pilot scheme participants had a very approximate 0.7–1.1 increase in score when asked the above question during the pilot as compared to before the pilot. Each 1 point is deemed to be worth €15,340. That's it. There's no economic return - it's a proven economic cost. There's no proven social benefit. No demonstrated effect on art prices or availability. The pilot was successful - if you consider it to have been - solely because the artists who received payments as part of the pilot had an improvement in Wellby satisfaction score when they were asked via survey. If you remove this factor, the pilot was an abject failure.
YesBox 8mo ago
Unlike baking bread, It can take decades for an artist to become experienced enough to create something of value. Some art, like classical music composition, is and has been propped up by grants and wealthy donors since forever. Whether that’s a good allocation of resources is of course entirely subjective :)
angiolillo 8mo ago
> one might wonder why they apparently are not able to sell their art for the same amount of money "Public goods" like parks, museums, bridges, roadways, transit, nature preserves, community spaces, and public safety services produce both direct value to their immediate users as well as substantial diffuse value to their community. Direct value can be captured by user fees, tolls, subscriptions, etc but capturing diffuse value is challenging. A park raises surrounding property values even for people who do not visit the park. Good transportation infrastructure increases the value of surrounding land and and productivity per capita even for nonusers. Relying solely on user fees may force some of these entities to close or fall into disrepair, thereby reducing overall value by substantially more than it would have cost to maintain them. And in some cases shifting the cost burden to direct users substantially lowers the diffuse value, for example back when fire fighting companies would let houses burn unless their owners paid them, ultimately resulting in more overall community fire damage. In these cases, subsidizing these public services with taxes (optimally Georgist land-value taxes) is an economically rational decision. One could plausibly argue that artists similarly produce diffuse value e.g., raising the profile of their nation or culture, making their neighborhood a more desirable place for people with money. Not only do artists typically struggle to collect a share of this diffuse value, as renters the very value they create often ends up pricing out of their community. I could imagine cases where it is a net benefit for a government to subsidize such entities if such subsidy is less than the fraction of the diffuse benefit that ends up being collected by taxes. I have no insight as to whether this scheme in particular is net positive, please see sibling posts for that. I'm just explaining that such arrangements are both economically rational and extremely common in high-functioning societies.
- EQmWgw87pw 8mo ago
  Your argument makes sense, but a park has a measurable scope. We all want it to be X sqft, with Y trees, and it will cost Z dollars. Are you going to force artists to make the specific art that the community is in need of, or can they just do nothing?
  - TomasBM 8mo ago
    Not OP, but posed like that, neither. Expect something? Yes. Enforce it? Not sure for the first tranche, but make it a prerequisite for continued funding. One big obstacle is, of course, how to define what to expect from each artist. For example, you can't expect the same level of output from sculptors and musicians. Another big obstacle is obviously the expected quality of output. I don't pretend to know the solutions to either of those obstacles, but they should be surmountable [1]. I think it's fair to expect some output in exchange for funding, but it doesn't have to be a high expectation. Personally, I like the idea of hiring artists as full-time with particular projects in mind [2], but intentionally leaving ~50% of their time to personal projects. [1] Perhaps artist communities themselves could discuss ways to make this exchange work for all parties. [2] Murals, restorations, beautification of public spaces, etc.
lucideer 8mo ago
> Your either don't understand or don't want to understand what people are commenting about here. From reading your comment I think this observation applies to your own understanding, not the gp's. > whether the value of the money paid by tax payers to artists, equals the value of what they give to the tax payers in return. [...] one might wonder why they apparently are not able to sell their art for the same amount of money. You might not see it but this is effectively equivalent to thinking only money has value, because you're describing a system whereby value is defined by money. Your dichotomy assumes anything that cannot be sold has no value, & anything that is sold is only as valuable as its price. The emergent conclusion from that formula is that only money has value. It's worth noting that it also follows from this that value is defined by people with purchasing power. If for example the only cohort who value any given piece of art cannot afford to financially support the artist creating said art, not only is the art & the artist's work without value, but by extension so too are the perspectives, autonomy & - ultimately - the lives of that cohort without value.
- EQmWgw87pw 8mo ago
  You’re making a logical leap, how can you say only money has value when things are worth money? That item has value equivalent to the money given for it, therefore that item has value. It’s likely you’d be able to find people who are willing to trade some electronic device you have for another equivalent one (some iPhone for some Android) without exchanging any money. Money is just the measure of value, it’s like saying something cannot be 5ft tall without the existence of a measuring tape. Societies have existed before money they were just inefficient.
  - lucideer 8mo ago
    > That item has value equivalent to the money given for it, therefore that item has value. > Money is just the measure of value Money is the measure of market value. If you believe it's the measure if inherent value, you believe anything outside of the market has no value. E.g. that human lives have no value outside of waged labour (or heck, even slavery). The point here is the monetary value is a model of value, not the definition of it. If you are defining an item's value by it's market price, then you believe what the gp was describing: that "only money has value" (since it defines all value).
TomasBM 8mo ago
> one might wonder why they apparently are not able to sell their art for the same amount of money. Because the skills and effort needed to market and sell your art to an audience are not equal to the skills and effort needed to produce good art [1]. I agree that there could be other complementary or better solutions compared to this scheme. But as long as the above premise is true, not every good artist will want or be able to sell well. [1] However you define this. Supposedly, Van Gogh was a lousy salesman, but a good artist.
multiplegeorges 8mo ago
Art is often only appreciated in retrospect, so it is typically undervalued at the time of its creation. > equals the value of what they give to the tax payers in return This seems incredibly shortsighted.

picture 8mo ago

There are many things that are valuable to people, but which they would rather not pay for. They include public goods and externalities, like infrastructure and education and a reasonable amount of military. It makes a lot of sense that people would rather enjoy art for free if they had the option, and since the majority of art experience can be easily duplicated and transmitted, why pay for it yourself? There is also another benefit of art stimulating further intellectual and creative development of a society, perhaps yielding second order benefits that are hard to quantify. Thus overall, it can make a lot of sense for government to pay for art as a society.

ryanjshaw 8mo ago

I also wonder why the tax payers who care can’t contribute directly to a fund, and keep government out of entirely.

komali2 8mo ago
Then it would be a popularity contest and depend on the artists' ability to market themselves in a capitalist space. The one with the best TikTok channel would get the money. That doesn't lead to having diverse, interesting, and challenging art.
- ryanjshaw 8mo ago
  How does the government solve this problem? Why can’t a private organization replicate that? How was art produced previously without the existence of these programs?
  - komali2 8mo ago
    > How does the government solve this problem? The same way it solves all problems: poorly, yet better and more fairly than corporations do. > Why can’t a private organization replicate that? Private organizations are driven by profit motive. Profit motive is usually in a negative correlation with fair results in these sorts of situations. If you mean a church or non profit, then, because those don't represent a region of people, and there's no petition mechanism to change their behavior if they're bad. "We'll stop giving them money" great so you're back to my original point then: profit motive. > How was art produced previously without the existence of these programs? Hard to say, but there sure is a lot of it, from as long ago as ten thousand years, so personally I think it's safe to say there were lots of reasons beyond either an S Corp or 501(c) buying popular art, or a liberal democracy funding it.
    - ryanjshaw 8mo ago
      I didn’t really follow your argument about non-profits. Clearly the artists somehow managed to convince government to support the scheme, why can’t the same people form a non—profit and convince ordinary members of the public to support the same scheme in a non-profit structure? That way we have a smaller government, lower taxes, and the people who care can directly spend their money on addressing this problem - rather than have their money going to taxes where it might be spent somewhere they don’t agree with! Nobody has to argue about money being spent on things they don’t care about. Everybody is happy.
      - komali2 8mo ago
        > I didn’t really follow your argument about non-profits. I assumed that was an angle people were going for: charities and non profits rather than governments. I'm not convinced the artist fund happened because artists were good lobbyists with transferrable sales skills, just socket in either Big Government, Big Church, or Big Nonprofit and they'll happily churn away art. Seems it's more a government initiative, sourced by the public out of a desire for more art, or to live in a society where artists can focus on making arts. Personally I thought the whole point of improving automation and increasing productivity was so that we could all just hang out and paint or make music or whatever. > That way we have a smaller government, lower taxes, and the people who care can directly spend their money on addressing this problem - rather than have their money going to taxes where it might be spent somewhere they don’t agree with! It doesn't make sense to only privatize art, then, because all things that taxes are spent on are things some people don't care about. What you're arguing for is a total privatization of everything, and functionally the elimination of government (since some people won't want their taxes to go to, for example, the police or military or even the president's burger budget). So, an anarcho-capitalist argument. Some people would be very happy in that world. Most wouldn't. If you specifically want to single out art and ok with, idk, roads and fire departments being funded by taxes, then that just means you disagree with your neighbor about the kind of society you want to live in, since the only way to build a society based on your values in a liberal democracy is through government - private markets are concerned only with profitability, which is often negatively correlated with having a fair and comfortable society.
- shwaj 8mo ago
  That’s not what they’re saying. Only the funding source would change; the funds would still be split evenly to anyone who meets the criteria of being an artist.
  - ryanjshaw 8mo ago
    Thanks. That was exactly my question.
  - komali2 8mo ago
    Ok, well that problem has just been solved already by Ireland. What's your argument to do it some other way?
    - shwaj 8mo ago
      I’m not arguing anything, I was just trying to clear up confusion. However, it’s not clear to me that Ireland has “solved” the problem.
jmye 8mo ago
Because we use taxes as a process to crowdsource funding more effectively. That's literally the entire basis for it. Might as well ask why "only the taxpayers who care about a new highway can raise funds to buy it" and then we're back in some weird, system of no central government because someone can always claim "why not just like, let people donate money" because it's a simplistic cliche that appeals deeply to people who aren't quite clever enough to work out just how much they've benefitted from the system as it's been constructed.
- ryanjshaw 8mo ago
  > simplistic cliche that appeals deeply to people who aren't quite clever enough Is this passive aggressive insult really necessary? > Because we use taxes as a process to crowdsource funding more effectively I’m sure you will agree that not everything that everybody wants can get funded. The debate here is how to draw the line. I think critical shared physical infrastructure occupying a limited valuable resource is nothing like art, so I’m struggling to follow your argument.
  - jmye 8mo ago
    > Is this passive aggressive insult really necessary? I think simplistic cliche's deserve derision - if you don't like that, perhaps don't use them? It's hardly a shot at the writer to suggest that what he wrote is mediocre. > I’m sure you will agree that not everything that everybody wants can get funded. The debate here is how to draw the line. No, your argument was that I should fund things myself directly. I pointed out that that's an inane and boring argument. If you want to debate other things, then do that in the first place. > so I’m struggling to follow your argument. It might help if you re-read your own arguments first, instead of trying to make them into new ones. Things people want funded by the government get funded when they vote for them to get funded either directly or via representatives - if you don't like those things, there is a clear way to change the algebra. In no case is suggesting people just like, "pay some extra taxes, man" a useful are additive observation.
- buzzert 8mo ago
  > we use taxes as a process to crowdsource funding more effectively Effectively? It doesn't seem to me like most western governments allocate this funding "effectively" at all. How do we increase the accountability?

komali2 8mo ago

Nobody pays to view a mural, but a lot of people view it, and property values go up as a result. It cost the artist time, effort, and money to make it, and if you hire an artist specifically to make a mural, it's prohibitively expensive for an individual. Better to amortize the cost across the population and have public works. Like we do for infrastructure. Seems to work just fine.

philipallstar 8mo ago
Isn't this arguing indirectly for national taxpayers to prop up the value of certain properties? Why not just have a local collaboration with a local artist and people pay directly?
- jimnotgym 8mo ago
  Because they would all refuse, presumably? Like they would refuse to fix the road, because that would benefit everyone not just their greedy selves.
  - philipallstar 8mo ago
    Yes, local roads are usually taken care of by local taxes. Why would Manhattan's road improvements be paid for by rural Virginians?
    - komali2 8mo ago
      That's just an arbitrary separation. Both places benefit from the federal highway system that allows goods to be delivered across State lines. Both benefit from the maintenance of shipping lanes, the national power grid, the submarine cables connecting them to Europe and Asia, the... This is why hyper privatization will fail: it's impossible to separate out all the intricately intertwined systems in such a way that people are throwing pennies in a million directions to pay exactly enough to each stakeholder involved in the functioning of their society.

AdamConwayIE 8mo ago

You don't have to wonder whether or not it returns value to the tax payer. The Irish government already monitored the pilot program for two years, publishing all of the details and findings. [1] "The headline finding from this social CBA is that for every €1 of public money invested in the pilot, society received €1.39 in return" This came about as a mixture of greater economic activity from participants, cultural impacts that saw public-facing artist activities increase, and improvements to wellbeing of participants that reduced their requirement for psychological interventions by the state. The state also predicts that the further roll-out of this program will benefit consumers with lower prices for artistic works, as there will be more supply overall. The scheme has been quite popular here in Ireland. Given the history of Ireland when it comes to art (both in the sense of spoken and written word, and in other mediums), it makes sense to introduce a scheme like this to safeguard and uplift those who produce art. [1] https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-culture-communications-and-sport/publications/basic-income-for-the-arts-pilot-scheme-reports/ https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-culture-communications-a...

closewith 8mo ago
Thanks for linking the CBA. I hadn't seen that before > "The headline finding from this social CBA is that for every €1 of public money invested in the pilot, society received €1.39 in return" Okay, so if you read the CBA, the net fiscal cost of the pilot was: * Gross pilot cost (2021–2025): ~€114 MM * Tax revenue: ~€36 MM * Social protection savings: ~€6.5 MM * Net fiscal cost: ~€72 MM So for every €1 of public money invested in the pilot, society received 37¢ in fiscal return. So it's an unambiguous fiscal cost, a net loss. Of the "Total monetised benefits", €80 MM of the benefit was in "wellbeing gains", as measured by the WELLBY test, which is calculated based on a single survey question: > “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays, where 0 is "not at all satisfied" and 10 is "completely satisfied"? The €80 MM in "wellbeing gains", which is the sole decided of whether this pilot was a net positive or a net negative to society, is because on average, the 2,000 pilot scheme participants had a very approximate 0.7–1.1 increase in score when asked the above question during the pilot as compared to before the pilot. Each 1 point is deemed to be worth €15,340. That's it. There's no economic return - it's a proven economic cost. There's no proven social benefit. No demonstrated effect on art prices or availability. The pilot was successful - if you consider it to have been - solely because the artists who received payments as part of the pilot had an improvement in Wellby satisfaction score when they were asked via survey. If you remove this factor, the pilot was an abject failure.

YesBox 8mo ago

Unlike baking bread, It can take decades for an artist to become experienced enough to create something of value. Some art, like classical music composition, is and has been propped up by grants and wealthy donors since forever. Whether that’s a good allocation of resources is of course entirely subjective :)

angiolillo 8mo ago

> one might wonder why they apparently are not able to sell their art for the same amount of money "Public goods" like parks, museums, bridges, roadways, transit, nature preserves, community spaces, and public safety services produce both direct value to their immediate users as well as substantial diffuse value to their community. Direct value can be captured by user fees, tolls, subscriptions, etc but capturing diffuse value is challenging. A park raises surrounding property values even for people who do not visit the park. Good transportation infrastructure increases the value of surrounding land and and productivity per capita even for nonusers. Relying solely on user fees may force some of these entities to close or fall into disrepair, thereby reducing overall value by substantially more than it would have cost to maintain them. And in some cases shifting the cost burden to direct users substantially lowers the diffuse value, for example back when fire fighting companies would let houses burn unless their owners paid them, ultimately resulting in more overall community fire damage. In these cases, subsidizing these public services with taxes (optimally Georgist land-value taxes) is an economically rational decision. One could plausibly argue that artists similarly produce diffuse value e.g., raising the profile of their nation or culture, making their neighborhood a more desirable place for people with money. Not only do artists typically struggle to collect a share of this diffuse value, as renters the very value they create often ends up pricing out of their community. I could imagine cases where it is a net benefit for a government to subsidize such entities if such subsidy is less than the fraction of the diffuse benefit that ends up being collected by taxes. I have no insight as to whether this scheme in particular is net positive, please see sibling posts for that. I'm just explaining that such arrangements are both economically rational and extremely common in high-functioning societies.

EQmWgw87pw 8mo ago
Your argument makes sense, but a park has a measurable scope. We all want it to be X sqft, with Y trees, and it will cost Z dollars. Are you going to force artists to make the specific art that the community is in need of, or can they just do nothing?
- TomasBM 8mo ago
  Not OP, but posed like that, neither. Expect something? Yes. Enforce it? Not sure for the first tranche, but make it a prerequisite for continued funding. One big obstacle is, of course, how to define what to expect from each artist. For example, you can't expect the same level of output from sculptors and musicians. Another big obstacle is obviously the expected quality of output. I don't pretend to know the solutions to either of those obstacles, but they should be surmountable [1]. I think it's fair to expect some output in exchange for funding, but it doesn't have to be a high expectation. Personally, I like the idea of hiring artists as full-time with particular projects in mind [2], but intentionally leaving ~50% of their time to personal projects. [1] Perhaps artist communities themselves could discuss ways to make this exchange work for all parties. [2] Murals, restorations, beautification of public spaces, etc.

lucideer 8mo ago

> Your either don't understand or don't want to understand what people are commenting about here. From reading your comment I think this observation applies to your own understanding, not the gp's. > whether the value of the money paid by tax payers to artists, equals the value of what they give to the tax payers in return. [...] one might wonder why they apparently are not able to sell their art for the same amount of money. You might not see it but this is effectively equivalent to thinking only money has value, because you're describing a system whereby value is defined by money. Your dichotomy assumes anything that cannot be sold has no value, & anything that is sold is only as valuable as its price. The emergent conclusion from that formula is that only money has value. It's worth noting that it also follows from this that value is defined by people with purchasing power. If for example the only cohort who value any given piece of art cannot afford to financially support the artist creating said art, not only is the art & the artist's work without value, but by extension so too are the perspectives, autonomy & - ultimately - the lives of that cohort without value.

EQmWgw87pw 8mo ago
You’re making a logical leap, how can you say only money has value when things are worth money? That item has value equivalent to the money given for it, therefore that item has value. It’s likely you’d be able to find people who are willing to trade some electronic device you have for another equivalent one (some iPhone for some Android) without exchanging any money. Money is just the measure of value, it’s like saying something cannot be 5ft tall without the existence of a measuring tape. Societies have existed before money they were just inefficient.
- lucideer 8mo ago
  > That item has value equivalent to the money given for it, therefore that item has value. > Money is just the measure of value Money is the measure of market value. If you believe it's the measure if inherent value, you believe anything outside of the market has no value. E.g. that human lives have no value outside of waged labour (or heck, even slavery). The point here is the monetary value is a model of value, not the definition of it. If you are defining an item's value by it's market price, then you believe what the gp was describing: that "only money has value" (since it defines all value).

TomasBM 8mo ago

> one might wonder why they apparently are not able to sell their art for the same amount of money. Because the skills and effort needed to market and sell your art to an audience are not equal to the skills and effort needed to produce good art [1]. I agree that there could be other complementary or better solutions compared to this scheme. But as long as the above premise is true, not every good artist will want or be able to sell well. [1] However you define this. Supposedly, Van Gogh was a lousy salesman, but a good artist.

multiplegeorges 8mo ago

Art is often only appreciated in retrospect, so it is typically undervalued at the time of its creation. > equals the value of what they give to the tax payers in return This seems incredibly shortsighted.