
Arts contributed $763B to US economy – more than agriculture or transport (2018) - cphoover
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-arts-sector-contributed-7636-billion-economy-agriculture-transportation
======
wazoox
Air to breathe didn't generate much money, but try doing away with it. This
sort of headline is complete nonsense. Market size is completely orthogonal to
actual importance. Likewise prices. Expensive and rare things like Ferraris or
Jeff Koon's flowers aren't more important than free things like air, water
springs and insects.

~~~
bastawhiz
The unfortunate reality is that in order to get many decision makers to
support something, you need to show them quantitative data about its value.

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.

~~~
devonkim
The problem with enterprise software is the same problem with most issues we
see from the producer side - those doing the work are completely different in
alignment and requirements / needs than those that make the decisions to
purchase for those. In Agile (and devops), the greatest friction is squarely
around the reality that there's a manager caste that pushes down and makes
decisions with very little feedback loops or misaligned incentives by all the
stakeholders involved, and this causes churn within the group. For the buyers
and the users of the software, their requirements are oftentimes lost. In your
scenario, users with more power over their day-to-day software will demand
better software and be empowered to select alternatives, but in more
traditional organizations there will be a lot less churn comparatively because
users will simply put up with bad things forcibly.

Almost all the "radical" software and project management practices to show up
(and when implemented successfully at least) in the past 15 years aims to give
more power to workers and to de-scope the role of management from pure
decision-makers into a more supportive role with more intense feedback. There
is a very consistent theme that organizations where these efforts fail are
ones where management uses new processes and tooling to exert their existing
political power to achieve results instead of also transforming themselves.

------
JoeAltmaier
Artists amount to 1.8% of the American workforce

[https://www.princeton.edu/culturalpolicy/quickfacts/artists/...](https://www.princeton.edu/culturalpolicy/quickfacts/artists/artistemploy.html)

Farmers, 0.05%

[http://infomory.com/numbers/number-of-farmers-in-
us/](http://infomory.com/numbers/number-of-farmers-in-us/)

Not surprising that art is a bigger industry? Unsurprising, with ~40X the
number of people involved, arts produced 4X the revenue.

~~~
xgbi
Can an artist draw 1000 paintings like a farmer can (automatically) milk 1000
cows per day?

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.

~~~
dv_dt
Andy Warhol had an art factory. More modern artists dabble with machine
learning. It makes one wonder how we will value the art when we get to a case
where an artists trained avatar lives on beyond them.

~~~
lostgame
I’m working on this very thing.

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mc32
The arts is s broad category dominated by radio, tv and the film industry, as
well as books and music and such. It’s not so much your artist in lofts and
buskers on the street.

~~~
toofy
Absolutely. Music, acting, and story telling, etc have almost always fallen
under the category of art. Is it always high art? Of course not, but I think
most would still consider these things art.

~~~
lazyjones
How about news broadcasting then? The weather report?

~~~
toofy
I suppose if an artistic person broadcast the news in an artistic manner,
sure, why not?

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maxk42
This is disingenuous. They're comparing the entire entertainment industry to
the manufacturing portion of the agriculture industry. If you include
agriculture's entire impact after the manufacturing step, you'll find the
retail and food services industry that arise from it contribute $5.75 trillion
to the economy. [1] That dwarfs the arts and entertainment industries by
several times.

[1] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/197569/annual-retail-
and...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/197569/annual-retail-and-food-
services-sales/)

~~~
evgen
And if you are going to add the entire food chain to agriculture then we will
add the telcos and consumer electronics industries that depend on content
consumption and the tertiary industries like advertising and marketing that
draft off the economic engine of content delivery. I think that in the end it
is going to be the case that arts and entertainment have a far larger
footprint than food over the past few decades.

------
stunt
Unfortunately everything that comes on top of your mind when you hear Art is
probably at the end of list. Entertainment and Media are dominant.

~~~
meruru
I don't think it's unfortunate that oil paintings don't generate much money.
Hopefully books would be at least halfway up the list though.

------
drumttocs8
It would be more honest to use "Entertainment"

~~~
sametmax
Yes, a lot of movies or video games block busters, no matter how pretty they
are, are closer to a rollercoaster than to a van gogh painting.

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.

~~~
beat
That's not art?

The whole point of art is to make _someone_ feel _something_. And a big part
of getting people to feel is playing on familiarity - for example, how much
rock music can be traced directly or indirectly to Chuck Berry? Almost every
guitarist has been affected by him. We all mine Chuck Berry riffs, and thus
the audience can latch on to our original music and have a spark of
recognition.

Product "or" art? It's not either/or.

------
gabbygab
Why compare a broad category like arts with narrow category like agriculture?

Why not compare something general like arts and with something general like
food? Could it be because the contribution of the food industry dwarfs the
arts industry? Or compare something specific like "instrument market" with
something specific like agriculture?

Also, isn't contribution defined by how we arbitrarily choose to measure it?
Do we ( or should we ) assign the value or portion of the value of the goods
transported to the transportation system?

------
erikig
My initial thoughts were: _Such is the fate of efficient economies (like the
US) that have effectively turned farming and logostics into specialized
utilities_

Quickly followed by: _Try enjoying your arts and entertainment when you are
hungry and have to walk to the venues._

------
jumelles
More information here: [https://www.arts.gov/news/2018/arts-contribute-
more-760-bill...](https://www.arts.gov/news/2018/arts-contribute-
more-760-billion-us-economy)

There is a lot that's classified as art here, and rightfully so. Film, TV,
Broadway, music, photography, art schools, sculpture, jewelry, architecture,
musical instruments...

------
writepub
If 2% of the workforce is comprised of artists, would it suffice to cap
student loans to art majors at 3% or 4% of the student population?

At what point does a student loan become unviable to the lender, given real
world statistics? Why isn't it a factor in actual loan issuance. Further, why
is there massive rhetoric around student loan forgiveness, if the economy has
no need for certain professions beyond a threshold (which is apparently 2% for
arts). Do we want to educate people in certain majors on tax dollars, when the
labor market has no demand for it?

Also, do we want to encourage kids going into degrees, without a thorough
cost:benefit analysis of what they are getting into?

~~~
paulie_a
>Also, do we want to encourage kids going into degrees, without a thorough
cost:benefit analysis of what they are getting into?

They do

------
colechristensen
Who spends more money on art/entertainment than groceries?

~~~
benj111
They mention agriculture, not groceries.

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.

~~~
colechristensen
They mention broadcasting, art-related retail, and several other things
associated with facilitating trade instead of creation.

If you include art galleries and bookstores, you should include restaurants
and grocery stores right?

The USDA has a chart of household expenditures: food=13%, transportation=16%,
entertainment+alcohol=6.2%

[https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/Charts/58275/agfood-
sector_...](https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/Charts/58275/agfood-
sector_fig02-002-fw_350px.png?v=8130.7)

Looks like the NEA and the USDA are making reports that make their own sector
shine. One talking about household expenditures, the other GDP "contribution".
I know I could not convince anyone (or myself) of the significance of the
different measurements, but when it comes to "X is bigger than Y", the
takeaway for the average reader, the headline and report ring false.

~~~
benj111
"Looks like the NEA and the USDA are making reports that make their own sector
shine"

Probably, you didn't point to a conflicting source, so I was just going from
the article.

One thing you didn't account for is balance of trade. Art in the NEA
definition is probably a net exporter. Food probably not? (you can export raw
materials, and you can export the brand. As a non American though, my big mac
has never seen America, so I really don't know how that would feed through to
those figures). Agriculture also attracts subsidies, that _could_ account for
the disparity, although it could increase the disparity so I don't know.

Long story short, the figures don't necessarily contradict each other.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
This article is making an argument that because broadcast TV, film generate
billions of dollars, that the government should continue to fund the NEA. Is
there anybody who believes that if the NEA was completely defunded that it
would cause the output of broadcast TV or film to go down? This is like
arguing that government should subsidize yoga instructors because healthcare
is such a huge part of the economy, and yoga is part of the healthcare
industry.

------
maxxxxx
If you added up all the contributions different sectors claim to be making to
the economy you would probably end up with a GDP that’s 50 times as much as it
really is.

------
georgeecollins
I can't tell if they included video games / interactive entertainment in this.
If they didn't, it would be an even bigger figure.

There is a huge bias against the entertainment industry in a lot of America.
On Fox, if they use Hollywood as an adjective it is a pejorative. Meanwhile
our culture exports are the envy of the rest of the world, who subsidize and
protect hoping to catch up.

------
rdlecler1
there is a very broad definition of the arts here. It’s really the
entertainment industry:

>But the largest economic impact nationwide came from the usual suspects:
broadcasting, which generated $127 billion in economic activity; followed by
the motion-picture industry, which accounted for $99 billion; and non-digital
publishing, with $77 billion of economic activity. The “arts-related retail
trade”—which includes everything from art galleries to book stores—generated
$51 million in 2015. But the arts-related retail trade employed 767,000 people
to “provide arts and cultural goods and services,” making it the second-
highest-employing industry in the arts and culture sector.

------
lazyjones
I've always suspected that CNN is a work of art...

------
Babiker
How have they narrowed down billions generated down to 1/10 of a billion or
$0.6B, when what the definition or "art" is not set in stone?

------
gumby
Does this include TSA inspections at airports?

~~~
ralusek
The art of wasting time and money?

~~~
gumby
Security theatre -- participatory performance art!

~~~
olliej
Interpretive Dance! We interpret the constitution as not applying!

------
onetimemanytime
Can't really compare the three fields: transportation is key to everything,
people need to go to where they generate revenue. So does merchandise.
Agriculture, can't eat a painting, can we? Nor can we use the art money to buy
wheat from Russia long term.

so apples and oranges.

~~~
angry_octet
Exactly, you have to have transport and agriculture to enable that level of
art. Likewise, tourism, education, construction. It is really a meaningless
comparison in one sense. But it does make sense in terms of things like trade
disputes: why put tariffs on ordinary steel/aluminum to prop up an inefficient
and undercapitalized industry, when that imposes massive costs on a much
bigger industry like construction? Or alternatively, one should look at the
linkages between industries, and see what the choke points are.

------
nickthemagicman
Hacker News visitors don't seem enthused by this

~~~
spamcamel
I really don't understand why. The point of the article is to simply convey
that "art" is a larger part of the economy than many people realize, and that
maybe we should think twice about cutting funding for the NEA. Not sure why
that makes everyone so defensive here.

------
ralusek
Without reading the article, gonna go ahead and guess this is largely TV,
movies, and video games. Do ads and marketing count as art?

------
azeotropic
Gosh, if it's such a vibrant economic sector, maybe it doesn't need a
government subsidy.

~~~
cphoover
you say "subsidy" I say "investment"...

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

~~~
azeotropic
The NEA spends 1 out of every 5 dollars on its own bureaucracy, rather than
art. Is the NEA good enough at 'investing' that they can justify a 20%
management fee? That's laughable.

Nobody seems to appreciate the central contradiction in the argument of this
article. People can apparently 'invest' their money in the arts without any
guidance from Washington, so why not return the 150M budget of the NEA to the
apparently art-loving public and let them allocate it as they see fit?

~~~
cphoover
People can invest their money in science and technology... Why do we need the
government to invest in that? See how silly that argument sounds...

~~~
azeotropic
It doesn't sound silly at all?

The NIH is pretty poor at allocating research funds, and extremely bloated.
The grant application process is kafkaesque, to the point where most
investigators must hire an FTE just to deal with NIH paperwork.

Private foundations (e.g. HHMI, Wellcome Trust) already do a much better job.
There's less overhead, less make-work for beauracrats, and overall higher-
quality science.

I don't have first-hand knowledge of other disciplines, but I doubt that it's
much different. Certainly SpaceX, Blue Origin, Orbital ATK have moved from
design to implementation faster than NASA with the SLS (where 3 of every 4
dollars are spent on overhead).

~~~
cphoover
Without NASA I think it's fair to say none of those companies (e.g. SpaceX,
Blue Origin) would exist.

I could write an essay on the momentous achievements made by agencies you've
listed, and the private sector industries they've generated.

~~~
azeotropic
Of course SpaceX and Blue Origin, etc. are working off of pre-existing rocket
technology -- that's why I'm comparing to the SLS (which was supposed to be
assembled out of mostly existing space shuttle parts).

I don't think it's obvious that NASA was required to create commercialized
space. One could just as easily write an essay on the momentous achievements
made by private industry and philanthropic foundations.

I dare you to write an essay on the momentous achievements of the NEA and the
private sector industries it has generated.

