Around the world, we see people facing challenges not only accessing careers as artists, but also sustaining them. South Korean artists make 77% and Canadian artists 74% of their respective countries’ average income. In Ireland, 80% of visual artists who depend on their creative income live in poverty. One survey respondent in that country describes the outlook for artists this way: “The future always looks worse than the past. Economic booms are quite bad for artists, because they can’t afford to live where they should for their careers. Busts are worse.”

Generally, people born into less affluence have to work harder to catch up in any field. The Guardian’s Sonia Sodha writes that “we’ll never be able to eliminate the role that good fortune plays, but we need to do much more to lessen its influence and increase the relationship between effort and success.” What role can government play in lessening the influence of fortune when it comes to supporting artists? A look at several countries gives us some clues.

Tran Thi Doanh, Vietnames painter – Photo by Flickr user, Duc

Two Models: National Status vs. Sink or Swim

In some countries, including the United States, being an artist doesn’t necessarily mean having a professional artist career track, especially not in any sort of state-sponsored system. As one national study of artists reported, “some painters interviewed said that career was not part of their professional vocabulary; they simply were painters.” In that context, as we’ve explored, many US-based artists have day jobs and backup plans, and find themselves crossing between nonprofit and commercial sectors in a demanding market economy.

In other parts of the world such as in the former Soviet Union, as scholar Nina Dimitrialdi describes in her 2009 PhD dissertation on challenges faced by US and UK artists, “artist” was indeed a profession just like any other. An artist in the Russian Federation with “professional” status from the government currently receives compulsory social programs such as insurance covering illness, housing, maternity, disability, and retirement. Many countries with cultural sectors based on the old Soviet model, such as Egypt, fully bankroll training programs and manage “card carrying” artists and their benefits through a national union.

Left: Egypt’s High Institute of Ballet, 2013 (conditions under Presidents Mubarak, Mansour and Morsi) | Right: Same facility in 2016 (under President el-Sisi) – Images by Shawn Lent and Madga Saleh

Whether or not artistry is a formal profession in the eyes of the state, and what states do or don’t do to support that profession, reflects different agendas within different political systems. While the American model mostly distributes public funding for the arts indirectly, via tax deductions for nonprofit organizations and their donors, many other governments provide substantial direct support to individual artists. Increased overall government funding for the arts could be an important indicator of potential support for economically disadvantaged artists, but there is an opportunity in cultural policy to assess what funding schemes help bridge wealth gaps in the profession.

Unfortunately, we found existing research on this topic to cover predominantly North American and European countries, with few nationally representative results relating to artists from poorer backgrounds. While it is difficult to get a good read on the situation internationally, in many parts of the world, it does appear that dedicated government support – in the forms of subsidies and other incentives – has opened the artistic profession to more people across social classes.

Europe Day Slovenia – Photo by Flickr user, Steve

Public Policy Can Keep Artists Afloat

We see a number of countries enacting support programs for artists that are tied in with their tradition of centralized social services, supporting the basic needs of all citizens; this could be critical for artists and similar types of workers. As Quartz’s Aimee Groth put it when speaking about entrepreneurs, “when basic needs are met, it’s easier to be creative.” By giving more of a safety net to artists born with less means, government programs can make it easier for people (artists included) to risk being “entrepreneurial.”

Slovenia, Finland, Italy and Austria are a few of the many countries that offer pension and retirement programs to deserving artists as defined by those governments. The South Korean Artists Welfare Act extends the country’s employment insurance to 180,000 artists and accident insurance to 57,000 artists. The Danish Arts Foundation’s life-long benefit grants (livsvarige statsydelser) are awarded to state-selected, high-achieving artists in that country. In Thailand artists employed by the Ministry of Culture are considered civil service officers with the same salary system and benefits, and in Germany, the Artists’ Social Insurance Fund (Künstlersozialkasse or KSK) has been supporting self-employed artists and journalists since 1983.

2009 Making an appointment with Sabine Schlüter, head of KSK (Künstlersozialkasse) – Photo by Flickr user, Henning Krause

Estonia

Another country advancing its support of artists is Estonia, where a select group of artists and writers are offered a €1005 salary per month for two years plus health insurance and a pension plan. According to Indrek Saar, Estonia’s Minister of Culture, “the purpose of [the program] is to offer for a couple of years a possibility to work in peace and social guarantees for the distinguished creative people. Economic stability of a creative person gives better preconditions to create a new work of art.” This year Saar announced a 13.5% raise to the minimum wage for cultural professionals in that country’s government. This program is quite similar to one in Sweden, where income guarantees are given to selected artists who have created work considered “important for Swedish cultural life.”

Netherlands

The Netherlands has historically been a strong leader in this realm. The Dutch Artists’ Work and Income Scheme Act (WWIK), in place from 2005-2012, was the third major artist subsidy program developed for the country. WWIK provided financial support (70-125% of the guaranteed minimum income) for artists with a low income for a maximum of 48 months over 10 years to cover the start-up period of their professional arts career. Dutch artists also received extensions in the availability of unemployment benefits (4 years rather than 6 months).

While that program did not track impact for artists from financial disadvantage, another example from the Dutch attempted to connect cause and effect. From the 1960s-80s, the Netherlands provided temporary assistance to low-income visual artists that allowed those artists to sell their work directly to local governments as a supplement to income. The number of participating artists increased from 200 in 1960 to 3800 in 1983. During the same period, the growth rate of student enrollment in fine arts departments at Dutch academies was 60% higher than the average growth rate for technical and vocational training in other fields.

Members of Ethiopia’s Ras Theatre group dance and play as they wait for Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni at Bole Airport, Addis Ababa – Photo by Flickr user, Andrew Heavens

The Warning: Selling Out (or Buying In) for Survival

Governments sponsor artists for a complex set of purposes: cultural tourism like the kind Russia is planning in occupied Crimea; income generation or nationalism such as with the Agencia Cubana de Rap in Cuba; protecting the national image like in Vietnam; “preserving the country’s national cultural assets for the benefit of all citizens and future generations” including aboriginal arts like in Canada; binational collaboration such as that of China-Moldova; cultural diplomacy, placemaking, or improving public morale. Generally speaking, state-sponsored artists are expected to adhere to policies that align with national interests.

2013 Venice Biennale / Maldives Pavilion – Photo by Flickr user, Emergency Room Thierry

Before we all make a rush on the Dutch consulate or start demanding new state-sponsored artist programs in our respective countries – quite the issue to float in our current political climate – it’s worth considering the pitfalls that can come with increased government involvement in the arts.

• Threats to Freedom of Speech: Several of the programs mentioned above are or were careful to allow artistic freedom. The Netherlands supported the artists participating in its assistance programs regardless of the style or content of the work they produced. In Estonia, Minister Saar explains that artists receiving the government salaries are “still free in their creative work; the only requirement for the creative person is the commitment to one’s creative work.” Unfortunately, such freedoms are the exception rather than the rule. Many countries, such as Zimbabwe, have a national agency for censorship. While increased government support for artists can result in great technical rigor in the respective art forms, like in Russian ballet, it can also mean stringent restrictions on artistic expression and a high level of government interference. In 1980, UNESCO recommended governments “determine those remunerative jobs which might be confided to artists without restricting their creativity, their vocation and their freedom of expression and communication.” Russia may recognize artistry as a “profession,” but its track record with creative expression is abysmal; the organization Freemuse registered 32 attacks on artistic freedom in that country (such as censorship, imprisonment, physical attack, and death) in 2015 alone.
• Questions of Scale and Dysfunction: Government funding artists doesn’t automatically result in a net benefit for all individual artists, let alone poor artists. Many of the programs we came across focused on a relatively small number of superstars. Can any of these programs run at the scale needed to address the flaws in our arts ecology? And at what point might increased scale mean increased risk of corruption? Would an international scheme across the sector be more effective than relying on individual polities?
• Risk of Perpetuating Cultural Inequities and the Residual Effects of Colonialism: We have been examining government programs from the perspective of reducing socioeconomic inequality in the arts ecosystem, but in fact artists who are LGBTQ, with disabilities, from marginalized racial or religious groups, or political opposition may be just as likely to be excluded from government programs in many countries. With decision-making about which artists to cultivate via government sponsored programs so centralized, states have few incentives to include groups that may be at odds with perceived government interests.
• Risk of Servile Labor: Similar concerns apply to arts disciplines and new forms of self-expression. If you pursue a career as a painter of socialist realism art because the government only supports and allows that form of art, then there are fewer opportunities for you to express yourself and for audiences to gain benefits from a variety of artistic expressions. Artists in North Korea have been exported to execute massive arts projects in countries such as Cambodia, hired as employees to earn hard currency for the State.
• Lack of Cultural Variety: Even when a government’s intentions are pure, it is not clear that placing decisions about artists’ careers in the hands of bureaucrats leads to the best possible mix of cultural products and experiences. Generous benefits for artists in all likelihood means a limit on the number of artists who can access those benefits, which may mean that the people left out have even fewer opportunities to have a public creative identity and get paid for it. For all its issues, the United States’s market approach is rarely criticized for yielding a boring, homogeneous mix of work.

National Ballet of China ‘Raise the Red Lantern’ – Photo by Flickr user, Jesse Clockwork

Government policies can make it possible for artists to pursue better, more dignified careers, but there is no such thing as a free lunch. As we move forward in addressing the questions of support and equal opportunity in arts careers, we must be conscious of the tradeoffs inherent in systems that rely on more overt government or other patronage of the arts.

In the latest Createquity podcast series, Createquity and Fractured Atlas team members illuminate the major factors that contribute to artists (or prevent artists from) establishing successful careers. We also focus on some of the tools Fractured Atlas has developed to support artists, with the larger goal of helping create a more navigable and equitable ecosystem for professional artists.

Cover image: “Radical – Avant la Tempête @ EDLD 2015,” courtesy of Flickr user, Duc, via Flickr Creative Commons license. 

Who will take care of these artist-citizens when they get sick or injured? Who will grow food and repair buildings? Who will mediate disputes? Perhaps in a radical shift toward interdisciplinary living, these functions will be considered new artforms. Perhaps the growth of artificial intelligence will, in fact, have rendered these functions obsolete, freeing people to focus on artistic pursuits if they wanted. In our 21st century reality, though, not everyone who envisions an arts career can follow through on that dream. The option to make one’s living as a pro artist is bestowed upon a small portion of the people who desire it.

Which begs the question: who should those people be?

Photo by Flickr user, hollyannephotog7

As we at Createquity perceive it, they should be the artists whose work offers the greatest benefit to others. That can mean engaging an unusually large audience. It can mean winning disproportionate respect from experts. It can mean adding something unique to the cultural diet of humanity. Or it can mean improving lives in other concrete and meaningful ways.

Those criteria should have little, if anything, to do with an artist’s family tax bracket. And yet we see troubling signs that socioeconomic status does correlate with access to a professional arts career. Logically, it makes sense: if an occupation is attractive but probably low-paying, and then there are socioeconomic inequalities in the road to becoming a professional, inevitably that line of work would beckon more people from affluent backgrounds.

Empirically, reliable data is hard to come by, but what we have found tends to support the suspicion. One U.K. study finds that artists there are predominantly middle class, and a U.S. report declared that average household income during the childhood of artists (in 1979) was the same as those who went on to become chief executives, general managers, and engineers—above the 60th percentile of family income. Our own analysis of the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts via the National Archive of Data on Arts & Culture reveals that professionals in “Arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media occupations” were about 60% more likely than average to have a father who attended at least some college (55.9% vs. 34.5%), and 70% more likely to have a mother who attended college (55.9% vs. 32.6%). That is the most extreme skew of any of 23 occupation categories for mother’s education; for fathers, it’s exceeded only by mathematics and computer science occupations.

Artist by Flickr user, Esther Simpson

What’s behind these trends? Last month, our article on The BFA’s Dance with Inequality explored whether the cost of an arts agree poses a barrier to individuals in the U.S. from financially disadvantaged backgrounds who may otherwise wish to pursue a career in the arts. The short answer is that it doesn’t – in fact, the vast majority of working artists in this country do not have arts degrees, although the importance of such a credential to an arts career does vary widely by artistic discipline and goals.

What about risk? Could poorer individuals be shying away from becoming artists because of what might happen if it doesn’t work out? Are the risks associated with an arts career disproportionately discouraging to economically disadvantaged individuals? Are there other sectors we can learn from?

Here’s what we do know about pursuing a career in the arts.

• The notion of “the day job” is very real. Artists tend to have other work to draw from to earn income. The day-job phenomenon is especially true for artists who support single-income households. For example, Australian artists who don’t rely on the income from a partner spend more time on non-arts work.

• Many artists are making backup plans. Although artists are possibly go-getters by getting out into the field sooner than other professionals (with fewer total years of education), nearly half of them in the U.S., according to BFAMFAPhD’s “Artists Report Back,” built a safety net by majoring in another subject. Arts students also pick up more minors and teaching certificates as part of their “backup” planning – one way to try to minimize the risk inherent in their choices.

• The artist’s path is fraught with risk. The professional arts career has a long gestation period with high opportunity costs. Artists face greater variability in their earnings than those working in other fields and are five times more likely to be self-employed. Some have hypothesized that this nature of the arts draws more risk-seeking individuals than the general labor market.

Inequality Across Sister Sectors

In many ways, artists have a lot in common with tech entrepreneurs. The early (and sometimes not so early) stages of their careers could be likened to the startup phase of companies, in which Mark Zuckerberg hopefuls pull ramen-fueled all-nighters for uncertain, uneven remuneration. Working artists interact with labor markets in ways that could be compared to small firms. The two fields have common controversies: for tech entrepreneurs the necessity of a college degree has likewise been called into question. There’s even a debt-free, direct path for emerging tech stars from all types of socioeconomic backgrounds. A prime example is the Thiel Fellowship; following in the footsteps of other dropouts such as Bill Gates, young tech entrepreneurs are receiving $100,000 if they leave or put off college to pursue their own Thiel projects.

Photo by ThielFellowship.org as well as LinkedIn user, Mike Olson

Unfortunately, in both fields, the risks involved in developing a career seemingly correlate with the underrepresentation of low-SES professionals. According to one U.S. survey, entrepreneurs skew toward affluence; by another account, tech entrepreneurs come mostly from middle-class backgrounds. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor found that “more than 80% of funding for new enterprises comes from personal savings, family and friends.”

We don’t know whether tech entrepreneurs try to mitigate the risks of their careers, but it seems like artists do. A question lingers: if artists can and do create backup plans and hold day jobs to lower their personal risk, how do we explain why aren’t there more low-SES professional artists? Perhaps it’s related to social and human capital. In order to be successful, artists need to be able to commit uncompensated time to a passion project, particularly over an extended period. They need to spend thousands of hours in training/practice, which are thousands of hours that they’re not earning a living.

No matter what entrepreneurial capacities we teach, push and support to prepare emerging artists for this uncertain economy, a person’s financial circumstances could matter quite a bit. Resources depend, at least partly, on a stable asset base, and the limited resources of low-SES populations might impact their ability to grow their new businesses and arts careers, demanding greater risk-taking. The National Bureau of Economic Research recently provided indications that risk tolerance relates much more to circumstances (behavior in relationship to environment) than to personality, pointing to evidence that individuals from poorer backgrounds have lower risk tolerance.

Risking It All, for What?

Like tech entrepreneurship, the arts are among the world’s “winner-take-all” industries; with the exception of a handful of superstars, most of the pack will struggle mightily toward public acclaim and financial stability. The risk artists face, though, is on another level: even when successful in establishing a career at all, they experience the biggest drop between income during childhood and income during adulthood among the 31 careers in the National Longitudinal Survey. Researcher Pierre-Michel Menger reports in the 1999 Annual Review of Sociology that “the skewed distribution of artists income is strongly biased to the lower end of the range.” In Canada, arts managers, directors, coordinators and government cultural workers have higher and rising salaries compared to the art-makers themselves, who in the U.S. are more likely than non-artist and technical professionals to live below the poverty line (6.9 percent vs. 4.2 percent according to data from the 2000 US Census).

Is it just the dream of fame and fortune that compels aspiring artists to take such gambles? Or is it expression and societal contribution? Financial benefit, interestingly, does not appear to be much of a motivator for good work. According to Menger, professional artists feel “zero or negative correlation between effort and earnings.” In a recent London study of cultural industry professionals, 88% reported that they have worked for free; individuals from low-SES backgrounds may not always have that luxury. Indeed, risk aversion might be a reason less affluent individuals in the United Kingdom are more likely to participate in the arts informally.

Photo by Flickr user, Samira

Looking Ahead

While we have yet to find solid evidence that risk dissuades individuals from economically disadvantaged backgrounds from pursuing arts careers, we know that if the arts and entrepreneurship remain enclaves for the privileged, we will all be the poorer for it. As much as our cultural and technological palettes have been enhanced by the likes of Nina Simone, Mark Rothko, Steve Jobs, J.K. Rowling, and Hamilton‘s Anthony Ramos, they shouldn’t be the exception that proves the rule.

One potentially promising area of investigation would be to examine alternate systems that could better support such professionals by decoupling success from an inequitable distribution of risk. Do we need more targeted support for less affluent artists? Germany, France, and Holland have been experimenting with social welfare programs for artists. The government of Sweden is offering lifetime pensions. With a more equitable socioeconomic grounding, the issue of risk for artists (as well as for tech entrepreneurs) might become moot. In our final article of this current series, we’ll explore that topic in greater depth.

In the latest Createquity podcast series, Createquity and Fractured Atlas team members illuminate the major factors that contribute to artists (or prevent artists from) establishing successful careers. We also focus on some of the tools Fractured Atlas has developed to support artists, with the larger goal of helping create a more navigable and equitable ecosystem for professional artists. 

Cover image: “Semana Alagoana de Hip Hop,” courtesy of Coletivo Popfuzz via Flickr Creative Commons license. 

In “the real world,” 84% of working artists—defined by BFAMFAPhD’s controversial “Artists Report Back” study as people who make their primary living from their artwork—do not have degrees in the arts, and 40% have no college degree at all. (It’s important to note that due to data limitations, these figures exclude artists with master’s degrees or beyond in any field; however, the number of artists affected is relatively small.) If arts training programs continue to climb in popularity while budding artists from less affluence are deciding against studying the arts in college, does that mean the college-to-career trajectory is a myth? Has the arts degree become a luxury, or are artists from less advantaged backgrounds missing out on something?

Graphic by Shawn Lent for Createquity. Source: Artists Report Back

An Incubator of Artistry or a Waste of Precious Prime Time?

What can we make of the implication that higher education is not the golden ticket to creating or performing art for a living? It would be overstepping to say that arts degree programs provide students with no value at all: for one thing, they offer important time to refine one’s craft within a supportive but highly disciplined and similarly-skilled community of peers, critical mentors, and potential networks. Such credentials can serve as a signal of high artistic quality and capacity, a prerequisite for certain grant funding. We should note, though, that artists move freely between the nonprofit and commercial sectors in their pursuit of paid work and the value of a degree likely varies by context. It looks like a person doesn’t necessarily need a BFA or MFA to become a professional artist, but the degree could help an artist reach a higher level of industry success or make a full-time living as an artist.

At the same time, arts students may not have this expectation of working as artists. Across the board, most graduates (73%) work in a field outside their major. Arts students, in particular, might be prepared to thrive in other sectors, and they seem fine by that; the ongoing Strategic National Arts Alumni Project survey (which likewise has its limitations) finds that arts graduates are generally satisfied with their experiences and would do it again if they had the chance.

B.A. and Arts Double-Majors at Commencement 2016, UMD School of Theatre Dance and Performance Studies | Photo by Karen Kohn Bradley

For pro artists, the necessity or desirability of arts degrees may vary considerably by discipline. Although full-time symphony orchestra musicians are selected by audition, it is hard to find one these days without a degree in music. On the other hand, from the Oregon Ballet to Bally’s Jubilee, dance artists often delay or skip college because of the early retirement age in most dance forms (90.5% of working dancers and choreographers are under age 40, compared to 39.6% of working musicians). Examples like these leave arts degree programs vulnerable to the charge that they are building up a profession (academia) that isn’t necessarily serving artists. Sarah Anne Austin questions, “If opportunities in American modern dance are disappearing, and if being a tenured faculty member at a university is the only stable job available for dancers and choreographers, and having this job depends on being able to attract students… does this make American modern dance a pyramid scheme?”

One Option in a Long Line of Pricey Career Strategies?

Such questions wouldn’t be so charged were it not for the very real concern that arts degrees perpetuate inequality in the sector. Professional artistry has a lengthy and complex gestation period that is slammed with socioeconomic obstacles. Factors that may make, or break, one’s professional success as an artist include personal networks, the prestige of the teacher, portfolio materials, membership in a union/guild, affordable housing in a city with available arts jobs, and a myriad of other opportunities such as showcases, apprenticeships and internships.

Graphic by Shawn Lent for Createquity. Source: Playbill

Like aspiring athletes, emerging professional artists benefit from school and community members who identify and develop their interest, regular and rigorous private lessons, and pre-professional training. These present quite the financial hurdle for families: a recent calculation estimates that it takes $100,000 to raise a professional ballerina. Against this backdrop, the cost of college may only exacerbate what is already a yawning opportunity gap.

The Greatest Risk or the Great Arts Equalizer?

We may not know definitively whether arts degrees provide added value to aspiring artists, but we do know that they pose quite a bit of risk, particularly for artists coming from low socioeconomic status (SES). Although artists with bachelor’s degrees in any major earn more than artists who went pro after high school, new BFA holders quickly face the reality that artists experience lower returns to formal education than they would in other professions. Anywhere from 10-20% of artists with bachelor’s degrees report a “major impact” on their career decisions due to debt from higher education; this debt load comes on top of a heavy earnings penalty across the board for artists (8.4 percent lower than the rest of the labor market, according to 2000 Census data).

Graphic by Shawn Lent for Createquity. Source: U.S. Department of Education IPEDS Survey

Particularly on a discipline-specific basis, the conditions leading up to the decision to pursue professional artistry may represent disparities of access. If it were the case that high school graduates who aspired to artistic careers couldn’t pursue their dreams because of the risk aversion associated with low SES, that would be a major failing of a healthy arts ecosystem.

Given that, it’s probably a blessing in disguise that you don’t need an arts degree to become an artist. In fact, the preponderance of upper-middle-class students in programs offering those degrees might well indicate that poorer, emerging artists are making informed decisions that are in their best interests. Everyone’s situation is different, and statistics can only tell us so much about an individual case. But if you’re worried that an expensive four-year degree is your only way to the top of the arts heap, you can take heart in the knowledge that many, many creators and performers have made it there without one.

In the latest Createquity podcast series, Createquity and Fractured Atlas team members illuminate the major factors that contribute to artists (or prevent artists from) establishing successful careers. We also focus on some of the tools Fractured Atlas has developed to support artists, with the larger goal of helping create a more navigable and equitable ecosystem for professional artists. 

Cover image: “Hiram College Commencement 2015,” courtesy of Kasey-Samuel Adams via Flickr Creative Commons license. 

“Few and Far” photo taken by Bill Dickinson

Title: Artists Report Back: A National Study on the Lives of Arts Graduates and Working Artists

Author(s): Susan Jahoda, Blair Murphy, Vicky Virgin, Caroline Woolard

Publisher: BFAMFAPhD

Year: 2014

URL: http://bfamfaphd.com/

Topics: arts degrees, debt from arts degrees, the lives of working artists

Methods: Summary statistics from data from US Census’ 2012 American Community Survey (ACS) Public Use Micro Sample (PUMS).

What it says: Only 16% of working artists in the United States have arts-related bachelor’s degrees. Forty percent of working artists over the age of 25 do not have bachelor’s degrees in any field, and the remaining 44 percent have bachelor’s degrees in other fields. Of the two million annual arts graduates, two hundred thousand make their primary living as an artist. The median income of working artists is $30,621, but those with bachelor’s degrees have median earnings that are higher at $36,105. Arts grads’ debt loads tend to be higher than non-arts grads, and some of the best arts schools in the country have shockingly high student loan default rates. Those pursuing arts bachelor’s degrees are largely white and female, and the majority (54 percent) of working artists are male. The report makes three recommendations for the art schools and the field:

• While the majority of working artists do not have arts degrees, formal arts education is still a valuable way of building critical thinking, skill building, and other competencies that would be difficult to gain outside of formal school. The authors encourage those seeking arts degrees to seek low-cost or free options instead of expensive schools.

• Philanthropic and cultural institutions should look beyond higher education for emerging talent.

• Encourage groups of working artists without degrees and those with arts degrees to share and learn from one another.

What I think about it: These statistics do not include those with Master’s degrees or higher in the arts because of the way the Census collects data about educational attainment, and the methodology on earnings does not include those who make their livings as designers or architects. I wonder how many of those who do not have bachelor’s degrees in arts-related subjects went on to get MFAs. The choice to exclude architects and designers also seems like it would exclude some high earners in fields that typically require or heavily favor those with formal arts education.

Additionally, I wonder about how the statistics on the probability of artists attaining degrees compares to the rest of the labor market. In the United States, just about a third of people over the age of 25 have a bachelor’s degree, and in the labor market, a proportion of 60% of people with a bachelor’s degree puts it on the higher end of educational attainment in terms of professions. Further, I wonder how often people in other professions tend to stay in the same field as their college major, which would contextualize the other figures they cite in the report about the educational background of artists. I recognize that this is meant to be a critique of the conventional wisdom of a particular group of people about pursuing arts in higher education, but without some context about earnings and degrees in the United States, I think the findings and the interpretation can be distorted.

What it all means: The findings on the relatively high debt load for arts graduates combined with the seemingly low probability that those graduates will go on to become working artists presents troubling evidence for those considering higher education in the arts. Further, that seven of the ten most expensive colleges in the country after financial aid are art schools is evidence that arts students are over paying for their degrees. However, without additional context to compare these findings to the rest of the labor market, it’s hard to really understand whether we should think the proportions of holding an arts job or an arts degree in the arts profession are high or low.

“Scary-bathroom” by Flickr user Miss Nixie

Title: The “Starving Artist” – Myth or Reality? Earnings of Artists in the United States

Author(s): Randall K. Filer

Publisher: Journal of Political Economy

Year: 1986

URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1831960?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Topics: artists’ incomes and labor markets, demographic characteristics of artists

Methods: Descriptive analysis of US Census data from 1980 regarding artists’ earnings and demographic characteristics, as well as a descriptive comparison of artists’ labor market characteristics compared to other professions.

What it says: Filer seeks to explore the conventional wisdom that artists earn substantially less than they could in other professions, that only a very few artists will earn the majority of available earnings and thus the income distribution will have high variance, and that artists tend to be very young and leave the artist work force very early to pursue more stable and reliable professions. Prior research exploring artists’ labor markets have suggested that risk-seeking individuals, drawn to the potential high reward of an artistic profession, are particularly drawn to arts professions. Other explanations suggest that artists need to gain experience in the labor market to get an accurate sense of their earnings potential, which will draw a less experienced and more transient population. Further, some have contended that artists are motivated by the non-monetary benefits of artistic participation that may make them more willing to take the earnings penalty of pursuing an arts career than another, less risky field.

Filer examines these assumptions using earnings and occupation data from the 1980 US Census. This dataset classifies professions based on what respondents spent the most time doing during the prior week. Therefore, someone who spent most of their time as a receptionist in an office but also went to dance auditions would be classified as an office worker, not a dancer. The author acknowledges that this is an imperfect classification of artists and that a more accurate data set might be somewhere between self-identified artists and people who successfully make their living as artists, but that a dataset using this classification does not exist. Regarding earnings, Filer finds that while artists’ average earnings are six percent lower than non-artists, which he contends is a smaller difference than most might think given the conventional wisdom. Additionally, there is heterogeneity across artistic disciplines, with actors being the highest earners. Artists also reported working less hours than the general labor market population, were more educated, and were less likely to be black (.055 compared to .105 in the general labor market) and more likely to be male (a proportion of .604 compared to .563 in the general labor market). He finds that artists are younger than the labor market on average, but also that there is less mobility among professions among artists than other professions.

In terms of determinants of artists’ earnings, artists experience a far lower return on earnings per year of education ($511.59 vs. $730.99 in 1980 dollars), which suggests that artists develop human capital more on the job and less in school. Filer notes that it’s interesting that artists choose to spend longer in school than the general population since their returns are lower, and speculates that artists may choose to stay in school to escape from the competitive world of the labor market while continuing to pursue their art. Additionally, black artists face a smaller penalty in the arts than in the general workforce, and noncitizen artists also tend to earn more than noncitizens in other fields.

What I think about it: Filer acknowledges that the US Census’ methodology to identify artists is imperfect, as it only includes those who primarily make their livings as artists. He uses a quantitative method to address the endogeneities in the choice to become an artist, but cannot address the problem that successful artists are an incomplete representation of artists on the whole, as it excludes those who work other jobs to make a living. In light of the fact that this sample only includes those who successfully make their living as artists, I am not surprised that their earnings are not substantially lower than the rest of the workforce. If successful artists did earn substantially less than the general workforce while spending the majority of their time making art, I would think that a larger number of them would change their occupations. Similarly, I would be more surprised at his findings on how artists tend to stay in their fields for longer spells than the rest of the workforce if their earnings were far lower than other occupations. If an artist is one of the lucky few to make their living doing art and also makes art because they love to make art, shouldn’t we expect them to stay in the labor market for long periods of time? Finally, since this data is from the 1980 Census, we should be hesitant to draw conclusions about today’s artists’ labor market based on these findings.

What it all means: Artists in the 1980 Census, when successful at earning a living, didn’t make that much less than the rest of the population, were younger than the rest of the workforce, and tended to stick to their professions for a long time. Other than noting that these working artists are more educated than the general workforce, there is little information in these findings about the socioeconomic status of these artists, including other sources of income from parents or spouses. I’d argue that our research questions are not exclusive to those who have found success at artists, but include those who may be struggling to get by as artists because of barriers to developing human capital as artists due to socioeconomic status. People struggling to get by as artists, and who therefore take work in another field, seem like a key group to understand to answer these questions.

“Richard’s photography class notes” by Terry Madeley

March and April were busy months for us at Createquity. While we had ambitious research agendas for investigating both the history of the arts ecosystem and the labor market for artists and creative entrepreneurs, we found that it took some tweaking to refine our hypotheses and research questions so that we could find the types of sources and information that would make for impactful feature articles that add value to the current literature.

History of the Arts Ecosystem: Expanding definition of the arts

We have wrapped up our reading on this topic and are beginning work on an article.

After our initial research and some productive conversations with some experienced researchers in this area, we re-focused our work on this topic. The general framework for our history investigations has been to examine how change is made within the sector through the history of some major shifts. For this particular article we set out to explore the expanding definition of “the arts” within the mainstream cultural establishment since the middle of the 20th century.

We found that this change was inextricably related to many of the issues around cultural equity and diversity currently being discussed in the sector, and that exactly what had changed and to what extent was not as clear as in our previous investigation on the growth of the modern nonprofit arts sector. Accordingly, we’ve shifted to working on an article that attempts to make sense of the divergent visions of success for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the arts sector in the United States by identifying the assumptions and values underlying those visions. The article will incorporate an attempt to reconcile these visions of success with Createquity’s own definition of a healthy arts ecosystem, and define areas for future empirical investigation.

Artists’ Labor Markets and Entrepreneurship

After completing our initial review of the literature and sharing our internal report, the responses to our research questions separated into three distinct areas. Because of this, we are currently planning three separate, shorter articles to be published on the topic of economically disadvantaged populations making their livings as artists.

We are currently editing the first article, which will focus on higher education and the arts and the challenges that economically disadvantaged people face when pursuing arts training. From there, we will move on to a discussion of artists’ labor markets and the risks that artists face in their careers. Our last article on this topic will consider policy alternatives that governments around the world have attempted to mitigate some of the risks that artists face in their careers, along with how those policies have affected artists’ work.

Books! by Kirrus

Our research on the history of the arts ecosystem continues with our investigation of the expanding definition of the arts and the recent history of support and recognition for artists of color. We have decided to focus this research on the period covering 1980-today, with an emphasis on trends related to equity and multiculturalism within the arts ecosystem.

Here are the resources we have reviewed last month.

Bryan, B. (2008). Diversity in Philanthropy: A Comprehensive Bibliography of Resources Related to Diversity Within the Philanthropic and Nonprofit Sectors. Foundation Center. Retrieved from http://foundationcenter.org/getstarted/topical/diversity_in_phil.pdf

Campbell, M. S. (1998). A New Mission for the NEA. TDR: The Drama Review, 42(4), 5–9.

DeVos Instititute of Arts Management. (2015). Diversity In The Arts: The Past, Present, and Future of African American and Latino Museums, Dance Companies, and Theater Companies. Retrieved from http://www.devosinstitute.umd.edu/What-We-Do/News-and-Announcements/Announcements/Announcements/Diversity%20in%20the%20Arts%20paper

Garfias, R. (1991). Cultural diversity and the arts in America. In Public money and the muse, ed. Stephen Benedict. New York: Norton.

Gordon, A., & Newfield, C. (1996). Mapping multiculturalism. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press.

Haft, J. (n.d.). Article: Voices from the Battlefront: Achieving Cultural Equity Through Critical Analysis. Retrieved from https://roadside.org. October 22, 2015. https://roadside.org/asset/article-voices-battlefront-achieving-cultural-equity-through-critical-analysis

Hartmann, D., & Gerteis, J. (2005). Dealing with Diversity: Mapping Multiculturalism in Sociological Terms. Sociological Theory, 23(2), 218–240.

Jensen, R. (1995). The Culture Wars, 1965-1995: A Historian’s Map. Journal of Social History, 29, 17–37.

Jewesbury, D. D., Singh, J., & Tuck, S. (2009). Cultural Diversity: Language and Meanings. The Arts Council of Ireland. Retrieved from http://www.artscouncil.ie/uploadedFiles/Main_Site/Content/Artforms_and_Practices/Arts_Participation_pages/Cultural_Diversity_language_meanings.pdf

Koch, C. (1998). The NEA and NEH Funding Crisis. Public Talk: Online Journal of Discourse Leadership, (2). Retrieved from http://www.upenn.edu/pnc/ptkoch.html

Lowry, W. M. (1991). How many muses? Government funding for the multicultural. Journal of Arts Management & Law, 21(3), 264.

Marta Moreno Vega. (1993). Voices from the Battlefront: Achieving Cultural Equity. Trenton, N.J: Africa World Pr.

Matlon, M. P., Ingrid Van Haastrecht, & Kaitlyn Wittig Mengüç. (2014). Figuring the Plural: Needs and Supports of Canadian and US Ethnocultural Arts Organizations. Chicago, IL: Plural. Retrieved from http://www.pluralculture.org/programs-services/figuring-the-plural-book/

Moore, M. (1990). The politics of multiculture. Journal of Arts Management and Law, 20(1), 5–15.

Pankratz, D. B. (1993). Multiculturalism and public arts policy. Bergin & Garvey.

Race & Ethnicity in Independent Films: Prevalence of Underrepresented Directors and the Barriers They Face. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/Research-Art-Works-Sundance.pdf

Sidford, H. (2011). Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change. National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. Retrieved from http://www.ncrp.org/files/publications/Fusing_Arts_Culture_Social_Change.pdf

Ravitch, D. (1990). Multiculturalism: E pluribus plures. American Scholar, 59(3), 337.

Voss, Z. G., Voss, G., Louie, A., Drew, Z., & Teyolia, M. R. (n.d.). Does “Strong and Effective” Look Different for Culturally Specific Arts Organizations? Retrieved from http://www.smu.edu/~/media/Site/Meadows/NCAR/NCARWhitePaper01-12

Meanwhile, we have also focused our literature review and searching on artists’ labor markets and on entrepreneurship. Studies that we reviewed last month appear below:

Alper, Neil O. (n.d.). ARTISTS’ CAREERS AND THEIR LABOR MARKETS*. Retrieved from http://faos.ku.dk/pdf/undervisning_og_arrangementer/2010/ARTISTS__CAREERS_191010.pdf

Abbing, H. (2008). Why Are Artists Poor? : The Exceptional Economy of the Arts. Retrieved from http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=340245

Caves, R. C. (2000). Creative Industries: Contracts between art and commerce. Retrieved from https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=imfTUHj8uVcC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=poor+students+pursue+art+careers&ots=1ETnN5opB8&sig=Ra2jkWr15h47wDmdwJjpfhBmKcY#v=onepage&q&f=false

Dimitrialdi, N. (2009, May). THE EMERGENCE OF PRACTICE: MOTIVATION AND DECISION MAKING AMONG CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ARTISTS. University of Brighton. Retrieved from http://eprints.brighton.ac.uk/12291/1/Thesis_%20Nina_Dimitriadi.pdf

Galligan, A., & Alper, N. (2000). The Career Matrix: The Pipeline for Artists in the United States. In The Public Life of Arts in America.

Jackson, M.-R. (2004). Investing in Creativity: A Study of the Support Structure for US Artists. The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 34(1), 43–58. Retrieved from https://phillyartistssummit.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/investing-in-creativity.pdf

Menger, P.-M. (1999). Artistic Labor Markets and Careers. Annual Review of Sociology Vol. 25, 25. Retrieved fromhttp://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/223516.pdf

Throsby, D., & Zednik, A. (2011). Multiple job-holding and artistic careers: some empirical evidence. Cultural Trends, 20(1), 9–24. Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09548963.2011.540809

Wadhwa, V., Aggarwal, R., Holly, K., Salkever, A. (n.d.). The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur: Family Background and Motivation. Retrieved from http://www.kauffman.org/~/media/kauffman_org/research%20reports%20and%20covers/2009/07/anatomy_of_entre_071309_final.pdf

Our research questions include:

• How does economic disadvantage decrease access and knowledge of working arts opportunities?

• How many low-SES people who might want to be artists cannot be artists because of barriers to participation?

Literature from our initial scan includes:

Anderson, A. R. (2003). Class matters: human and social capital in the entrepreneurial process. The Journal of Socio-Economics, 32(1), 17–36. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105353570300009X

Beattie, I. R. (2002). Are All “Adolescent Econometricians” Created Equal? Racial, Class, and Gender Differences in College Enrollment. Sociology of Education, 75(1), 19–43. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3090252?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Benhamou, F. (n.d.). Artists’ labour markets. In A Handbook of Cultural Economics (pp. 53–57). Retrieved from https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=eyXQbYAXCBQC&oi=fnd&pg=PA53&dq=time+and+money+required,+successful+artist,&ots=808sTBgr7J&sig=p1sN51mGV3lieGBaFekB8ppBHLM#v=onepage&q=time%20and%20money%20required%2C%20successful%20artist%2C&f=false

Bui, Q. (2014). Who Had Richer Parents, Doctors Or Artists? NPR Planet Money. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/03/18/289013884/who-had-richer-parents-doctors-or-arists

Cox, R. D. (2016). Complicating Conditions: Obstacles and Interruptions to Low-Income Students’ College “Choices.” Journal of Higher Education, 87(1), 1–26. Retrieved from https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/journal_of_higher_education/v087/87.1.cox.html

Filer, R. K. (1986). The “Starving Artist”–Myth or Reality? Earnings of Artists in the United States. Journal of Political Economy. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1831960

Hans, A. (2008). Why Are Artists Poor? : The Exceptional Economy of the Arts. Retrieved from http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=340245

Jahoda, S., Murphy, B., Virgin, V., & Woolard, C. (n.d.). Artists Report Back: A National Study on the Lives of Arts Graduates and Working Artists. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/N2AYyx

Luftig, R. L., Donovan, M. L., Farnbaugh, C. L., Kennedy, E. E., Filicko, T., & Wyszomirski, M. J. (2003). So What Are You Doing after College? An Investigation of Individuals Studying the Arts at the Post-Secondary Level, Their Job Aspirations and Levels of Realism. National Arts Education Association, 45(1), 5–19. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1321105

Minniti, M., & Nardone, C. (2007). Being in Someone Else’s Shoes: the Role of Gender in Nascent Entrepreneurship. Small Business Economics, 28(2), 223–238. Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11187-006-9017-y

Mullen, A. L. (2014). GENDER, SOCIAL BACKGROUND, AND THE CHOICE OF COLLEGE MAJOR IN A LIBERAL ARTS CONTEXT. Gender & Society, 28(2), 289–312. Retrieved from http://gas.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/12/17/0891243213512721

Rampell, C. (2014). The Most Expensive Colleges in the Country are Art Schools, Not Ivies. The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2014/03/28/the-most-expensive-colleges-in-the-country-are-art-schools-not-ivies/

Simon, R., & Barry, B. (2013). A Degree Drawn in Red Ink. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324432004578306610055834952?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424127887324432004578306610055834952.html

SNAAP. (2013). An Uneven Canvas: Inequality in Artistic Training and Careers. Retrieved from http://snaap.indiana.edu/pdf/2013/SNAAP%20Annual%20Report%202013.pdf

Strategic National Arts Alumni Project. (n.d.). Spotlight on First-Generation Artists (PART 2). Retrieved from http://snaap.indiana.edu/databrief/vol4no1.html

Meanwhile, we have also begun work on a new research area, continuing our investigation into the history of the arts ecosystem.

History of the Arts Ecosystem: expanding definition of the arts

Arts institutions and organizations that constitute the core of the formally recognized “cultural sector” were—and continue to be—dominated by Eurocentric artists and art forms. While this bias persists, the definition of what counts as art, and what is deemed worthy of study and support by formal institutions, appears to have expanded considerably over the past 50 years.

Createquity is investigating this shift as part of our larger project on the history of change in the arts ecosystem, with an emphasis on the role of changemakers. A few of the questions we will be exploring in this research process are:

• What are some examples of artistic activities and traditions pursued by artists or communities of color that have seen an increase in prestige and recognition from the 1950s to today?
• Is there any data or method of quantifying this increase in prestige?
• How much has the amount of monetary support available for noncommercial artistic activities and traditions pursued by artists or communities of color changed from the 1950s – today?
  • How does this contrast this with the general increase in support available for nonprofit arts activities, and with demographic shifts in the same period?
• Have artists of color working in the commercial sector seen increases in the resources they personally gain as a result of their artistic work?
• Who are some of the most important actors from within communities of non-Eurocentric artistic practice who have deliberately organized to increase the visibility of their work and their peers?
  • What was their original intention when they started the work that led to this change?
  • How did they gain attention or resources for their activities beyond the norm for their time?
• What are some identifiable moments of reform from within institutional funding communities?
  • How did they start?
  • Who made the ultimate decision to change institutional policies and why?
• Has the bulk of this shift been in recognition and prestige as opposed to monetary resources?
• How have artist-driven movements or projects and funder-led initiatives interacted with one another on this issue?

We have begun our initial literature search, and we are also looking for suggestions from our readers. Read more about that here.

(1) What we mean when we say “watching TV”
When we talk about hours of television watched, we’re talking about self-reported hours; in other words, the amount of time an individual themselves assesses they watch TV, regardless of whether they’re fully focused on the program or it’s on in the background.

(2) On TV and kids’ health
Although this article focuses on adults, it’s worth noting that the health concerns about TV and its impact on physical health extend, of course, to children. One study finds that high-school-aged children who watch more than 3 to 4 hours of television per day are 36% more likely to report eating less than five fruits or vegetables per day, and 56% more likely to be overweight than their peers who watch less than two hours daily. Another suggests that low-income parents in particular may face stressors related to chronic financial hardship, like poor mental health or food insecurity, and that these stressors may influence their views of the importance of restricting screen time. This, in turn, may impact their children’s screen usage.

(3) On our regression analysis
The General Social Survey (GSS) is a representative, national survey covering attitudinal, social, and demographic topics in the United States. In 2012, the GSS included a module asking respondents questions about their cultural participation. As we began our investigation, we wondered how arts attendance and television viewing would predict subjective wellbeing. We used data from the General Social Survey to descriptively explore the following questions:

1. Holding income, condition of health, education level, gender, age, job satisfaction, and social engagements with friends and family constant, how does arts attendance and television predict wellbeing?
2. Using these same covariates, is there a difference in how television and arts attendance predicts wellbeing for respondents at different income quartiles?

We used logistic regression analysis to descriptively explore these questions, the results of which are linked here for all income levels and here for income quartiles. Our dependent variable was respondents’ determination of how satisfied they are with their lives in response to the prompt below, where Strongly Disagree, Disagree, and Neither Agree nor Disagree were considered unsatisfied and Agree or Strongly Agree were considered satisfied.

(Please tell me on a scale of 1 to 5 how much you agree or
disagree with the following statements about your life. 1 means
strongly disagree and 5 means strongly agree.)

I am satisfied with my life.

Covariates included respondents’ assessment of their own health, household income level, age, gender, how often the respondent interacts with friends and relatives, job satisfaction, and education level. Note that because health was included as a control, the regression analysis measures the effect of TV on life satisfaction independent of its effects on health. However, since health does have a strong relationship to life satisfaction on its own, if TV makes people less healthy, it will presumably also make them less satisfied with their life.

(4) On our anecdotal interviews
In order to hear the stories and better understand the viewing choices of low-SES adults who watch large amounts of television, Createquity interviewed nine individuals who self-identified as not having graduated college and reported watching at least five hours of TV a day. We recruited interviewees primarily by posting ads on craigslist in large cities like Washington D.C., Los Angeles, and Chicago, as well as in cities and small towns throughout the United States. . Interviewees were paid a small honorarium for their time. All respondents were women, and most had children at home. This portion of the investigation had two goals: 1) to add nuance and resonance to our findings from the literature review; and 2) to explore topics that were not addressed directly in the published research, such as reasoning behind viewing choices and the relationship between television viewing and arts participation.

FULL BIBLIOGRAPHY

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• Television is America’s national pastime. Adults spend an average of nearly three hours in front of the tube daily, outpacing the next most common leisure-time activity by a factor of four.
• There is surprisingly robust evidence suggesting TV watching may contribute to poor physical and cognitive health; when it comes to happiness and life satisfaction, however, the verdict is still out.
• Are people consciously choosing TV over other activities? There’s not a lot of evidence one way or another, but it doesn’t seem like most adults who watch large amounts of TV are doing so reluctantly.
• The arts are not the (obvious) antidote. People who attend exhibits and performances are no more likely to report being satisfied with their lives than those who don’t.
• We value adults’ freedom to make their own choices, so will need to see clearer evidence for an opportunity to improve wellbeing before committing to a case for change.

* * *

TV Slave – photo by flickr user Manuele Carra

In 2014, First Lady Michelle Obama broke the internet with “Turnip for What,” a vine promo for her Let’s Move! campaign. She’s appeared on the Biggest Loser. She has her own viral dance sensation–the #GimmeFive, performed to Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk. (You know it, right?) And she’s encouraging Americans to drink more water through fun social media stunts that appeal to our egos (hello, John Legend) and a line of chic accessories from the likes of J. Crew and Rebecca Minkoff. (Not to be outdone, POTUS and VPOTUS have been known to run around the White House and drink water, too.)

No, she’s not trying to be the next pop star. (Though we would totally buy her record.) She has a mission, and that’s to stem the obesity epidemic in the United States. The situation is, by all accounts, dire: 17% of children and almost 35% of adults are currently considered obese, and those numbers are worse among individuals with lower incomes and less education (so-called “low-SES” populations). Almost one in eleven adults has type 2 diabetes, and many more have prediabetes. Obesity is bad for our wallet: the US spends an estimated $147 billion in obesity-related healthcare expenses annually. It’s bad for the environment, too: cars are burning nearly a billion more gallons of gasoline a year than if passengers weighed what they did in 1960.

FLOTUS is but one character in the ongoing obesity saga. The Food and Drug Administration appeared in 2014 with new rules requiring establishments to post the calorie content of food on their menus. It went even further in 2015, when it required front-of-package labeling. Former Mayor Mike Bloomberg led a movement in New York to reduce soda consumption by limiting the sale of jumbo sugary drinks, which re-ignited the debate around the so-called sin tax. For more than a decade, public schools have battled youth junk food consumption with all sorts of methods: removing vending machines, imposing strict guidelines for school nutrition, and the Hail Mary move of banning birthday cupcakes.

Let’s Move Day – photo by flickr user Phil Roeder

The junk food hullabaloo raises interesting questions about choice, and whether individuals can or do make good choices for themselves. Here, the work of leading psychologists, economists and neuroscientists provides useful context: it is now widely accepted that most people make sense of the world by simplifying it, and the ways our brains are wired to simplify things can cause us to make judgments that are contrary to our best interests. There are a few reasons we might tend towards the simplify trap: hyperbolic discounting, which is our tendency to value immediate pleasure (or pain) over future consequences; loss aversion, or the fact that we dislike losing more than we like winning, which can make us risk-averse; or our tendency to focus only on what we know and what’s familiar. The combination of these factors makes low-risk, familiar propositions offering immediate satisfaction very hard to turn down. If we grew up with juice boxes and oreos as a school snack, and the closest grocer is a corner bodega stocked with chips and soda, and, well, sugar and salt and fat are so good, then of course we’d reach for cookies over carrots.

At this point, dear reader, you might be wondering why we have spent the first four paragraphs of an article about television and the arts talking about obesity. Well, as it turns out, TV (probably) makes you fat too.

TUNE IN, DROP OUT

Jamie K. is a 36-year-old from Fort Wayne, IN. She has a GED, and is unemployed. She likes to make jewelry and work on home improvement projects in her free time, which isn’t much, since she has three teenagers. She doesn’t go to arts events, because she doesn’t “have friends that are cultured, and it’s hard to go to things that [she] would find interesting by [herself].” She actively watches 10 hours of TV a day. Sonja B., a 57-year-old from Chicago, IL who is also unemployed, doesn’t attend arts events because they are usually in the evening, and she “wouldn’t want to go by [herself.]” She works out, and watches an average of 15 hours of TV, daily. Shantell T. is a 33-year-old administrative assistant from Washington DC. She watches 12 hours of TV on a typical day, and doesn’t consider herself to be a very “artsy” person.

In May of 2015, Createquity published Why Don’t They Come?, the first of many deep dives into the question of disparities of access to the benefits of the arts. The article looked closely at arts participation patterns among poor and less educated individuals, and considered obstacles to attendance including logistical reasons, such as cost and access to transportation or childcare, as well as other factors like feeling excluded and not having a friend to take along. (It is worth noting that many of the logistical reasons cited as obstacles to arts attendance are barriers to healthy eating as well. Cost and access in particular are blamed with the widening food gap between rich and poor.)

What we discovered in the course of our research surprised us. While the aforementioned obstacles were certainly barriers, a lack of explicit interest was far and away the dominant factor keeping low-SES populations away from arts events.

That’s What You Think – photo by flickr user Robert Couse-Baker

Of all these statistics, one in particular stood out to us. Virtually alone among the activities we studied, television attracted more participation from poor and less educated adults rather than less. And on top of that, our analysis of GSS data suggested that even within low-SES groups, adults who don’t attend arts events watch even more TV than those who do. It seems possible that, whatever sustenance people are seeking from live arts attendance, the folks who don’t go are getting it (at least in part) from the small screen.

Given the tendency to be distrustful of television, we were curious: are people going to be worse off on average watching TV instead of engaging in other, potentially more enriching, activities? Should this be an area of concern for our work here at Createquity? Is there an opportunity here to improve wellbeing through the arts?

SMALL SCREEN, BIG CONSEQUENCES

“It’s kind of a waste,” admits one of our interviewees. “I’m not really doing anything when I’m sitting and watching TV.”

As it turns out, sitting and not really doing anything when you’re watching TV doesn’t bode well for your physical wellbeing. There is compelling evidence that increased hours spent watching television is associated with obesity, in part because of the sedentary lifestyle it promotes by crowding out time that could be spent on exercise. SA Bowman looked at data from the USDA’s Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals (CSFII), and found that men and women across demographic groups, including race, income, and educational status, were more likely to be overweight as their average hours of television viewing per day increased. Women who watched more than two hours of TV per day were 41.4% more likely to be obese than women who watch less than one hour a day. For men, that figure was 90.29%. And it’s not just sitting that’s the problem: even among healthy Australian adults who exercise at least 2.5 hours per week, watching TV is straight up bad for the waistline, with more hours watching TV per day was associated with increased blood pressure, waistline, and cholesterol levels. (Note 2)

Research has indicated that TV affects physical health in other ways as well⏤even to the point of shortening your lifespan. One team’s analysis of the 2008 General Social Survey-National Death Index dataset reveals that each hour of TV watched per day is associated with a 4% increase in mortality risk, amounting to an overall reduction of 1.2 years in total life expectancy due to television viewing in the US. A 2010 paper found an increased likelihood of all causes of mortality with more than 2 hours of television watched per day. Yet a third paper finds that, compounding psychological factors aside, TV may lend itself to an increased likelihood of smoking (and we all know where the shoe drops there).

Watching Zoolander – photo by flickr user Vincent Diamante

Are you doing some math in your head? (Your Favorite TV Shows x Total Viewing Hours) / Hours Watched Daily = Life Expectancy Reduction and Loss of Cognition? We did some math too, because there’s more to the brain than cognition. We ran a regression analysis on television and wellbeing using data from the 2012 General Social Survey. After controlling for variables including health, income level, education level, gender, age, and the frequency with which people interact with their friends and relatives, we found that increased hours of watching television is negatively associated with overall life satisfaction for people in the top three income quartiles, albeit only by a little bit. (Interestingly, we did not an association between television viewing and happiness for people with household incomes less than $25,000 per year). With a small sample and effect size and no ability to infer the direction of causality, we have to be careful not to push these results too far. Still, this descriptive analysis doesn’t do the case for TV any favors.

Others have investigated the relationship between watching a lot of television and one’s overall satisfaction with life (sometimes framed or referred to by scientists as subjective wellbeing). In their analysis of individual responses to the World Values Survey, which includes data from 80 countries, researchers Luigino Bruni and Luca Stanca found that television “crowds out” other, more social, activities–such as volunteering or spending time with friends and family–that are associated with higher life satisfaction. In the same study, they also suggest that increased hours spent watching television causes people to want higher incomes, which in turn creates unhappiness and low life satisfaction. According to Bruni and Stanca, TV is a part of a “relational treadmill” that induces people to measure their increase in happiness against that of their neighbors, instead of against their own experiences. Television, they argue, makes people want to consume more, inspired by both advertising and program content; unfortunately, by this metric, individuals will never achieve a real increase in happiness that corresponds to their increase in buying power. Some take issue with the way Bruni and Stanca classified countries in their methodology (see here), and at least one set of researchers note that when considering heterogeneity within countries, people who watch television report higher levels of wellbeing than people who do not watch any television at all. Still, we likely can all point to an example of being sucked into the “relational treadmill” of consumption thanks to TV.

TV and your brain: Turin street art – photo by flickr user mermaid

THE TWIST

You would think with all this talk of obesity, mortality, and dissatisfaction with life, people would reach for the off button. The fact that they don’t suggests they must be getting something out of it.

Could it just be that people who watch large amounts of TV lack self-control? That could explain some of these findings; for example, there is research that indicates unhappy people in general tend to watch more TV, suggesting that depression might be the culprit in some cases. But that doesn’t seem to be the whole story. There is an emerging body of research on television and addiction, but people are still trying to understand it, how many people are affected, and how it relates to other addictions that might be more disruptive to daily life. We have not found evidence tying television addiction to income level, even though people with lower incomes tend to watch more TV.

TV Man in the Autumn – photo by flickr user sualk61

Then there’s the fact that, for many, watching television is a meaningful social experience. Kawanda C. lives in New Orleans, where she doesn’t have a car. She’s 31 and didn’t finish high school. She works as a cashier, and spends a lot of time getting to and from work. She watches on average eight hours of TV a day, and loves to watch with her kids. Sonja B. also opts for companionship when taking in her favorite shows: “It’s always fun to watch TV with someone else because they might have a different perspective.” Indeed, in contrast to to Bruni and Stanca’s findings about television crowding out social activity, researcher Nele Simons’s interviews with TV watchers show that they socialize around the television they watch. She even suggests that people watching television at different times can create new opportunities for TV and socializing. In Simons’s telling, the classic mid-century meme of a traditional family unit gathered around to watch I Love Lucy or the Ed Sullivan Show continues, only today it’s football at your uncle’s place, or Game of Thrones at your corner dive bar.

Family watching television. Evert F. Baumgardner, ca. 1958 – from the National Archives and Records Administration.

It does seem that qualitative methodologies tend to paint a more positive picture of the effects of television. A set of interviews with Dutch adults aged 65-92 published last year explored the question of whether their television viewing habits are more often part of a selection strategy–that is, a conscious choice made to maximize wellbeing–or a compensation strategy, a choice that is made to fill time or otherwise compensate for some kind of loss or diminishment. While there were certainly examples of compensation strategies among their interviewees, the researchers more often found that people were watching TV with no regrets.

But the TV-is-good-for-you case is more than anecdotal; there’s a small but growing body of quantitative research that paints a more positive side to the medium as well. Recall that our aforementioned analysis of the General Social Survey found that among the lowest income quartile, which is also the segment that watches the most TV, more television is not associated with lower life satisfaction. One hypothesis to explain this comes from a paper by Bruno S. Frey et al. analyzing data from the European Social Survey. Frey et al. found that people with a lower opportunity cost of free time, like unemployed people or those with very fixed working hours, were less likely to report decreased life satisfaction as their TV hours increase, while the opposite was true of individuals with a high opportunity cost of their free time. If people with lower incomes tend to have a lower opportunity cost of their free time, this might explain why television at the bottom income quartile does not seem to harm life satisfaction.

While we haven’t encountered research showing positive effects of television content on adult viewers, there are some success stories for children and teens. In one study, researchers Kearney and Levine looked at the MTV franchise 16 and Pregnant–a series of reality TV shows including the Teen Mom sequels–and determined that the shows ultimately led to a 5.7% reduction in teen births in the 18 months following their introduction, which is about one third of the reduction in teen births during that period. In a follow-up, Kearney and Levine found that preschoolers who lived in areas where they could watch Sesame Street were 14% less likely to fall behind when they got to elementary school, and that this effect was much more pronounced for kids who grew up in areas with higher levels of economic disadvantage.

TV time – photo by flickr user Blake Danger Bentley

I WILL CHOOSE FREE WILL?

TV makes us fat. It dumbs us down. Too much TV makes us unhappy. Not enough TV makes us unhappy. TV makes us laugh. It keeps us informed. It keeps us from more social activities. It’s an opportunity for family time. It’s dangerous: for our feeling of self worth, for our capacity to understand right from wrong. At the end of the day, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that TV is both good and bad for us, depending on who we are, how we define good and bad, and how we go about asking and answering the question.

To be sure, not all of this evidence is created equal. If we were to pit the “TV is good” and “TV is bad” hypotheses against each other in a contest of methodologies, bad would probably win out. But how bad is bad? What exactly is the threshold of evidence of harm that would warrant taking the position that TV requires an intervention?

Here, the case of junk food provides us with a useful comparison. The impact of junk food consumption on public health has generated enough concern among reasonably-minded policy wonks to motivate multiple attempts at intervention by the state. And yet even for junk food, that movement to change behaviors has not come without controversy. The FDA, under intense pressure from Congress (and the National Restaurant Association) was forced to delay nation-wide implementation of menu labeling requirements until after the upcoming Presidential elections. (NYC implemented these same rules in 2006, and it took a full two years for them to become reality.) This past November, NYC passed a law requiring restaurants to indicate highly salted dishes; it was challenged immediately. Bloomberg’s famous soda ban was struck down, suffering from a backlash from the very people it was intended to help. Richmond, CA took a different approach, introducing a soda tax rather than a size limit, but it, too, failed.

What’s more, many of these well-meaning attempts to regulate the health of Americans don’t seem to be working: menu labeling has not been shown to change eating habits (and at least one study suggests it leads to greater caloric intake.) Kids denied in-school vending machines often end up consuming extra junk food. One year after Berkeley, CA became the first city in the US to successfully pass a soda tax, a study of its effectiveness reveals that, as the price increase has been largely assumed by distributors, the intended effect on consumers is negligible.

The no free-will bus campaign – photo by flickr user Travis Morgan

While there are certainly aspects of the effect of TV on physical, cognitive and subjective wellbeing that are concerning and deserve further exploration, given how dicey it is to seek to intervene in adults’ choices, our instinct is to exercise caution. For us to move forward in pursuing a case for change with respect to TV, we would need to see clearer evidence for an opportunity to improve wellbeing.

For us, the question of wellbeing ultimately comes down to opportunity and choice. Our definition of a healthy arts ecosystem draws inspiration from the “capability approach,” a widely adopted philosophical framework developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum that defines wellbeing in terms of freedoms. According to the capability approach, whether or not people take advantage of the opportunities they have, their capability to make decisions about how they pursue their lives is vital to wellbeing, and having the capability to achieve various states is more important than whether or not one chooses to exercise that capability.

Frances T. talks about the impact of TV on her life

It seems like a whole lot of people are making the choice to reach for the remote. For some, this undoubtedly isn’t the best choice they could make. For others, maybe it is. And it’s really hard for us, or anyone else, to tell the difference. Tempting as it might be to judge people who spend eight hours a day in front of the TV, many of us spend that much time or more each day in front of a different sort of small screen. We can only hope that everyone who does so is as enthusiastic about it as Frances T., who confidently declared when we asked her whether TV affects her wellbeing, “it is my own wellbeing to watch TV.”

Liked this article? Two things. First, we’ll be hosting a #CreatequityAsks Twitter chat to discuss the implications of this work on Wednesday, March 9 from 4-5pm Eastern time. Second, we’re conducting a reader poll to help us determine what we should investigate next. Please take 5 minutes to share your opinions! Thanks so much.