The Price of Everything
Displaying 11 - 20 of 29 articles
It’s a common refrain among the “dries” in any government that arts and cultural policy should set its course by the lights of economic policy, usually competition, growth and innovation policy. Sometimes…
Sometimes things that are pretty simple for most people can seriously confuse an economist. The heat over the ABC cuts is a good example of the blurry line between economics – and the economics of politics…
The warmest, most welcoming home of cultural nationalism is appeal to the provenance of “our stories”. Real Australian stories are made by Australians, for Australians, using only Australians, and only…
The arts economy by-and-large replicates the rest of the economy in its structures, complexity and diversity. There is a craft-based core unchanged for eons and a dynamic middle made up of more or less…
Regular readers of this column will know that I’m neither an artist nor a cultural expert, but something much more déclassé: I’m a cultural economist. Part of this involves studying the incentives that…
Economics sometimes has surprising applications. One example is the Alchian-Allen theorem, an observation that came from a footnote in an economics textbook in the 1960s about how quality demand is affected…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the public funding of arts and culture will cause political strife. Reasonable people just do not agree on this, and can be surprisingly quick to accuse others…
Over the past 20 years the size of government spending has grown, both absolutely and as a percentage of GDP. Public sector debt has also increased substantially. The cautionary tale of Greece indicates…
A little economics can go a long way, and that is certainly true when thinking about good jobs and bad jobs, and specifically whether some sectors have better jobs than others. This is sometimes framed…
Luca Belgiorno-Nettis’s family contributed A$600,000 toward the A$10 million budget of this year’s Sydney Biennale (Australia’s largest outdoor arts festival), continuing a long family tradition of generous…