
Creative Arts and Investing in Systems - barry-cotter
http://crookedtimber.org/2019/01/11/creative-arts-and-investing-in-systems/#more-45733
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barry-cotter
> The thing about the arts industries is that they’re very hits-driven;
> talking about what happens to the median person going into them is always
> going to massively underestimate the value of the system as a whole. They
> share this characteristic with pharmaceuticals and, famously, the oil
> industry (as the wildcatter proverb has it, “part of the cost of a gusher is
> the dry holes you drilled”). You can’t tell ex ante which spotty
> undergraduate is going to turn into a claymation genius and retrospectively
> justify the last decade of investment. Importantly, nor can they. As far as
> I can see, if you were to set it up without subsidy, you would most likely
> get too few people going into the creative arts, as they would rationally
> decide that they were more likely to be one of the ones that didn’t make it
> than one of the Nick Parks.

> This is really not all that unorthodox; it’s just the application of venture
> capital thinking to what people are (wrongly in my opinion) analysing as a
> debt problem. The undergraduate education subsidy system ought to be thought
> of as one where the government makes loads and loads of smallish VC
> investments, effectively buying a roughly 30% shareholding for a five figure
> investment, with diversification across an entire undergraduate cohort every
> year. If you’re given that sort of an opportunity, then obviously you go for
> some moonshots, particularly when you’re the government of a country that
> famously does very well in creative industries compared to its peers[3].

