Arts contributed $763B to US economy – more than agriculture or transport (2018)

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.

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.

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.

Thank you.

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.

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.

The arts saw a $20 billion trade surplus, leading with movies and TV programs and jewelry.

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.

I'm not sure why some people in this thread have such a strict definition of art. Hollywood blockbusters are just as much art as poetry.

They do

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.

People like me are the reason for the article I guess.

Generally you want to keep investing in things that make you money.