You appear to be saying there are some benefits from poor and lower class people consuming/producing art, or higher education. Fine. But earlier you talked about the value of opportunity, and implied that Cowen was wrong to assume that art only had value to those segments of society that are actively consuming the fruits of that spending. This implies that you were stating there was a value to someone in having an opportunity to visit the National Gallery or British Musem, even if they never actually did so. This sounds like option value to me.

Now option value does have value. For example, when I go tramping I carry some survival equipment, including a bag of rice and a survival blanket and a box of matches. I’ve never had to use that equipment yet. But I still carry it, and value it, because of the option it maintains if, eg, I get delayed by bad weather for a few days.

You appeared to be arguing in comment 5 that there is some sort of option value in having art to people who never actually consume/produce that art. I don’t follow your argument. The benefit my husband appeared to obtain from the National Gallery and British Museum was negative, not an option benefit.

At an individual level, anything in a museum that I can see for free is something that I can see if I need to. Less of the world is hidden from me.

I don’t quite follow. How does someone benefit fom an arts subsidy without actively consuming/producing that art?

I derived a great deal of benefit from the British Museum and National Gallery when I visited London, but, judging by his behaviour, my husband derived negative benefit (on the other hand, he gets far more out of classical music than me). How does someone who lives in London but never visits the National Gallery or the British Museum benefit from that opportunity?

Just about all the people I meet in a local classical concert are people who play an instrument themselves.

I’m extremely grateful for every source of subsidy, private and public, that makes it possible for me to attend half a dozen Cleveland Orchestra concerts each year. If ticket prices were even to double from their current level that would probably become impossible.

I agree with Henry that the book is well written and interesting. More books should be writtenlike this but I do have some quibbles with the content.

Just as Tom does, Cowen sometimes assumes that a section of society only benefits from an arts subsidy if it is actively consuming the fruits of that spending. That reasoning is to ignore the value of opportunity. As an example keeping access to the British Museum and National Gallery free means that anyone able to visit London can benefit from the collection.

It seems slightly churlish to criticise a book that covers everything from CIA funding of abstract expressionism to WPA funding of James Baldwin for its omissions but there are some I think are important. One is that the discussion is focussed on US institutions with occasional comparsions between the US and mainly European activities. The result is to focus on the contrast between direct and indirect funding. That overemphasises the source of the funding as the determinant of quality of art funding and misses the opportunity to discuss the varying success of different direct funding schemes. Writing about what makes a direct funding organisation good would however be much more contentious ground than most of what is in the book.

One of Tyler Cowen’s own examples, the fashion industry, would have been interesting because it operates with almost no effective intellectual property protection.

Cross subsidy and scale effects in Hollywood would also have been interesting, as would a discussion of small country responses to the same issue.

These are quibbles and are made in no small part because it would be interesting to read Cowen writing about them. The book is short, well packaged, entertainingly written and very mild in its conclusions. All of those make it possible for anyone, wherever they stand on frequently highly polarised debates about arts funding, to get something out of. With luck it will help debates be more constructive.

There are basically two extremes of art, popular art where everyone’s opinion matters equally, and “high” art where only the opinions of other “peer” artists (and perhaps their sponsors, if they have them) matter. Those are the extremes, reality is usually somewhere in between. But it’s wrong to identify anything with an electric guitar in it as belonging to the first group (or anything with a violin to the latter) – to me it looks as if prog rock, metal and even punk are modern music forms which are strongly peer-oriented, and there is also some “crossover” classical which is held in contempt by most “real” classical music lovers, but which is very popular, for instance Karl Jenkins.

But you know what I’d bet on? I’d bet that the cultural gap between rich and poor is largest where there is least social mobility, like in Britain, and smallest where there is most, like in Scandinavia.

Do the rich tend to have very different tastes in art from the rest of the population? If not, then I don’t see how the rest of the population would miss out from rich people’s charitable efforts, as they would be getting much the same diversity as if they chose for themselves.

Obviously the rich can afford to attend the opera/symphony/ballet more often and from better seats, while the very poor who are fans of classical music are limited to listening to it on the radio or attending free performances or the like. But does that mean more rich people prefer classical music than poor or middle-class people? How many rich people don’t go to classical concerts because they don’t like the music?

I don’t know of any evidence that rich people’s tastes run different from the rest of the population for extended periods of time (obviously there may be differences at the start of an artistic movement, for example when the Beatles were playing at the start of their career in Liverpool, before they got a record deal, very few people outside Liverpool could have been fans of them as they woudn’t have known the Beatles existed). Didn’t Princess Margaret cause an uproar in the British establishment for listening to rock & roll? Does Prince Harry listen to classical rock at those parties that make the headlines of the tabloids? Does Paris Hilton exclusively attend jazz nightclubs?

Again if I recall correctly, the basis for the long-standing US preference for indirect support is precisely a belief in decentralization: rather than itself pick the artists to support, the government lets private citizens do that and in effect tops up their contributions. The result, though, is a concentration of control over government funding for the arts by the rich, since it’s disproportionately they who contribute to art. (Good for highbrow arts like opera and the symphony, good also for NYC. Not so good for everyone else.) This is especially so if there are tax deductions rather than credits for charitable donations, since the value of a deduction is higher at higher income levels. (I don’t know which is in place in the US now; Canada switched from deductions to credits a while back.)

Anyway, the tax treatment of charitable contributions is a major way governments support the arts, and is one where what’s supposed to be decentralization doesn’t actually work that way.