Createquity.Createquity.

Around the horn: Independence edition

Ian David Moss — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 01:45:55 +0000

Whew! I think this past month might just have been the craziest ever for me. Two research contract proposals, a final report, visits to Chicago, DC (twice), San Diego, LA, and Boston, a birthday, committee work for the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leader Council, editing Arts Policy Library pieces by the Createquity Writing Fellows, at least one almost-all-nighter, concert at which a band I’d supported on Kickstarter wore a costume theme that I picked out, presenting on my cultural mapping work in public for the first time (and getting quoted in the Wall Street Journal for it) – I’m getting tired just writing about it. Forgive me for not cranking out too many extended thought pieces recently…unfortunately the blog, much as I love it, doesn’t pay my rent. But to tide you over, here are some tasty links!

(By the way: I’m starting to think that I might standardize the section titles in the round-up. Any thoughts?)

ARTS AND THE GOVERNMENT

Rhode Island is the newest state to recognize the L3C.
Tim Mikulski reports on the activities of a new coalition that is revising the 1994 National Standards for Arts Education.
What would a Republican campaign for higher office be without a little copyright infringement? It’s really kind of inconvenient for them that most of the karaoke klassics out there were written by hardcore liberals.
The IRS’s list of nonprofits whose status was revoked apparently contained some errors – apparently George Washington University and the University of Michigan were included, for example. Whoops!

THE ART OF GIVING

The Irvine Foundation has announced its new strategy for the arts focusing on audience engagement. The WolfBrown white paper written about on this blog last week is clearly a part of this. You can watch the video and join the discussion on Irvine’s website – Rocco Landesman has already kicked things off.
Meanwhile, former San Francisco Foundation program officer John Killacky has something to say to his erstwhile colleagues in the grantmaking world.
Hewlett Foundation President Paul Brest is back blogging, this time as a guest for Grantmakers in the Arts. In his first post, he points out that despite a major focus (and seeming agreement) within the funding community in recent years on the value of general operating support, there is little evidence of a pronounced upward trend in GOS grants. Change doesn’t come easy in the foundation world, I guess.
Brian Newman wonders if the crowdfunding phenomenon exemplified by Kickstarter is, uh, crowding out donations from institutional funders.
Finally, GiveWell offers a perspective on why we should expect giving effectively to be difficult.

MERGERS AND CLOSURES

Arthouse at the Jones Center is exploring a merger with the Austin Museum of Art.
Another orchestra down: The Seattle area’s Bellvue Philharmonic is no more after this weekend.
Diane Ragsdale pays tribute to the now-defunct Florida Stage. The post also features a great and lengthy comment from National New Play Network Executive Director Jason Loewith.

APPOINTMENTS AND PROMOTIONS

Lisa Philp will be the new Vice President for Strategic Philanthropy and Director of GrantCraft for the Foundation Center.
Blogger, longtime executive director of the Center for Arts Education, and my former boss’s boss Richard Kessler will be the new Dean of Mannes College The New School for Music.
Stellar Technology and the Arts blogger Amelia Northrup has taken on a new position as Strategic Communications Specialist at TRG Arts. Not content merely to share the news, Amelia goes out with a bang by sharing some fantastic tips for organizing your job search.

RESEARCH AND READINGS

According to the latest Giving USA report, charitable contributions were up in 2010, but only slightly: 2.1%. The arts, however, fared better than most, seeing donations rising 4.1% after inflation. You might recall that Giving USA got some egg on its face earlier this year when evidence surfaced that its econometric models drastically underestimated the extent to which individual giving dropped during the recession. Now they say they’ve included another variable in the model that explains the drop, so this year’s estimate should (hopefully) be more trustworthy.
With all the talk about eliminating or reducing the tax deduction donors receive for their charitable gifts, kudos to Sarah Lutman for digging into the Congressional Budget Office’s recommendations on the subject.
Theatre Bay Area has published a report on social media use by arts organizations, authored by our friend Devon Smith of Threespot Consulting. Devon has her own account here.

ACROSS THE POND

Going England one further, the right-wing government of The Netherlands is set to cut its arts funding by 25% and more than triple the tax on tickets to concerts. Sadly, the powers that be have chosen to let smaller arts organizations bear most of the burden – an especially heavy one since unlike here, government funding makes up the vast majority of revenue for most. Recommendations to phase in the cuts were ignored.
Michael Kaiser reports from a trip to England (part I; part II); Michael Royce checks out the arts scene in Berlin (part I; part II; part III).
Weirdness: a Chinese firm has contracted Albert Speer & Partner to build an exact replica of the Austrian village of Hallstatt – in Guangdong Province.
Weirdness: Norway is apparently training its own diplomats how to explain black metal.
Weirdness: a city in India has no municipal government – and is apparently doing pretty well. Marginal Revolution and Matt Yglesias provide interesting commentary.

BIG IDEA CORNER

Meant to mention this last time around – National Arts Strategies is launching a cool-looking initiative designed to help CEOs become more effective leaders. Andrew Taylor provides his customary brief summary.
Lee Streby has an extraordinary three–part exploration on what he would do if he were building an orchestra from scratch. And speaking of orchestras, Greg Sandow has been musing on how we might objectively evaluate the quality of their performances.
Sasha Anawalt, Doug McLennan, et al. set up a five-day “pop-up newsroom” called Engine 28 last month to cover live theater convenings and events in LA. The LA Times has more.
Dollars and sense: Assets for Artists is looking to expand beyond Massachusetts. Gary Steuer draws the line between arts education and economic development. Barry Hessenius on a different kind of arts endowment – and how we might fund it. And since I’m always a sucker for people questioning the premises behind microeconomics, here’s Justin Wolfers recounting how being a father has made him question the neoclassical model; and Seth Godin on why coordination, not competition, is the next frontier for economics.
If you’ve ever played the mobile/tablet game Angry Birds, you know how addictive it can be. Now the company that makes Angry Birds, Rovio, is launching a totally visionary location- and accessory-based scavenger hunt in which visiting various special places in real life activates Easter egg features in the game. This is some seriously creative shit that arts marketers should be paying close attention to.

Around the horn: road trip edition

Ian David Moss — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 05:30:00 +0000

I’m writing from lovely Caribou, ME, where my girlfriend and I are resting after the first day of a rather quixotic quest to travel the entire north-south length of US Route 1. The towns of northern Maine are, shall we say, sleepy in the winter; we have the run of our B&B since we are the only guests here tonight. (Just like the Bates motel — three rooms, three vacancies. Well, without the murders and so forth, one hopes.) According to the innkeepers here, we are not the first to undertake this journey, but perhaps among the few to do so in a Corolla — most of the rest are on motorcycles. Assuming all goes well, we’ll get to Key West by the first week of January and hit up Disney on the way back.

In the meantime, here are some arts/business links.

With the Obama inauguration around the corner, there seems to be a sudden surge of interest in national arts policy. Fractured Atlas posted a request for ideas on investing in arts infrastructure. Coming on the heels of RAND’s report on state arts councils (and Isaac’s deconstruction of it), Lesley Friedman Rosenthal drew attention to state and local arts policy with a particular focus on tax strategies in an op-ed for Newsday last week. Despite my own interest in the subject, I’ve mostly refrained from jumping in thus far because I feel like I still have a lot of learning to do. I’m pursuing an independent study on public policy and the arts in the spring and my reading for that effort will no doubt inform my opinions. I do think, though, that before we go nuts with policy recommendations it would help to come to more of an agreement in the field about what it is exactly that the arts are supposed to accomplish. I hope to address this in more detail in the new year.
In the meantime, here’s a white paper that was sent to the transition team last month by Americans for the Arts, developed in collaboration with a number of other national arts service organizations. Among other things, it proposes more than doubling the NEA budget, naming a “senior-level administration official” to coordinate arts policy among the various federal agencies, strengthening the relationship between arts organizations and the Corporation for National and Community Service, streamlining the visa process for visiting foreign artists, and ensuring recognition of the arts as a core academic subject in education programs. The document seems well-written and -considered to these still-learning eyes.
Via Steven Levitt of the Freakonomics blog, here’s a sprawling article in Bloomberg about what’s happening at the famed “Chicago School” as free-market thinking blows up in everyone’s faces:

Already, some of the university’s top economists have abandoned hard-line Friedmanism for the middle ground.

Douglas Diamond, a finance professor at Chicago since 1979, declined to sign Cochrane’s petition damning Paulson’s bailout. Diamond says he knew the Sept. 29 vote against the rescue would spur investors to pull assets from banks. He says governments have no choice but to provide safety nets for banks and tougher oversight.

“The vote was the beginning of people believing crazy stuff, like the U.S. might find it politically expedient to let its financial system go,” Diamond, 55, says.

Robert Lucas, a Chicago economist who won a Nobel in 1995 for a theory that argued against governments trying to fine-tune consumer demand, says deregulation may have gone too far. […]

“I’m changing my views on bank regulation every week,” Lucas, 71, says. “It was an area I saw as under control. Now I don’t believe that.”

Economics myths

Ian David Moss — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 17:09:00 +0000

When I first studied music theory approximately a decade ago, I was rather shocked to discover, unbeknownst to me and apparently every rock band whose music sent me into spasms of ecstasy when played on my headphones at high volume, that parallel fifths in music—not to mention octaves, cross relations, and leaping to a leading tone, among countless other infractions—are bad, bad, evil, bad. Of course, no one who writes music nowadays actually believes this. But that’s not what they told me at the time, and that’s not how my assignments were graded. To this day, as a composer, I have yet to encounter a situation in which the ability to write sonatas in authentic 18^th-century style has come in handy. Anyone? Anyone? Maybe it’s just me.

This is not a case of running into some bad teachers. This is the way music students are taught introductory music theory. It’s a conservatory tradition that goes back hundreds of years, to a time when those parallel fifths actually mattered to people writing music professionally. It’s just that the pedagogy has fallen behind where the field is, to the tune of a decade or twenty.

I encountered this same feeling again this past semester when learning about economics for the first time. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that there is still much about economics, as a field, that I do not yet know or understand. I’m sure that there are smart people out there developing models that take into account the concerns I detail below. For now, though, I want to take a look at the assumptions that underlie the very practice of economics, and the way that those assumptions are presented unchallenged in the standard introductory curriculum.

If all economics tried to do was observe and model human behavior, I wouldn’t be writing this screed. But economists apparently feel that it’s okay to make not just “positive” statements, about what is, but “normative” statements as well, about what ought to be. I often felt, in my introductory econ classes and while reading my textbook, like I was watching an advertisement for Republican fiscal policy. Our reference text, the popular Microeconomics by Robert Pindyck and Daniel Rubinfeld, does not shy away from applying classical economic theory to the issues of the moment. On the contrary, the book analyzes taxes, wage floors, price subsidies, and other attempts by the government to gain revenue or regulate prices for some social purpose. Each discussion is accompanied by helpful graphs that show you how each of these policies creates “deadweight loss” resulting from the reduction in the number of transactions. That’s right, they call it “deadweight loss.” Could they think of a more biased term? I mean, there’s no “happy joy gain” on the graph from the public benefits of fewer people smoking cigarettes or everybody having access to heat and hot water.

And that, friends, is the problem. Classical economics models have no reliable way to represent human happiness or suffering in a supply-and-demand graph. Little things like that are what economists call an “externality” – i.e., they don’t know how to make it into a formula, so they’re just sort of going to pretend it doesn’t exist. (The issue of externalities is first addressed on page 621 of the Pindyck and Rubinfeld textbook, in the 18^th and final chapter.) On the other hand, any attempt to mess with the market causes measurable deadweight loss, so that means it’s bad. It’s all so simple and convenient!

I wouldn’t be harping on this except for the fact that there are actually people, seasoned professionals with jobs teaching economics to young minds, who think this way. Earlier this year, I attended a panel discussion (which was really more like a Lincoln-Douglas style high school debate on steroids) at the Yale Law School entitled “The Myth of the Rational Voter.” The guest star was an associate professor from George Mason University named Bryan Caplan, whose book was both the subject of discussion and the title of the event. Hoping to gain expert psychological insight into electoral politics, I was disappointed to find that the book was apparently an investigation into why “correct” economic policies generally become law despite a vast majority of voters holding “wrong” views about economics. And what were these “wrong” views, one might ask? Yup, you guessed it—tariffs are bad, taxes are bad, rent control bad, free markets good good good. Leaving aside the obvious methodological issues with such a survey (after all, government policies are generally designed to be of greater benefit to the average layperson than the average professional economist), what disturbed me was that there was absolutely no challenge to these basic assumptions from the other panelists. Caplan was allowed to present these opinions as foregone conclusions, as if economic science had shown them to be as obvious as the law of gravity. He also couldn’t help throwing in some smug digs at the (lack of) intelligence of his own students, which of course just made him all the more endearing.

I hear people talking like this and it makes me want to scream. Folks, there is no such thing as free markets in modern society. If markets were truly free, slavery would still be a booming industry in this country, as it was in the 1600s. If markets were truly free, we’d have paid bounty hunters roaming our cities, putting on hits for anyone who wanted to get rid of an inconvenient rival or former spouse. If markets were truly free, crime in poor areas would spiral out of control as public police departments were replaced by private security agencies who would charge more to serve high-crime areas because of higher costs. Heat? Electricity? Firefighting? Forget it, those would be private too. Can’t pay? Too bad.

The fact is, there is a basic tension in economics between efficiency and equality, which Pindyck and Rubinfeld readily acknowledge. Getting maximum productivity (from a profit standpoint) in a market means that people with lower incomes will be left out of the picture. Economists even have a name for these people. It’s “low-value consumers.”

There is an alternative way of looking at the above, which is that there is no such thing as something that’s not a free market. After all, the government systems we do have in place for human services, infrastructure, price regulation, and so on, are essentially the result of consumer action. They voted people into office to institute these reforms, a power no consumer had on his or her own. One could argue that these policies are the result of the “market” deciding, in aggregate, that prohibitions against certain industries might be a good thing. That environmental protection was worth setting limits on what large companies could put into the air or water. This view requires a broader conception of market activity that goes beyond merely buying and selling. It essentially says that whatever happens is part of the larger organism of humanity, that the actions companies and consumers take to affect the market are as much a symptom of the market as a driver of it. It says that markets will always be free so long as human beings are creating and living them.

To believe that, though, would invalidate the classical economic assumption that the only thing people are interested in is maximizing profit. Whoops!