Elephantstrunk

Not so much a review as a collection of observations.

Good & Plenty by Tyler Cowen is free of the reductionism and economic triumphalism that it might be feared a book about the economics of culture would express.

Discussions of state involvement in artistic endeavour range from direct grants to CIA operations via copyright and tax breaks.

Pages 82 to 84 contains the best discussion of what the music industry might be like without copyright I have seen. It’s neither scaremongering nor shrill.

It is extremely focussed on the US. There are international comparisons but they tend to be between the US and Europe. I concede that it is a big enough subject to be getting on with but had this book been written from a European point of view it would have less on centralised and direct versus decentralised and indirect and more on comparison of institutions with similar mandates. It’s not something that Cowen ignores but if you only took away the summary you would likely tacitly assume that the method of funding determines the outcome more strongly than it in fact does.

Cowen is manifestly no Philistine but his economical superego might be. Art and culture frequently become goods for consumption. In some ways analysing something as subjective as art and culture in this way frees conclusions from the prejudices of both author and reader but it also doesn’t easily deal with some important considerations. It places no value on availability until the availability is exploited which distorts analysis of who benefits from arts spending. It is also to a large extent blind to the network effects that are vital to art and culture as a collective endeavour.

At the end the conclusions are mild and weakly held. For me that is just a polite way of making the point that many of those most exercised by arts funding have hopelessly narrow views of how arts funding actually works. I suspect Professor Cowen would like his book to be read by both those who want more arts funding and those who are opposed on principal.

While many of Cowen’s points have been extracted from academic papers, there are plenty of details that would justify whole papers or books for detailed examination.

The book is quite short, readable if digressive (and I think the digressions are part of the message) and prettily produced for a text from a university press.