Suppose a city has a budget for new public art - say $1 million per year. Somebody at a municipal budget hearing asks: “should we increase this amount?” How would we go about deciding?
I’m trained as an economist, and so here is the method of my people. We would first recognize that public art is, in the economist’s narrow sense of the term, a “public good”, in that it satisfies two criteria: it is “non-rival” (one person’s stopping to look at and appreciate the art does not detract from other people’s ability to do the same); and it is “non-exclusive” (it would be impracticably costly to try to charge people a viewing fee). In terms of a cost-benefit test then, we would try to figure out the sum of the benefits people would get from a slight increase in the public art budget (what we would call the sum of “marginal benefits”), since many people will benefit, and compare that number to the proposed increase in costs. If the sum of marginal benefits exceeds the marginal cost, then the budget increase is worth doing. Indeed we would keep increasing the public art budget until the sum of marginal benefits had declined (since we expect diminishing marginal returns to the art) to just equal the marginal cost, and there we would have our optimum (this formula was articulated by Paul Samuelson - in school we called it the “Samuelson condition” for optimal public good provision). If we could somehow read the minds of how much each person said they would value more public art, at least in theory we could fund its provision through very individualized taxes such that everybody felt happy with the budget increase. In practice of course we cannot do that, we fund expenditures through other taxes, and that inevitably leaves at some people grumbling “my tax dollars paid for this?”.
For many “ordinary” public goods - street lighting, stormwater control - the economist’s method might be just fine. But is it appropriate for cultural goods?
Charles Taylor’s “Irreducibly Social Goods” is included in his essay collection Philosophical Arguments (1995). My friend gave me a copy of the book as a gift when it was just released (thank you, br). It changed my thinking as I was just venturing into the subfield of cultural economics, and has stayed with me since - I am still working through the implications.
Taylor has two criticisms of the economic approach, though they stem from a common source: his critique of atomism, aka methodological individualism.
The first part of the critique is that cultural goods - art and the humanities and sciences, languages, institutions - are necessarily shared by individuals, and only make sense in that context. I can imagine the installation of lights at the end of the lonely road where I live, such that I am the only person actually gaining by it, and likewise for stormwater control I can imagine my home being the only one that benefits from a new installation. These situations are unlikely, but at least imaginable. Or, even if ten households benefit from the stormwater control, it is not a stretch to consider separately the benefits to each household, and to add them up. But I cannot say the same about art: it depends upon shared experience and meaning - the fact that I consider an installation “art” at all depends on a communal understanding of what art is. Its benefit to me depends on the context of the community. This is not true for the more “practical” public goods.
In a related essay Taylor writes:
Jacques lives in Saint Jérôme, and his greatest desire was to hear the Montreal symphony under Charles Dutoît playing in a live concert. He had heard them on records and the radio, but he was convinced that these media could never give total fidelity, and he wanted to hear the real thing. The obvious solution was to travel to Montreal, but his aged mother would fall into a state of acute anxiety whenever he went farther than Saint Janvier. So Jacques got the idea of recruiting other music lovers in the town to raise the required fee to bring the orchestra to Saint Jérôme. Finally the great moment came. As Jacques walked into the concert that night, he looked on the Montreal Symphony Orchestra visit as a convergent good between him and his fellow subscribers. But then, when he actually experienced his first live concert, he was enraptured not only by the quality of the sound, which was as he expected quite different from what you get on records, but also by the dialogue between the orchestra and the audience. His own love of the music fused with that of the crowd in the darkened hall, resonated with theirs, and found expression in an enthusiastic common act of applause at the end. Jacques also enjoyed the concert in a way he had not expected, as a mediately common good.
The second part of the critique is how we come to value cultural goods in the first place. I was born with desires for food, warmth, and, later, various material comforts, but I was not born with desires regarding the music of Schumann, the paintings of Constable. I was shaped by the community in which I was raised. Even cultural tastes developed later in life arose out of an early foundation that left me open to them.
The arts are an irreducibly social good.
When economists set out to find out how much people value proposals for public spending, since there are not market prices they can look to, they simply ask people: “would you be willing to pay this much extra in taxes to fund this particular public project?” This method is known by “contingent valuation” or “stated preference.” There is a debate in the economics world about the accuracy of the responses given by the public to these questions (I am a member of team-skeptic): how good are people at placing a dollar figure on a project they have only just heard about? Are they fully informed about the details of the project, and alternative uses of funds?
But Taylor says the problem runs much deeper than this: we cannot sensibly ask an individual a question about the value they place on an aspect of their shared culture, even if they are very well-informed and have had time to think about it (the example Taylor gives, from his vantage in Montreal, is that asking Quebecers what price they would be willing to pay to maintain the supremacy of the French language in Quebec is to pose an impossible question to answer).
No economist I know is daft enough to believe that our preferences have nothing to do with the communities that shaped us. And that the benefits we receive from some goods are dependent on their being shared is unexceptional. But my take from Taylor is that economists have not followed through on the full implications of these facts, and that we cannot sensibly try to apply the economics of public goods to those goods that form the core of who we are and what we value.
This leaves the question of cultural policy to a political process that doesn’t necessarily completely ignore economics - understanding costs and trade-offs is important even if you are a committed communitarian - but that tries to get a sense of what would best serve the community in terms of cultivating shared values and experiences, whilst avoiding policies that could, unchecked, lead to an illiberal nationalism.
Thanks for this, Michael. Grateful for the summary and discussion of how Taylor's approach has entangled your own thinking! It strikes me that much of the nonprofit arts aren't fully private nor fully public, but rather plural (as Henry Mintzberg would frame the sector). Groups of people discovering and enabling value – not for everyone, but for some subset of everyone. "Irreducibly social" fits this framing well.