There is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them.

(Hugh MacLennan, The Watch Ends the Night (1958)).

Some personal history

When I was in high school, I found my place in the band room. I took up the French horn (never very well) and played in the concert band. I learned guitar and bass and played the latter in the jazz band. I sang in the chamber choir, and took part in the cast, or chorus, or pit, or crew, of musicals and plays. My closest friends were band room kids. I also played in a garage (basement, actually) band. I had a great pair of music teachers (one of whom I got to spend time with on a recent hometown visit), and thought that this had to be the greatest job in the world. So, in hopes of one day becoming a high school music teacher myself, I applied to the local university school of music,1 did the theory exam, did the audition (on voice - I had the benefit of the low bar set for desperately needed tenors), and got accepted.

I was the only one of my peer group who chose this route; many other music friends tried to make it in the pop/rock scene in Vancouver, and they were surprised I didn’t try to do the same. But I didn’t see much future there. A few got regular gigs in local bands, one very good drummer I played with got a job on a cruise ship band. One kid at our school actually managed to achieve superstardom, but I think we all knew what a rare thing that was. And so far as I know he was the only one who, quite sensibly, stuck with it.

How did music at university go? At the end of the fourth day of classes, I went to the registrar and dropped the whole thing, and, unsure of what was even on offer at the huge campus - I’d never really known well anyone who had ever attended university - just picked from a set in general arts and sciences. This eventually turned into a major in economics. In the music school, I had realized as soon as classes got going - the voice teacher who thought I didn’t have much of a voice but that maybe it could be turned into something;2 the theory teacher disappointed how few of us in the entering class had perfect pitch; and other students, who were driven about achieving success in their instruments in a way I just was not - that this did not look like a happy situation.

This was awfully impulsive of me (though my parents were relieved), and if I had stuck it out for longer, even a semester, I might have found my place there after all, but I’ll never know.

Was it a rational choice, to drop music school, and the idea of making music my profession, either as performer or teacher? Would I have had a better life if I didn’t drop out? I can’t know, because I don’t know what my life would have been like.

But I need to clarify this.

I can read all manner of numbers regarding the earnings of professional musicians in different genres, or wages in the teaching world, or what my salary might be now if I had got my degree and begun teaching at some high school, and stuck with it for more than forty years (which is of course a lot more certain than if I had tried to make it performing). I could try to find the paths for different alumni of the program (though of course the school will highlight the great successes - I would have to dig for info on the lesser known artists, or the ones who tried ten years of performing and then packed it in, or the ones just happy to teach in K-12). That’s data that with some work I could start to evaluate. And I could compare that to what eventually became a career as an academic.

But what I can’t do is know how I would have been different as a person.

A brief digression into economic method

Economists want to be able to predict how people will react to changes in external economic circumstances, such as changes in the prices of things they purchase, and changes in the wages of various jobs they could conceivably do. To be able to say anything at all sensible about this, they have to work with the assumption that as prices and wages are changing, people’s preferences over what sorts of things they like to consume, and over how driven they are to earn money at the expense of time for doing other things, stays much the same. Otherwise, any change in what people do could be explained by waving our hands and saying “their preferences changed, that’s all.”

The definitive statement of why this assumption is necessary is by two Nobel prize winners3 George Stigler and Gary Becker, in their 1977 essay “De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum”. The title is poorly chosen, since you come to it imagining it will be about the unavoidably subjective nature of taste, but instead it is about the need to assume individuals have stable preferences:

the economist [searches] for differences in prices or incomes to explain any differences or changes in behavior.

But what if people try to change their preferences? They have an answer for that. In Gary Becker’s very influential book Human Capital (1964), people know that they have the capacity, through formal education or informal skills acquisition or on-the-job training, to increase their productive capacities in the workforce and thereby command a higher wage. So, people do a cost-benefit analysis of whether acquiring more human capital will ultimately prove to yield more gains in future wages than the costs of going to school or devoting unpaid time to skill-acquisition. But the person stays the same, their “utility function” stays the same; it’s just that after investing in human capital they can earn more.

Stigler and Becker apply the same idea to the example of the appreciation of classical music. Suppose a person is capable (not everybody is!) of really enjoying classical music. They value the appreciation, not just the act of putting a record on the turntable. But music appreciation is “produced” by a combination of listening right now, and the “capital” that has been built up by listening to music at previous times. Someone could make a rational decision: “I will listen to Beethoven now, even if I don’t get a lot from it right now, but it will eventually pay off with the pleasure I will eventually get from listening to it.” But, importantly, nothing else about the person changes as a result of this investment in music appreciation - our listener is otherwise the same person.

I spent a lot of my academic life with the Journal of Cultural Economics, the flagship of our merry band of economists who study this sort of thing (I was Book Review Editor for six years, then Co-Editor for another six, and published a few articles there), and to this day the working model of arts consumption is something like that proposed by Stigler and Becker, with people choosing the deliberate acquisition of the ability to enjoy the arts, while otherwise staying the same, and likewise for investments in the training needed to become a professional artist.

I enjoy listening to certain genres of music, or going to the art museum, more now than I did in my twenties, because I have, often deliberately, “invested” in trying to get to better know what I am hearing and seeing. And when I became a boring economist instead of trying to earn a living through music, it was a rational calculation of the expected returns to different career paths. But otherwise, the assumption is that I’m basically the same guy as ever.

The limitations of social science on understanding our cultural lives

I really enjoyed this post by Emma Dollery at Discordia Review, “How Arts Grants Ate the Arts Audience”, and recommend the whole thing. But consider this excerpt:

Choosing to be an artist is, or should be, a profoundly difficult path. It’s innately lonely: necessarily, you separate yourself from the warm, safe embrace of being one amongst many, and, by extension, put yourself at the mercy of the very group you’ve just separated from. Part of the job description is willfully choosing to become incredibly vulnerable to a sea of strangers, exposing your guts (your work) to them, and asking them whether they connect, why, why not, and what’s pretty or ugly or stupid about it all. Being a writer/artist who is offended by or afraid of honest feedback (in all its forms, whether that be savagely critical, glowing, or everything in between), is like being a doctor who doesn’t want to see blood. You signed up for this, honey!

In that sense, creating work for the public is less glamorous than it is absolutely fucking terrifying—the kind of hard work that requires effort, bravery, and a very thick skin. The power lies in numbers, the power lies with the audience, and it’s a totally valid, essential place to be.

You can still love an artform, be seriously involved in an artform, be actively shaping an artform, without having your name pasted on it. But this kind of participation comes with its own set of responsibilities and reciprocal honesty. It involves an active pointing of attention, supporting things that you believe in and protesting against things you don’t. Discerning audiences should be talking to each other, forming the metrics of their own taste, voicing strong and sometimes impolite opinions, and demanding from their artists—with readership, attendance, vocalized thoughts—what they have, by being artists, promised to give: an honest investigation of what it means to be alive.

Becoming a serious artist, or a serious participant in the arts (which means more than “I went to a show last year”) changes the person. It is not just about “I chose to invest in this career path over that one based on relative costs and benefits” or “I chose to read some art history books so I could get more out of visiting a museum”. If someone is serious about it, it changes what they want from life, in all respects. It changes who they want to be around with, which changes them even further. If I had become a music teacher, and spent my life at it, or tried seriously to become a performer, I would not be the person writing this blog post right now.4

This means that economic analysis of these choices is going to be severely limited. How do you make a fully rational decision to change who you are, given that you can no more have a clear sense of what the new you will be like than you can of what it is like to be a bat? As Shaun Hargreaves Heap argues in a recent article, preference change remains as the “blind spot” in economics. It’s not that people who work in the field of cultural economics don’t know this - they are smart people and conscientious about trying to get things right - but economic method itself is going to put a hard constraint on how deeply models of decision-making can illuminate the choices we actually make for our cultural lives.

If I had made different choices in my late teens and my twenties, it is not just that I might have more capacity to enjoy this thing, or more ability to earn income at that thing. My worldview would be different, what I care about in life would be different, far beyond what can be analyzed in a model that assumes stability in such things.

(Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock in the original Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, 1949).

In a guest essay in the New York Times, former Washington Post theater critic Naveen Kumar writes that “Broadway is Serving Up Liberal Comfort Food.”

His piece concludes:

Not everyone goes to the theater hoping to be confronted with big questions, the kind that compel audiences to turn inward and disrupt their worldviews. But offering easy answers to those who do is its own form of injustice, shortchanging the medium’s potential. Why pat people on the back when what they really need — and what live performance is uniquely poised to deliver — is a punch to the gut?

What went wrong? His argument that in a response to theatre audiences claiming to be turned off by being “preached at” by the plays they attended on Broadway (and I can’t blame them), there has been a turn to the safe, the comforting, the pat on the back.1

Five years ago, a lot of new theater was in a less indulgent mood. As the industry awoke in 2021 from pandemic shutdowns, many playwrights and producers were eager to champion the values of the social justice movement set off by the killing of George Floyd the previous spring. Works, often written by nonwhite artists, challenged audiences to face up to their latent biases — no matter how well intentioned they might have assumed they were as theater-loving liberals.

In New York there came a wave of shows that pushed boundaries and prodded progressive audiences. “Slave Play,” Jeremy O. Harris’s incendiary dark comedy about race and desire, which opened on Broadway in the fall of 2019, returned for an encore engagement. “A Strange Loop,” Michael R. Jackson’s hall-of-mirrors musical about a fat Black queer playwright grappling with his own subjectivity, won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony for best musical. A slew of plays, including new works like Antoinette Nwandu’s “Pass Over,” an urban parable partly inspired by “Waiting for Godot,” and Tina Satter’s “Is This a Room,” about the interrogation of an N.S.A. whistle-blower, as well as revivals by Suzan-Lori Parks, Ntozake Shange and Alice Childress, crowded Broadway stages.

Those theater-loving liberals, thinking they are well intentioned, needed some prodding.

But now?

The Tony Awards race is dominated by plays that are more affirming than confrontational, offering the sort of benign provocation unlikely to keep people awake at night or wonder why they paid good money to feel unsettled. …

This spring, we have Nathan Lane in “Death of a Salesman,” Arthur Miller’s reliable elegy to the downtrodden working class.

Which is quite a dismissal of a play that is rightly seen as an American classic.

I think Mr. Kumar gives the game away in his discussion of Giant, by Mark Rosenblatt. Here is the entire discussion of this play:

Then there’s John Lithgow (competing against Mr. Lane for best actor), with his sour and prickly turn as Roald Dahl in Mark Rosenblatt’s “Giant,” a fiery topical debate lightly outfitted as a drama. The play, which premiered in London in 2024, finds Dahl mired in public controversy over a review he wrote about Catherine Leroy and Tony Clifton’s book “God Cried,” which documents Israel’s 1982 siege of Lebanon. As the play begins, Dahl’s essay has been denounced as antisemitic, and his editor and an emissary from his publisher, both Jewish, arrive to seek a public comment that will calm the waters before the release of his next book, “The Witches.”

The play, which quickly recouped its Broadway investment, raises two major questions, to my mind. One is why we continue to insist on making art about terrible men. The other is this: Does “Giant” succeed in dramatizing the interplay between antisemitism and criticism of Israel, or does it flatten that debate because Dahl is so obviously a grotesque bigot? Mr. Lithgow’s performance is a kinetic marvel, but there’s no question that his Dahl is a snarling and even gleeful hater of Jews.

The cynical view would be that “Giant” seeks to validate the anxiety, including among some supporters of Israel, that those who oppose its state actions must also be antisemitic. The less cynical view would be that all of this makes “Giant,” at the very least, a less interesting play for simply offering up an obvious villain.

So, a play about an author of very popular (though, to my mind, very uneven in quality) children’s books is shown to be a terrible person (there had already been a lot of published accounts to this effect), and that in itself is not prodding enough. Instead, the problem is that Dahl is shown to be anti-Israel but not in the right way, such that somebody who supports Israel, and is a bit dense, might think this play is validating. A better option, I guess, would be a play about someone who opposes the actions of the Israeli state but is more palatable, maybe who has a River-to-the-Sea poster but does not take it literally, and who has a Jewish friend, or some such?

In other words, Mr. Kumar wants plays that pat him on the back, for his proper views on political and social issues, and that give gut punches to those superficial theater-going liberals who secretly harbor views that are not quite radical enough. He wants plays with his politics; it’s those audiences, you know the type, that need to be “challenged.” His “worldview” doesn’t need changing.

Are pats on the back and gut punches the only options? What about plays that are just about being human, where at the end of the play you would have no idea whether a character was a Trump or anti-Trump voter, or anything about their views on defunding the police, or the two-state solution? Plays about falling in love, falling out of love, unrequited love? About dealing with the consequences of a terrible decision? About friendship, and betrayal? About a particularly dramatic historical event, where the cast do not wear hats with a G if they are a goodie and with a B if they are a baddie? Where a group cast does not seem like it was chosen for a Pew Research Center focus group? Where the play is just laugh out loud funny? That have not obviously been wrought with granting agencies and foundations foremost in mind?

Better than a knuckle sandwich.

This is the headline from a New York Times piece, one where intrepid reporters venture into the hinterlands to talk with people who do not read the New York Times, in this case young men who voted for Donald Trump but who now feel a bit uncertain as to where to turn, politically.

The article, like most in the genre, seeks to help the Democrats by explaining to them what they need to do to capture the votes of the undecided. Although based around interviews with the common folk, the article has a thesis, which may have been determined before the reporters booked their flights and rental car, and quotes and anecdotes are chosen to provide confirming evidence of that thesis.

And what do we learn.

First, these young men are what political scientists would call “low-information voters”:

Frustrated with the cost of everyday necessities, Carter Tice, a 20-year-old tree landscaper in Milwaukee, voted for Donald Trump in 2024 because he promised economic relief — but Mr. Tice has not yet seen any improvement. …

And Owen Cheyne, 21, from rural Klamath Falls, Ore., who listens to podcasts from influencers who supported Mr. Trump in 2024 — like Joe Rogan and Theo Von — has been disappointed by the president’s much-heralded tariff policy.

“He said it would get bad because of tariffs, and he said it would get better,” Mr. Cheyne said. “We’re still waiting.”

Mr. Tice and Mr. Cheyne voted for Trump based upon promises that he had no means of keeping. He would provide economic relief how, exactly? Aside from a couple of cranks, every economist in the country, from the right or left, knew and said repeatedly that Trump’s tariff policy would do more harm than good, in the short run and in the long run. They fell for bullshit that was not even clever bullshit, from a guy who had been in politics for enough years that anybody with even half an interest in what’s going on would know that on economic matters (and more) he was truly without a clue.

Second, there is a concern with “masculinity” that is something of a social media (and traditional media) creation without there being much of substance to it:

Vincent McKibben, 25, a computer hardware engineer in Austin, Texas, grew up in a liberal family but enjoys the irreverent banter offered by right-leaning voices like Mr. Rogan. Recently, however, he has started to worry that the heterodox “manosphere” preys on buzzy culture war issues to attract attention, rather than offering substantive solutions.

But that has not left him entirely enthusiastic about Democrats. He said that the clinical, policy-driven voices on the left felt “very academic” and lacked a masculine charisma that people could latch on to.

I have a suspicion that words have been placed in Mr. McKibben’s mouth here - “clinical, policy-driven voices on the left”? - but let’s take the reporters at their word. What does any of this mean? I get that voters can benefit from simple messages rather than a boxload of hundred-page policy papers, but is this about policy, or tone, or what? Should the Democrats try “universal public health insurance, but delivered in a Ford F-150”? Is Mr. McKibben saying, in so many words, that he doesn’t want to vote for a woman?

Credit to the Republicans where due, I suppose, in being able to choose as their leader Donald J. Trump, surround him with the most ridiculous, slavish sycophants, and then be able to convince people this was the party of masculine virtue.

In interviews, young men indicated just how tricky that might prove to be. Many were deeply skeptical of the Democratic brand and viewed the left as unwelcoming.

Some, for instance, said a traditional family dynamic, with a man as the breadwinner for his wife and children, would give them purpose — an aspiration of masculinity they said they believed the left discourages.

Again, this needs some fleshing out. What is this “Democratic brand” that is unwelcoming? How so? Why does masculinity involve a stay-at-home wife? Who on “the left” has discouraged this? Maybe what discourages it is a shortage of young women who think giving their husband this “purpose” sounds like a fulfilling and stable situation? Or people liking having two incomes because they can afford more stuff?

Everything in this piece seems manufactured out of the most shallow parts of the social media / podcast discourse, where those being interviewed have no way of articulating their thoughts beyond what they’ve been told to think.

And that leads to my third thought: for all the talk about masculine charisma, the young men in this article are very passive.

Neither party, they said, was speaking to their concerns.

Okay, well, there are things you can do about that. The way the interviewed men are portrayed in the story is that they see politics as something like different brands of trucks competing for buyers, rather than something in which they can actually take part, in showing up at meetings, in organizing, even in running for office in local politics. They ask of the two political parties, “make me an offer I will like,” and complain that neither of the two is satisfactory, but without doing anything to make that discontent known, or, as I read this, of even trying to become better informed.

My own kids are Gen-Z, and I have full empathy for the young men in this story that it is hard going out there. Nothing changes perspective like getting a decent job, even at starter’s pay, and it is very challenging right now for a young person to get a decent job. It makes the thought of one day buying a house, and being able, with your partner, to support and raise kids, seem hopelessly distant. I don’t envy them at all, and I don’t make light of their struggles.

But they can do better politically than only being able to repeat half-baked things they heard on Joe Rogan.

On the weekend John Ganz had an interesting discussion of our rich tech-elites and aesthetic taste, of which they have little, and who would hope to destroy what for now remains that is human and beautiful. This leads him to consider Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790) and Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), where the latter book’s title is clearly meant to evoke the former. I won’t try to summarize Ganz - I recommend you read him yourself (not just this one piece) - but I will take this opportunity to try to wrestle with my own thoughts on Bourdieu, from the perspective of working for many years in the cultural policy field.

Let me take the excerpt from Distinction that Ganz uses:

The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile—in a word, natural—enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affirmation of the superiority of those who can be satisfied with the sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane. That is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences.

In Distinction Bourdieu makes two claims, one about society and one about aesthetics, and I think it is important to separate the two, since it is possible for a reasonable person to believe that either one of the claims is true but not the other. This is but a blog post, so I know my treatment here is a bit sketchy.

Bourdieu’s sociological claim is that people can use their cultural taste, whether genuine or simply an affectation, as a signal of how they ought to be classed, and can use this “cultural capital” to their advantage in making social and economic connections. If they acquire this cultural capital from their parents and their social standing, then cultural taste works to preserve the transmission between generations of class status. In the translation of Bourdieu I have he says cultural capital can be “exchanged” for social and economic capital, but I wouldn’t put it that way; it’s not actually exchanged or traded - once you have it you don’t need to part with it - it is simply useful in obtaining other sorts of capital.1

Is this claim true? Maybe, though I think it might have been much more the case in prior generations (Bourdieu was writing about France in the 1960s). Demonstrating elite taste in art is neither necessary nor sufficient for getting on in our world, though I would grant that having a least basic manners, dress sense, and the ability to hold intelligent conversation still matter. But art? Enjoy any movies, music, or reading you like and no one in your economic world is going to care very much.

I’m not sure Bourdieu’s sociological claim is falsifiable - what evidence would prove him wrong? If I say that our elites mostly listen to bad music and watch junk movies, could a counter-claim be that “well, yes, but they are snobby about that too?” I’m really not sure what to do with this.

Bourdieu’s aesthetic claim is that cultural judgments are nothing more than expressions of personal taste (used for social reasons), and have no truth-standing beyond that. Kant makes the distinction between matters of purely personal preference - “I prefer a pinot noir to a malbec” - where I don’t expect everyone to feel the same, nor feel that everyone should prefer pinot noir to malbec, to judgments regarding art, where the claim “Chopin’s Nocturnes, especially as recorded by Ivan Moravec, are beautiful” is meant to convey something greater than my personal enjoyment of them, and that other people ought to find them beautiful too, and when they do we can enjoy the work communally. But Bourdieu (in common with the logical positivists) holds that it’s all personal preference, nothing more.

Of course taste is subjective, that’s why even people very knowledgeable about a sub-genre of art can still disagree about the relative values of different works. But Kant (and Hume before him) think that there are principles we ought to be able to agree on, regarding what works are beautiful, well-crafted, intelligent, respectful of their audience, subtle, expressive, and original, and which are ordinary, slipshod, banal, condescending, obvious, mechanical (these days, literally so), and formulaic. (I’m not saying I have the masterful eyes and ears that enable me to discern all these things, far from it, but I can still recognize the existence of such standards, and to try to better understand them).

I come to cultural policy through economics, and there is something of a rule in the social science (economics or sociology) of the arts that you don’t make aesthetic claims in your research. As a social scientist you might personally believe that there are legitimate distinctions we can make about the value of art and artists, but in the paper you are submitting to the International Journal of Cultural Policy or the Journal of Cultural Economics or Poetics you keep it to yourself. This is a good norm: it allows the reader to assess the social science claims on their own terms, without the empirical findings being muddied by the researchers’ views on the subjectivity of cultural taste, and of their own tastes. But that norm doesn’t mean Bourdieu and other skeptics are correct.

As I said above, one can believe one of Bourdieu’s major claims without believing the other. One the one hand, I could say, yes, people sometimes try to acquire, or at least feign, an enjoyment of the high arts and make pronouncements on cultural value to improve their social standing, but that doesn’t mean there is no such thing as legitimate judgment in the arts; my claim that Moravec’s recordings are something beautiful (I might say) comes from experience of listening to piano recordings, of reading others who are more knowledgeable than I am about the genre, of carefully listening for the subtleties in his approach, and so on.

On the other hand I could say that the arts and judgments of beauty simply don’t matter any more, if they ever did, in social and economic standing. But while Bourdieu was wrong about that, he is right that all this elevated talk we get in art and cultural criticism is literally nonsense, and just amounts to someone saying “I like the colour blue, pinot noir, and Chopin”.

What does this mean for cultural policy? In my book, The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts, I wrote this in the concluding chapter:

One can insist on a neutral state regarding the good, but it is not how the Arts Council (and all the subsequent arts councils) were founded, and the rationale for public spending on the arts quickly withers without the guiding assumption that there is something intrinsically good in appreciating beauty and the arts (these not being the only intrinsic goods) and that people are better off with encouragement and subsidy that connects them to the arts. Further, the point of arts funding is to promote the intrinsic value of aesthetic appreciation, which means that there must be judgments in the funding body as to what artists and presenters rise to the level of artistic excellence where such appreciation is warranted. It is not simply a matter of “more art”, but art that enhances people’s well-being beyond the cultural goods that are easily and cheaply obtained in commercial markets.

If you are going to have some sort of arts council that gives money to artists and arts organizations, they have to make some sort of judgment about what is worth funding and what is not.

If someone wants to make the claim that all judgments of cultural taste are nothing more than the expression of the likes and dislikes of the speaker, then the rationale for giving any funds to any particular artist or presenter dries up. Why fund this instead of that? Why publicly fund any art at all? Let citizens figure out themselves how to spend their income. Saying, “well, we can still have an arts council, we just need to tweak how it makes its grants” does not get you anywhere. Handing out money through a lottery doesn’t get around the problem of asking how public arts funding is justified in the first place.

If you also follow Bourdieu that consumption of elite-approved art just serves to reinforce social distinctions, that the only purpose of opera is to let the Sir Humphrey’s of the world feel superior, and use the intermission for political networking, then the case for funding the arts gets even worse - high art becomes a public bad, and instead of being subsidized ought to be assessed a special tax, like we do for cigarettes.

You can still study the political economy of the arts through Bourdieu’s lens, how elites have captured the arts and directed public money to uses that preserve their privilege. But your days as a “public funding for the arts advocate” are over.

(from the Los Angeles Times)

John Ganz concludes his post (rightfully) somberly:

Now, a clever reader might object at this point, “Well, what about a hipster type who doesn’t want people to know about their special tastes? Aren’t they just hoarding social capital?” Yes and no, perhaps. No one gets it like I get it could be someone essentially saying, “Other people who engage with this will see it as agreeable at best, or as a piece of cultural capital to show off their taste, but I perceive the beautiful in this thing, and I want to preserve that experience.” So paradoxically, an apparent snob might be invested in the universality and permanence of an aesthetic experience, while a popularizer might be using it a) to make a buck, or b) to pose with it and have a moment of fashionability before they discard the thing in the trash heap along with all the other fads, thereby destroying the sensus communis, the universal and timeless moment of beauty. I think people who work in museums and art education probably struggle with this: how to make aesthetic experience accessible enough to the public, but also communicate its importance and rarity. I think the best art criticism also does this: it’s welcoming without dumbing down.

To bring this full circle, we can already see how the communication revolution is actually quite corrosive to a sense of community. I think part of what’s so dispiriting about the almost cancerous growth of AI and technology is what it seems to be doing to aesthetics: it’s pulping it, turning it into slop, into another material to keep the engines running. And it’s sad and angering that there are many people, who I think are insensitive to the experience of the beautiful and the sublime, who seem to be celebrating this destruction. There’s a real sense in which it is really the destruction of humanity or a distinctly human way of experiencing the world.

I realize my post-retirement hobby reading of twentieth century British intellectual history is not for everyone, but I’ll try to get to something of general interest!

Kidd’s book is not quite what I expected: its focus is Oxford and Cambridge (let’s follow him and call it Oxbridge), and for the most part consists of essays on specific episodes from the war to Thatcher, for example, why Oxbridge for the most part was so hostile to the introduction of sociology as a subject, why they did have an interest in social anthropology, what Oxbridge academics thought of their counterparts in the US and in France, etc. No chapter on my field of economics, which surprised me since Cambridge had a contingent of unorthodox critical scholars of economics that marked it as unique (search “Cambridge Capital Controversy” for a flavor).

The two chapters that most interested me were the first and the last. The first dealt with Oxbridge academics during the war, and the extent to which they took part, not only in highly specialized functions like code-breaking, but also on the front lines, being held in, and sometimes escaping from POW camps, and the like:

The historian and philosopher Michael Oakeshott, a fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, served during the campaign in the Netherlands and northwest Germany in 1944-45 as a captain in B Squadron of Phantom, a special reconnaissance and liaison unit which maintained communications between headquarters and fighting units. An even-tempered team player, Oakeshott happily indulged his troops, who were generally much younger [Oakeshott would have been in his mid-40s: MR], and demurely concealed his academic distinction.

The war was when Oxbridge opened more doors to women, suddenly being sparsely attended.

The last chapter is about Oxbridge in response to Thatcher, or, more properly, changing social and political opinion which led to the rise of Thatcher (we could and should approach the influence of Reagan, then Trump, in the same way). I think we could narrow down the opinions which came to dominate conservative thinking about elite universities in the 1980s in the UK as (1) the faculty are left wing and unrepresentative, (2) they look down their noses at ordinary citizens, and (3) a healthy university sector would spend a lot more time thinking about the needs of industry.

And that set has had remarkable persistence. You get the occasional conservative calling for more study of the greats, but they are outliers.

What I’ve found in the last few decades is that while right-wing politicians will still pursue various “culture war” battles with universities, and which are bait I find hard to resist taking, the important lines of state control are through the perceived needs of the economy - what degree programs should continue to exist and which should be cut, and how new programs are meant to show their relevance, where relevance does not mean relevant to the human condition, but relevant to guesswork estimates of employment trends.

The recent embrace by public universities of AI as a relevant thing for industry takes this trend into laughable territory, as they promise state governments that their graduates will be “AI ready!” and try to persuade big tech capitalists that they ought to direct some of their wealth at funding new university programs.

Students have made clear that they hate this manipulation, and they see right through the con. They also know that nobody needs a course to tell them how to use these tools (even for sophisticated stuff like writing code rather than crappy essays on For Whom The Bell Tolls, faculty I know who find it a useful tool did not have to re-enroll in classes to figure it out).

This is pretty far distant from listening to grace in Latin while sitting at the high table at All Souls, but it’s a far distance on a road we’ve been on for a long time now.

I start with three stories, separated by decades.

One: I was an undergraduate in the 1970s. I did a big project in my Canadian Economic History class1 on the immigrant settlement of the prairies in the late nineteenth century, coincident with the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. I gathered a lot of data from various publications, and then carried out regression analysis by walking to the building on campus that had the computer, entering the data into punch cards, feeding it into a reader, and then going to get a coffee as I waited around for a printout of the results to come. I was rather proud of the essay I ended up with.

Two: In 1997, the (highly respected) economist Xavier Sala-I-Martin published a paper in the American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, with the unusual title “I Just Ran Two Million Regressions.” It’s good stuff, trying to take various things people thought contributed to the economic growth of nations and sorting them out. Twenty years earlier, I would have laughed if someone suggested running two million regressions, but the changes in computing power, and in the software that would enable such work - no more punch cards - made it possible.

Three: The Stanford Graduate School of Business just published a conference report, entitled “Why AI makes this ‘the most exciting time to be a social scientist.’”:

Rose Tan, a Stanford economics PhD now at Snowflake, opened the day with a live demo. Starting from an empty folder, she asked Claude Code to fully replicate a classic economics paper, then format the results into a polished manuscript and an interactive web page. The one lesson she wanted students to take away: “Ask the LLM. No question is too small.”

Andrew Hall, the Davies Family Professor of Political Economy at Stanford GSB, said he reorganized his lab around AI agents in December and has been publishing weekly since. …

With AI agents handling coding, literature review, and data work in parallel, a single student could direct the output of what used to take a whole team. “Grad students used to be the guy tinkering in the garage,” [Matthew] Gentzkow said. “You’re now running a firm with a hundred people in it. Take yourself to business school.”

For all the things wrong with AI, its proponents always cite what they see as one unambiguously good thing: it makes writing code an awful lot faster. While this increase in computing power and speed might displace some jobs, that is unlikely, for now, to happen in the university sector.2 After all, the number of social scientists in any college department (except for the super-prestigious research powerhouses) is determined by how many students want to take their courses. In the long run enrollment determines faculty numbers determines the amount of research. This is funny when you think about it - research is valuable, has a social good, and this is how we will decide how much economics relative to sociology relative to history research gets done. But anyway: faculty whose research involves data will be able to produce a lot more research papers, but that won’t reduce the need for faculty. Young researchers who are pleased with this ought to be just a little bit wary: the possible will become the expectation, and AI doing your coding and “literature reviews” will not, in the end, leave you with more leisure time.

So where will those papers go?

[Guido] Imbens, in his opening, asked what happens to peer review if the quantity of plausible-looking research jumps by an order of magnitude. Gentzkow, who edits one of the American Economic Association journals, said he’s on regular calls with fellow editors about exactly that. As the quantity rises, he said, the scarce commodity becomes judgment.

Let me digress, to the cultural world. In my view (this is not held universally) the goal of cultural policy should be that more great art gets made (however different people might define “great”), and that more people have the ability to recognize, and the desire to enjoy, great art. There is no shortage of mundane, ordinary art. Thousands of novels are published each year, in the US alone. The internet tells me over one hundred thousand new songs are added to streaming platforms every day. We don’t need to encourage more of it (that seems to be the goal of guaranteed income for artist programs, but I’ve said my piece on that).

In the last years of my academic career, I was asked to serve as reviewer for academic journals for a lot of papers that were mundane and ordinary. They were competent, for the most part (desk review would not send out to referees the obviously bad). But they were not interesting in the sense of asking a question that anyone would really care about, even in their sub-discipline. Sometimes I got the distinct impression the authors themselves did not care, and whether this explanatory variable proved to be statistically significant but this other one did not was not something interesting even to them. The point of the research was to produce a publishable paper, as their employment required of them. And the development of tools that made it much easier to run countless regressions on a desktop made producing this sort of paper relatively quick.

And in many of the fields and journals in which I was at least peripherally involved, the ratio of interesting work to the ordinary and mundane was shrinking.

Of course there is still some really great work being done in the social sciences, policy analysis and management. There are scholars I really admire. But the expansion of the number of published pages has generated a lot of material that just doesn’t seem to have been worth the time, that will sink without a trace.

And that was before AI.

And so, I suppose, a plea. Let the advantages that AI provides in writing code, in producing bloated literature reviews, in formatting graphs and tables, not produce more research papers. We don’t need an increase in the rate of production of research papers, any more than we need more bad covers of “Yesterday,” or novels about TikTok influencers. Let the outcome be that researchers get more time to really think through what questions it would be worthwhile to try to answer, to spark enquiry into new directions, new ways of thinking about how to understand and model human behavior. Make the latest issue of a journal something people in that field actually look forward to seeing.

Reverse the trend.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports:

Jayson Gillham believes artists have a right to bring their whole selves to the stage.

“I believe that everyone has the right to freedom of expression,” the internationally acclaimed, London-based pianist says.

That’s why the British Australian musician, 39, is suing the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) for discrimination based on political belief, after it cancelled one of his scheduled performances in August 2024.

His recital was cancelled after he dedicated a new piece by Australian composer Connor D’Netto to journalists killed in Gaza at a concert in Melbourne on August 11, 2024.

“Over the last 10 months, Israel has killed more than 100 Palestinian journalists,” Gillham said, introducing the piece, titled Witness.

“A number of these have been targeted assassinations of prominent journalists as they were travelling in marked press vehicles or wearing their press jackets. The killing of journalists is a war crime in international law, and it is done in an effort to prevent the documentation and broadcasting of war crimes to the world.” …

In response to Gillham’s remarks, the MSO apologised for offence and distress caused and added it “does not condone the use of our stage as a platform for expressing personal views”, canning his next scheduled performance.

Within days, the MSO said cancelling Gillham’s concert had been an “error” and committed to rescheduling the recital.

But negotiations between Gillham and the orchestra quickly fell apart. In October 2024, he launched legal action in the Federal Court, saying the MSO had rejected “reasonable requests to remedy the situation”.

“This battle in the Federal Court is about defending everyone’s right to freedom of speech,” he said on Instagram. “It’s about ensuring artists can perform with integrity and without fear of censorship.”

In this piece I am not going to give my own, I think unremarkable, thoughts on conflict in the Middle East. I just want to think about Gillham’s claims about free speech.

If the Melbourne Symphony does not want guest performers making political statements during their concerts, it has every right to say so. If it “does not condone the use of our stage as a platform for expressing personal views”, then probably best to make this clear to any featured performer as they draw up their contract (and I don’t know if that happened in this case). Unless explicitly granted, no artist has complete freedom of speech on stage. An actor cannot decide on their own to interrupt a performance of Twelfth Night with a political dedication. Some performing arts organizations might think such political statements are fine, actually, and they can say so. Or a politically-oriented artist could produce their own shows, as Gillham seems to have moved towards. But if the MSO does not feel that way, there is no “free speech” right that overrides it.

The audience at an orchestra concert (Gillham does not raise the topic of “the audience”) is captive, and deserving of consideration; many of them, like me, might prefer to enjoy their orchestral music neat. To insist that they must be made to listen to the guest performer’s political thoughts, even when the orchestra management has said it doesn’t go in for that sort of thing, is self-indulgence.

And I doubt most artists would agree with a blanket “free speech” right at invited gigs anyway. Suppose a featured violinist, before their performance, said “I dedicate this performance to those who died, and their families, in the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel, and support Israel’s right to self-defense and to bring justice to those who committed this heinous crime”. Would Gillham think that free speech deserves protection? Suppose a guest artist wanted to talk about other political issues, or value-added taxes, or the Westminster parliamentary system, or that Vegemite is an abomination? Suppose a guest artist addressed the audience with racist opinions on Australia’s Indigenous people, or made a grossly homophobic joke. The ABC story the next day would not be about “free speech”, but about demands that the musician never be invited back.

Here in the United States, there is an ongoing cycle in the discourse between “campuses need to allow free speech” and “no, not like that”. But to my mind the “no, not like that” people are in the right - for an institution to function, there will always need to be some boundaries.

Note the Gillham case is different from artists expressing political views in a separate forum from their contracted performance. The ABC story goes on to say,

It's a cultural context that has seen the recent scrapping of a children's book by an Indigenous author lead to a mass boycott of a celebrated publisher and the dis-invitation of a Palestinian Australian author causing the collapse of a writers' festival.

But this is not the same situation as political statements being a part of the work or performance, and they shouldn’t be confused - the “cultural context” is quite different. To take their first case, the scrapping of the children’s book had nothing to do with the author, nor the fact that she is Indigenous (why even mention that?), nor the content of the book, but that the illustrator of the book had posted a viciously antisemitic article on Substack in the wake of the terrorist attack at Sydney’s Bondi Beach (I won’t link to it, but you can find it in this story in The Guardian). Whether that was a good or bad decision by the publisher I leave as an exercise for the reader, though I do think it is up to them (and remember there have been protests over not scrapping books by notorious figures). If someone had written a brilliantly researched and presented account of the geological features of the Dampier Peninsula in Western Australia, and then made horribly misogynist statements on social media, what would the reaction be to a university press going ahead and publishing it anyway? I have written before that if a publisher, or an orchestra, or a gallery, contracts with an artist whose politics are well-known, then there’s an obligation to stick with them, even in the face of protest (and any politics is going to draw at least some sort of protest from somebody). My university’s last-minute cancellation of an exhibition of the work of Samia Halaby remains a stain on its reputation. But I would grant that something new coming to light might warrant a reconsideration.

What the Gillham case is about is not “free speech”, but that he thought his speech, addressing his cause, at a Melbourne Symphony performance, ought to have been permitted. He can negotiate such an arrangement, but he can’t claim it as a matter of right.

We would not have our Guardians grow up among representations of moral deformity, as in some foul pasture where, day after day, feeding on every poisonous weed, they would, little by little, gather insensibly a mass of corruption in their very souls. Rather we must seek out those craftsmen whose instinct guides them to whatsoever is lovely and gracious; so that our young men, dwelling in a wholesome climate, may drink in good from every quarter, whence, like a breeze bringing health from happy regions, some influence from noble works constantly falls upon eye and ear from childhood upward, and imperceptibly draws them into sympathy and harmony with the beauty of reason, whose impress they take.

Plato, The Republic, Book III (trans. F. M. Cornford).

The academy believes in developing in their cadets the essential values of respect, responsibility, integrity, kindness, and caring. The Honor Code mandates that “A cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do.” Character is taught everyday both in and outside of the classroom while focusing on traditional values ethics, honesty, loyalty and accountability.

From the website of the New York Military Academy.

This weekend James Traub had a guest essay in the New York Times: “Strict Uniforms. Ancient Philosophy. Can a Public School Cure Our Toxic Politics?” (here’s a gift link). It is about the growth in so-called “classical schools”, which combine more rigor in student deportment with some education in classic texts from Western Civ:

The students were talking about the part of Virgil’s “Aeneid” in which Aeneas tells Queen Dido of Carthage the story of the Trojan War and the travails that had brought him to her shore. Their teacher, Jeremiah Lemon, asked if Aeneas was telling the truth or shaping the tale to his own advantage, as Odysseus had done in “The Odyssey.”

“I think he’s telling the truth,” said one student. “Odysseus was trying to make himself look good, but Aeneas is telling Dido all the dirty details.”

“I agree,” said another. “I think he wants to show Dido that he can persevere, that he can go through hardship and still come out of it.”

That second comment was a reference to Eagle Ridge’s moral code: Citizenship, integrity, perseverance, honor, excellence and respect. Those virtues are meant to infuse the school’s daily life. Almost everyone in Mr. Lemon’s class wanted to talk, but no one interrupted. There was no showboating. The students had arranged their desks in a big square to facilitate this Socratic seminar. At one point, a girl looked at a student who hadn’t spoken and said, “What do you think about this question?” And the student answered.

The problem, as Traub sees it, is that a heavy-handed moralism in nineteenth and early-twentieth century American schools led to a backlash in the form of individualism and “self-esteem” as the primary goals of schools, inevitably drifting into moral relativism1.

Traub goes on:

Every school says it encourages civil discourse and mutual respect. But that can be the precondition for something greater. At Eagle Ridge, the habit of thinking in serious moral terms enabled the kind of conversation I heard in Mr. Lemon’s class. After talking about whether Aeneas was lying to Dido, Mr. Lemon asked whether the hero could freely choose to remain with Dido if he already knew that his fate was to found Rome. The kids concluded that fate probably precluded choice. Mr. Lemon then turned the question in a more personal direction: “What matters more, the fate or the journey to get to that fate?”

“Every single person is fated to die,” a student said. “But everyone has to make their own journey.” Another drew on his prior reading: “If you just knew Oedipus’s fate, you would think he was a terrible person. But once you understand the journey he took” — what both his father and mother had done — “you’d be more sympathetic.” They did not come up with an answer; after all, they were thinking about questions that had no definitive answer. And they were 14 and 15 years old.

Classical schools, and liberal education, may not be to your taste. But here’s a question to ask yourself: Would you feel better, or worse, if you knew that every future American citizen would receive an education like the one they get at Eagle Ridge?

Well, since he asks, worse.

It’s not that I object to students reading and thinking about and discussing the classics - I’m all for it. That said, while I don’t know about public schools in other places, at my children’s not-classical public high school, which has a mix of town kids and rural kids, they read Homer and Shakespeare and Goethe (though to be honest, by the end of reading him they felt as miserable as poor Werther himself), and they put on productions of Antigone; it’s hardly a cultural desert.

My bigger objection is Traub’s idea of a “cure for our toxic politics”, his notion - a twenty-five centuries old notion - that if only we ran schools this way, we would produce a better class of adults. This is just as misguided as those on the right (as well as some on the left, to be honest) who think that radical public school teachers are producing generations of Trotskyists, and that school choice and vouchers for private schools will see a surge in the ranks of Young Republicans. Our toxic politics - and it is toxic - was neither caused in our schools nor can it be cured there. The classmates at my own, pretty undisciplined, public school (an area was set apart in the courtyard for students who wanted to have a smoke between classes) turned out no less moral, no less civically responsible, than students who manage to obtain an elite, disciplined, classical education. There are ghastly people who drive our “toxic politics”, and it wasn’t an undisciplined high school that set them wrong. It is laughable to think the New York Military Academy’s most famous graduate, our toxic politician in chief, came to embody the “essential values of respect, responsibility, integrity, kindness, and caring.” Ethics is a practical activity, and children begin to learn it with their first steps and their first words. Some people will develop a worldview that that morals are for suckers, that might is right, that loyalty is to be demanded from others but does not constitute an obligation on oneself. The finest imaginable schools won’t change them.

We can teach students about the natural and the human world, its cultural heritage, and hope to instill intellectual and aesthetic curiosity. And we can also try to ensure that students are happy in what they are doing - education is not just future investment, like being sure to floss your teeth, but is about the present. I posted a note the other day about going to the local high school art show, and seeing students of all sorts getting great pleasure from showing their creations. It’s tough being a teen - you want them going to bed at night feeling good about the day and what’s to come tomorrow. Traub never convinces that his classical schools will do a better job of this.

I think the biggest weakness in Traub’s essay, and with this he is as one with the New York Times editorial board, who take it as axiomatic, is the assumption that the real problem in American politics is that people with different views don’t speak and listen to each other enough. That if only they could come together and see that we’re all just people trying to get along and make sense of the world.

At Eagle Ridge, they are taught to preface their remarks with, “I agree with you” or “I disagree with you.” Apparently they do disagree. Mr. Lemon told me that he listened to two girls whose parents were pro- and anti-Trump have a fierce political argument — then stand up and take each other’s hands.

Well that’s very nice. But we all live around and encounter people who vote differently from ourselves, and manage to do so with calm and civility. Sorry to keep going back to our local public school, but you don’t get fistfights breaking out over whether Trump’s tariff policy will actually revive manufacturing employment.

Our politics are toxic, but it’s not because ordinary citizens lack the ability to speak civilly with those who hold different political views. It’s because there are people in the highest political offices, and people who have their ear and influence, who have toxic ideas and want to do toxic things. As Adam Serwer famously put it, “the cruelty is the point.” That’s what toxic. And those toxic ideas are undiscussable.

Donald Trump: A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.

Me: With all due respect, Mr. President, I disagree. Let’s shake hands.

Trump’s view that black people are congenitally less intelligent than white people is certainly toxic, but it is not amenable to civil discussion between adults or schoolchildren. We cannot shake hands on it.

And so, no, a public school cannot cure our toxic politics.

So what then is the point of “classical schools”, if you can read and discuss the classics in any ordinary public school (and we do) and ordinary people seem to be able to discuss politics without screaming (and we do)?

It’s the aesthetics. People who’ve not themselves read Virgil or have any interest in actually doing so like the idea of kids in uniforms in highly disciplined classroom settings, undistracted by the riffraff who will hurt Kyle’s chances of getting into Dartmouth. Eagle Ridge’s website claims its uniform policy prevents unnecessary competition in fashion, but when I walk down the hall between classes at our school, I don’t see competition, but rather an anarchy of dress and dyed hair, and kids having a laugh, though not in single file. And these kids are alright.

I read a story yesterday about the attempts to make a local arts tax in Portland, Oregon slightly less bad, and since I used to teach about this sort of thing I thought it might be worth giving my personal quick-and-dirty checklist on local earmarked taxes for the arts.

Here are questions anyone wanting to propose such a tax ought to ask themselves:

What are we trying to achieve? The answer cannot just be “yay arts!” because you are going to be asking locals to pay more in taxes and they rightly will want to know what it is for, how it will make life better in the community such that the additional taxes are worth it. Even answering “the arts are a nice thing for communities” isn’t enough: how so, specifically? When I worked in government, my boss would always ask people with proposals for a new thing “what problem are you trying to solve?” There should be a clear answer.

How will we distribute the funds? This question can only be asked after you have a solid answer to the first question: how you distribute money depends on what you are trying to achieve. Grants for young artists, or other subsidies to individual artists? A wide distribution across various nonprofit arts organizations? A focus on your very big institutions, so they have more secure financing? It depends on what you think is lacking in your community. Do your biggest institutions really need more money, that cannot be raised through philanthropy? Why?

Should it just be for the arts? Probably not - the nonprofit arts alone don’t have enough of a base that actually cares. But if you add in history and science museums, botanical gardens, aquariums and zoos, bike paths, and so on, you start to build a bigger coalition of interests. Think about residents with little kids who can’t get to the symphony, but want things to do with their family.

Why an earmarked tax? An earmarked tax is where the revenues do not go into a general fund, but are set aside for a specific purpose (as with the federal government’s gasoline tax, for example). The good thing about earmarked taxes for the arts is that they give a generally (though not perfectly) predictable amount of money year to year, not subject to shifting needs from the rest of the local government budget. But that’s also the bad thing: if you ask a treasury official about earmarked taxes, they don’t like them, since it reduces government flexibility to address long-term shifts in where money is needed. Arts funding doesn’t amount to a lot of money, so maybe not such a big deal, but you wouldn’t want a local system full of earmarked taxes. An alternative is always just to have an arts council that is financed out of the general fund, remember.

What’s your geographic scale? You can do a tax for a large and sprawling metro area, but only if people at the edge of the sprawl will get at least some benefit from it. I once did a study on voting in a failed referendum in metro Detroit for an arts tax (it’s paywalled, but I think there’s a free pdf out there if you google for it, or just ask me in a note), and people in the far northwest of Oakland County were being asked to have an increase in their property taxes to fund organizations predominantly on Woodward Avenue, 58 miles away. If you use a big area, the distribution of funds has to be wide. (metro Denver’s seven-county arts district ensures funding is spread out - it seems to be pretty popular there).

Should big arts organizations get a guaranteed proportion of the funds, or should they write grant proposals every few years like everyone else? This always proves to be a sticking point, and you can easily imagine how local arts bosses divide on this. I don’t like guaranteed allocations. It allows for a certain complacency in those with a guarantee, they are typically the ones with actual staff to handle applying for grants to the local fund, and it deters new ventures. Suppose I have an idea for a big new arts thing in Shelbyville, and I am told, “well, yes, there is a local arts tax, but you’ll be fighting over a share of the twenty percent left over after eighty percent has gone to the legacy institutions that got here before you did.” I’ll look elsewhere.

What tax base? State laws might restrict your options here, and whatever you choose will typically need approval through a referendum. My advice is to keep it simple. Metro Denver and Salt Lake County add a tenth of a percentage point to the retail sales tax, which is easy, and evenly distributed. Some places use a tax on hotel stays: this is also fairly simple. Do not think that this means “great, we’ll just get people who live somewhere else to fund our arts!” The incidence of a hotel tax is to an extent borne locally. Otherwise, why not fund your entire local government this way? Property taxes are also used in some places (St. Louis does this for a small group of big institutions). But people hate property tax increases. And you can hit a ceiling, where increased tax rates simply lower assessed values of properties. You don’t need to get fancy about this. In the Portland story linked above they talk about a possible levy on streaming services, but … why? “We are going to tax you for watching a movie at home when you could have been at a gala performance at our opera” doesn’t add up to me. Don’t choose a base that is clearly regressive, ie where the poor will pay a larger share of their income than the rich - this was a real problem with Portland’s head tax. In some countries and states they use lottery profits to fund the arts, and that is very, very bad, about the most regressive tax base there is (maybe with the exception of funding the arts through taxing cigarettes - I’m looking at you Cleveland - but at least there you can cite a public health benefit from the tax).

Yes, Minister ran on BBC television in the early 1980s, the early Thatcher years (I’ll come back to the importance of this). I enjoyed it at the time (I was pretty young), and recalled it when I went to work in government myself in the 1990s. Canada has a UK-style Westminster parliamentary system, with more of a permanent staff of senior bureaucrats than in the US where political appointments play a much larger role.1 The theme of the show is how the permanent secretary (the civil servant at the head of the bureaucracy) Sir Humphrey Appleby (played by Nigel Hawthorne) attempts, sometimes with success and sometimes not, to get the elected politician and new cabinet member Jim Hacker, “Minister of Administrative Affairs” (Paul Eddington) to adopt policies that he, Sir Humphrey, would like to see, even when Hacker initially disapproves. The joke in the title is that each episode ends with Sir Humphrey saying “Yes, Minister” as if following a directive from Hacker, but in fact often it is Sir Humphrey who has managed to get Hacker to come around to Sir Humphrey’s views. It is genteel comedy, cleverly written and acted. It is not like the other, later, great British program about the relationships between cabinet and the senior civil service, The Thick of It, which is much more explicit in its anger and disgust at the methods of the government of Tony Blair. Still, Yes, Minister also has a pretty bleak view of how governments make decisions, as we shall see.

Season 3, Episode 7 is called “The Middle Class Rip-Off”, and it is about public funding for the arts. You can find the episode for a dollar or two on most streaming platforms, but here is a free clip that gives the gist:

The plot: Hacker is visiting his Midlands constituency in his role as MP, and is told by local council members that the city’s soccer team, Aston Wanderers,2 is on the brink of bankruptcy. It could be saved through funds earned from selling the Corn Exchange Art Gallery (a rather dismal and not-well attended place) to a supermarket chain. Hacker thinks this is a marvelous idea. Sir Humphrey is appalled by it, seeing the thin end of the wedge of reducing arts funding in favor of subsidizing more popular entertainments - that’s where the clip above is taken. Sir Humphrey then puts his plans in motion: ensure the Art Gallery building’s heritage listed status makes demolition impossible, arrange a shuffle so that Hacker’s portfolio is increased by his becoming Minister with responsibility for the Arts in addition to Administrative Affairs and Local Government, such that having his first act in that role be the closing of an art gallery would look very bad, and use a pending increase in local council salaries and expenses to buy off the constituents who had been pressuring him (they reply that they could always knock down a primary school).

I was reminded of it because I get a notice whenever anyone has cited my Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts book in a journal, and Connell Vaughan did so in this article in the Irish Communication Review, where he talks about contemporary Irish arts policy in light of this old Yes, Minister episode, and likens Sir Humphrey’s views on the arts to what I said in my chapter on conservative arts policy. He’s a bit snarky about my book, I think for even broaching the topic, but never mind - I’m more interested in Sir Humphrey and Minister Hacker.

Yes, Minister was written by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn3. Lynn was a career writer for television and movies, but Jay had worked in government, and served as an advisor in the Thatcher government. Thatcher’s government was revolutionary in its ideology, and strongly wanted to sweep the Sir Humphrey’s out of the bureaucracy, or at the very least get them to adapt to a new way of thinking. Thatcher loved Yes, Minister - it was the only comedy she really liked.

Thatcher, more than any other Anglophone head of government I can think of, with maybe the exception of Australia’s Paul Keating,4 was heavily influenced by academic economists (though she herself had studied Chemistry). She took them seriously, and had people with strong credentials in her policy circle. She read, and met with, Hayek, as well as the most prominent monetarist economists. Her famous pronouncement:

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’ ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.

is straight from the adoption in economic modeling of methodological individualism - that there is nothing to say about the well-being of society other than the well-being of individuals and/or families.

In my book I also devoted a chapter to the economic approach to arts funding - a free working version is available here - and, in a way Jim Hacker would approve, the economic approach rests entirely on the existing tastes and preferences of the public. In the economic method, there is no room for Sir Humphrey’s elevation of taste, or of preserving something of value that your ordinary person does not think of as valuable. The economic approach to arts funding is built on the slim reed of whether there are “market failures” - spillover effects - but even that argument relies on the public recognizing the market failure and thinking something ought to be done about it. You can be an economist and still favor government support of the arts, but it’s not your economic models that will give you much justification; you will need to look elsewhere.

Now that applies to football too. But in practice we subsidize anything with a powerful enough constituency, even if small in numbers of people, and without justification through economic modeling. And so the arts keep their funding, even through Tory (or Republican) governments, and there are also subsidies to lucrative sports, and to film production, and to growing corn, whatever. In discussions with my arts policy peers I sound the warning that if there is to be no judgment about what sorts of art is worthy of funding, then it gets hard to justify any public funding at all. What makes art so special?

Sir Humphrey’s manner of arts advocacy is dead - there’s not one leader of a public arts funder who would (out loud) say anything remotely close to what he says in this episode. Nobody in government would have said it even in 1982 when the episode aired (I’m excluding Roger Scruton and the like). He is set up as a representative of everything Thatcher and her supporters hated in the conservative establishment, and it is shown through the episode that his support for “civilization” is nothing but self-serving snobbery. For all of Jim Hacker’s naivety, and, in the end, willingness to change tactics when it suits his own political future, his views on arts funding, a “middle class rip-off”, are never, in the episode, shown to be wrong: in the episode the opera is a place for men in black tie to enjoy smoked salmon sandwiches, and for permanent secretaries to plot to foil their political “masters” (although a scene is set at the intermission (shown at the top of this post) we never actually hear any music). And Sir Humphrey’s fulminating over saving civilization is always accompanied by audience laughter. No ordinary person could actually just enjoy opera.

One aspect of the episode that might seem quaint is the high arts being described as for the “middle class” - I’m not sure if anyone would say that today. Another is the notion of live football as the workingman’s pleasure. I looked online, and if I want to see Birmingham’s Aston Villa (one half of the model of the team in Hacker’s constituency) play at home against a pathetic and desperate Tottenham Hotspur on May 3rd, the cheapest ticket I can find is £87. If I wait a few days and instead go to see the touring Welsh National Opera perform The Flying Dutchman at the Birmingham Hippodrome, the most expensive seat is £69. This doesn’t mean the episode got things wrong - football has changed much more than the arts since the 1980s. But very, very rich sports teams still come around to local governments asking for public funds for stadium upgrades.

I’ve always been skeptical of the idea that simply engaging with a lot of narrative fiction will make people more ethical, or more generally empathetic (which is not the same thing), or will increase the depth of their political understanding. There isn’t any evidence for it, and too many counter-examples of well-read jerks and political cranks.

But don’t the stories told in novels, films, plays and operas have moral and political content? Yes, the author will bring some sort of moral framework to what they compose, and assume that the audience will be for the most part on the same page. I am what Noel Carroll would call a “moderate moralist”, where usually I can appreciate the art in a work without thinking about its moral assumptions, unless the author has brought forward a point of view so contrary to what I believe that it negatively affects my ability to appreciate the aesthetic value of the work.

What about works that challenge my ethical or political assumptions, but in a good way? Works where the author, without simply writing a polemic, can open my eyes to a different way of thinking about human relationships? Martha Nussbaum, in previous works like Love’s Knowledge and Poetic Justice, has argued that yes, some fictional works can increase our understanding in ways that an analytic argument might fail. In a 1998 essay responding to a critique of any attempt to conflate morals and art by Richard Posner, she wrote:

Love’s Knowledge, where my primary concern is with moral philosophy, and with the claim that moral philosophy needs certain carefully selected works of narrative literature in order to pursue its own tasks in a complete way; and Poetic Justice, where my concern is with the conduct of public deliberations in democracy, and where my claim is that literature of a carefully specified sort can offer valuable assistance to such deliberations by both cultivating and reinforcing valuable moral abilities. In neither work do I make any general claims about “literature” as such; indeed, I explicitly eschew such claims in both works, and I insist that my argument is confined to a narrow group of pre-selected works, all of them novels, and some of which (the novels of James and Proust, for example) are frankly very critical of their predecessors and contemporaries in the genre. I also make it very clear that even in terms of the general line of inquiry I map out, I have chosen to focus rather narrowly on certain questions about how to live, and to leave other equally interesting questions to one side. …

With the condition that she wants to consider selected works, I am on board. The late Earl Winkler, who I had for my undergraduate course in Ethics at UBC, used this technique, and to this day it remains about the most memorable class I ever took.

And so to Nussbaum’s latest book: what can opera contribute to political thinking?

The hero of the book is Mozart, and the first half of Republic of Love is devoted to a close listening to his operas. Note listening: Mozart himself said that with his operas the music comes before all else, and Nussbaum argues we cannot possibly understand the underlying moral vision of his (or anyone’s) operas simply through reading the librettos (in some cases, say Così fan Tutte, it would be quite misleading). Nussbaum calls Mozart one of the greatest philosophers of the Enlightenment, a bold claim. How does he earn this title? The late eighteenth century saw revolutionary change in how people saw their relationships to one another and to the state. What is expressed through Mozart’s operas (sometimes with difficulty) is the idea that this new world of liberté, égalité, fraternité needed men to discard past notions, or obsessions, with hierarchy, honor and revenge, possession and power, and through a change of heart come to love one another as we are, to show mercy and compassion, to listen to the women in their lives, to accept our imperfections, to be able to laugh at ourselves (Bernard Williams said that we should take Mozart’s comedy seriously; to be able to see oneself as slightly ridiculous is the beginning of moral thinking, and is vital to a happy romantic relationship. See also Verdi’s Falstaff, discussed by Nussbaum later in the book).

[Isabel Leonard as Cherubino, a character seen by Nussbaum as a very nice expression of Mozart’s vision of a new sort of man, in Glyndebourne's (2012) Le Nozze Di Figaro]

In terms of Nussbaum’s own politics, while there is much of a standard liberal progressivism in her outlook, I was most reminded during her discussion of Mozart’s politics of her work on the concept of capabilities in thinking about well-being and equality (though she herself does not use the term directly here). This is the idea (which she developed together with Amartya Sen, though I think Nussbaum did more to try to work through the practical implications - I used to have my students read her essay in Women and Human Development) that while it is important to ensure people all have a basic income and the necessities of life, and constitutional protections of their rights, we also need to think deeply about what sort of lives people are capable of leading on a day to day basis: being able to take part in the ordinary aspects of society, everyone being treated as worthy of equal respect and dignity, no one living as an exile, whether outside of society or within. These are aspects of welfare that go beyond what the state alone can provide - they require an understanding amongst citizens regarding how we ought to treat one another (in The Republic of Love see especially Nussbaum’s analysis of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes).

The second half of the book takes various post-Mozart operas, from Beethoven’s Fidelio to the contemporary operas Nixon in China and Dead Man Walking to illustrate how these new ideas of love and mercy continued to shape the art.

The anti-Mozart here is Wagner, and she chooses Die Meistersinger as the representative work of everything that is evil in an exclusionary nationalism. She includes a story about its Prelude being performed at a ceremony she attended at The New School in New York, and its complete inappropriateness given the history of that institution (at my own university the Prelude, performed by our student orchestra, was the highlight of a ceremony celebrating the university’s bicentennial, and, to be honest, it is an amazingly invigorating piece).

Wagner is the arch-enemy of Mozart’s Republic of Love not because he hates Jews, though he certainly does hate them. He is Mozart’s arch-enemy because he hates craziness, doubt, playfulness, difference, and reciprocity, aspects that the Republic of Love cherishes and cannot do without.

I enjoyed this book. Those with much deeper knowledge of opera than I have might have some disagreements with her analysis - her unrelenting disparagement of Wagner will certainly generate criticism. “I think Tristan is a tedious opera and that the view of love in it - all unsatisfied longing and no reciprocity - is adolescent and boring” are fightin’ words. But then it wouldn’t be a very interesting book if it left nothing else to say. For a layperson like myself, who enjoys opera but only rarely gets a chance to attend (though the productions at our university are excellent), it gave a new perspective, and this is a book I will re-read if one of the operas she discusses has an upcoming performance. She also made me really hoping for a chance to see some operas I’ve never seen before - if Verdi’s Don Carlos or Janáček’s Jenůfa is being performed nearby, I will be there.

And Nussbaum does fine work here, without going on about it, in dispelling the notion that opera is, and can only ever be, “elite.” Her book, and the operas she discusses, are available to anyone willing to take the time. And the great operas do not need to be “reimagined”, or have the villain dressed in a blue suit with a white shirt and a solid red tie, to be “relevant” to an audience in 2026. There’s plenty in Mozart that is relevant as it stands.

I was pleased when I found that Samuel Scheffler had a new book. He wrote two of my favourite recent works in philosophy, each of which I would recommend to my students: his essay “Immigration and the Significance of Culture” (2007), and his short book Why Worry About Future Generations? (2020). There is a recent, favourable review of One Life to Lead in the London Review of Books, by Thomas Nagel. Consider me your poor man’s, your truly penniless and destitute man’s, Thomas Nagel.

At one point Scheffler quotes Julian Barnes, from his novel The Sense of an Ending:

We live in time - it holds us and moulds us - but I’ve never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes: tick-tock, click-clock.

And this book is an exploration of how we lead our lives - making choices, experiencing emotions, building attachments - through time. We live in the present, but we are aware of our pasts, and aware that there is a future ahead, and that these two things are not the same. We know we have ties to past and future generations, and to varying degrees we care about this. We change how we see the world simply through ageing and recognizing our mortality; I see the world differently than my twenty-something children do because they have all these years ahead of them, with relationships and journeys and loves and missteps to come, whereas I have a lot more past to look back upon, with happy memories and also regrets, and much less future. But we change in other ways too: we might have gone through periods of grief, of elation, of anger, and these emotions change as years pass, we “move on” (and if we don’t, someone is bound to tell us there are good reasons that we should). As we age it is also the case that an increasing number of people who were important in our lives die, and while we have memories of them, they are no longer able to do what living relationships do, which is to see the world with us and try to puzzle out what is happening, what we are experiencing. I can imagine what my late father might have made of something that happened yesterday, but it is not the same as sitting and talking with him about it.

Scheffler wants to think about the ways these two facts of our lives interact: we get older, with an increasing realization of our mortality, suffering the losses of people who were very important to us; and, that interpersonal relationships are vital to leading a good life.

The opening sections of the book respond to some ideas about time and rationality from Derek Parfit - I’ll confess to only having read bits and pieces of Reasons and Persons. I suppose this was necessary for Scheffler, since Parfit tried to convince us that there is something irrational in treating past and anticipated future pleasures and pains differently, that we ought to be neutral over such distinctions. Since I was raised as an economist, Parfit’s claims were not something that struck me as awfully important: we are who we are, and it’s not that weird to prefer that our pains are in the past and our pleasures are yet to come. But eventually Scheffler gets through this, and states the view he wants to work with:

it should seem obvious that we have many asymmetric attitudes towards our pasts and our futures. We remember the past but anticipate the future. We feel guilt, shame, remorse, and pride about what we have done, not about what we will do. We feel fear about future events but relief once they are over. Our appetites are directed forward, not backward; future meals can assuage our present hunger but past meals cannot. We decide what to do now or in the future but not in the past. Our plans are forward-looking and not backward-looking. We may be shaped, traumatized, and haunted by our pasts; we may face our futures with trepidation, excitement, or determination. And so on. These observations are meant to be philosophically naive. They are just descriptions of the conditions under which we normally ascribe attitudes of one kind or another to ourselves and to others. As such, they are largely platitudes, and neither Parfit not any other neutralist denies them of our actual practices of attitude-ascription. … The very idea that one has a life, let alone a life to lead, depends on one’s viewing one’s past and one’s future asymmetrically.

But if all this is just so much common sense, what is left to say?

It’s impossible to adequately and briefly summarize so dense a book, and since this is a blog post I will aim for being brief. We are “persisting” beings, living in the moment but aware of a past and a future (which will come to an end), and there are specific people and relationships to which we develop attachments (by this I mean we value these people as persons, but we also value the relationships in themselves). These two things are intertwined - we can only have relationships at all if we have a sense of the flow of time. A utilitarian (and I know I’m creating a bit of a straw man here) could claim, first, that there’s no difference in a pleasure or pain according to when it happens, and, second, that there’s no objective reason to value the welfare of any one person over another simply because I am close to them. But Scheffler says, no, that can’t be right. Our relationships, both with individuals and with groups (I value my family and my friends, but also the choir I sing in, the community I live in) are what make a life.

This doesn’t mean we believe that the people and projects with whom we have deep ties are more important than anyone else’s - the basic moral principle of all people having equal worth is not discarded. The well-being and the personal relationships and projects of someone in Boise or Benin whom I have never met are not any less important than mine. I have a duty of care to those in the world - again, people I’ve never met - who are in hard circumstances and could use a collective hand. As a liberal I also have an duty not to try to dictate to them how I think they could best lead a fulfilling life. To say that our personal and social relationships and projects have a special and justified importance in leading our own lives is not to toss out the principles of understanding the equal value of all persons, and to respect their ability to choose.

The relationships and projects we form we are deferential. Being married, raising children, having real friendships, means that you have to take your spouse’s and children’s and your friends’ agency and desires and hopes, and not just what you imagine to be their well-being, into account. When I choose a project, say singing in my chamber choir, I am voluntarily agreeing to hold up my end - to make sure I practice the music, be engaged in rehearsals and performances, assist with the various logistics of putting on a concert, and so on. If I decide that this time I really am going to try to improve my French, it means submitting myself to the vocabulary and grammar and idioms of the language. It is these genuine relationships and meaningful projects that form what it means to live a life, rather than just exist. It’s possible to spend one’s days with no personal relationships other than the transactional, and to consuming mindless entertainment that makes no demands upon us, but that wouldn’t amount to much in terms of leading a life.

Scheffler:

There is an important difference of spirit and emphasis between this view and those that emphasize the value of autonomous choice. Those views, as they are often formulated, point us inward. They emphasize the value of self-creation: of governing oneself through the choice of one’s ends and attachments. According to the attachment-sensitive view, by contrast, our attachments point us outward rather than inward, by requiring us to account for ourselves to others and to submit to the requirements of activities we find compelling. We achieve good lives not simply by ruling ourselves but by focusing our attention on the world around us …

I am sixty-seven, and it is maybe the loss of both of my parents in the past decade that has made me think more of the limited time I have left, to attend to projects that I care about, to make the most of my relationships with family and friends, to try to repair relationships that became estranged. I think about this passage, that has stayed with me since I first read it many years ago, from Paul Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky (1949):

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

One Life to Lead is so carefully constructed that there are places the reader might wish for an aerial view of the forest through which Scheffler is cutting a path through the trees. But there is something quite profound here, a challenge to ethical systems based upon liberal rights or upon utilitarian consequences, since the atomism (to use Charles Taylor’s word) that underlies each of these ways of thinking about morals is put to the test. Leading a life requires not just “interactions” with others, but at the very least some serious mutual engagement with them, and understanding the duties that come from being a part of the lives they are trying to lead. At the end of his review, Thomas Nagel writes, “it is impossible not to take [the book] personally. It will make you think about the shape of your own life.” He’s right.

[A human named David Szalay].

Paul Bloom posted this note on Substack:

I’ve always thought that I would never want to read an AI-written novel, no matter how objectively well-written it is. But I’m starting to question this. I’m on a real David Szalay kick these days; last night, I finished “London and the South-East”, which was terrific, and I’m looking forward to starting his “Spring” later tonight. But I wondered: Suppose I discovered that there is no David Szalay, just a David-Szalay-GPT. Would I still want to read “Spring”? Yes, I would. This discovery would persuade me that AIs are fully human, in the best sense, and so my reluctance would go away.

In the comments, at time of writing I’m the only person to have disagreed. I wrote off the top of my head:

I am on the same kick - London and the South-East was terrific (and very funny) and I have Spring in my queue. And yet, I would not have this reaction. When I read a Szalay novel, I have in mind as I read that there is a man named David Szalay who lives in this world who sat down and wrote this, that this human had a story he wanted to tell, hoping readers would get something from it. If I were told there is just David-Szalay-GPT, I would feel tricked (much as people in the past have been tricked by fake paintings), and I would know the copy of Spring on my shelf was not written by a man with a story he wanted to tell, and I would put it in the recycling bin. In music, painting, fiction, I want to know there is a human trying to say something - I’m not just looking for pleasing sounds and images and words.

So let me try to expand with something beyond the top of my head.

All an AI novel (or song, or visual image) can do is draw upon what exists in digital form on the internet. Programs can get very good at drawing from those sources - whilst there is an awful lot of AI slop out there, I feel pretty certain that it will eventually get less sloppy. But it is still limited to a particular, and limited, sort of knowledge.

Any artist worth the name brings something to their work beyond the art that has gone before. Their lives, their emotions, their sensations. And none of this is available to an AI program. I could try to prompt AI into writing something like David Szalay, and it could read his previous works as well as other authors, but that would be its only source. A good program could fool at least some readers, no doubt. But they are being fed a placebo. And placebos don’t work once people are told that’s what it is.

I imagined an artist who specialized in drawings of cats. At a gallery opening, someone says to the artist, “you must really like cats - how many do you have?” And the artist replies, “well, I don’t actually have any cats. In fact, I’ve never actually seen a cat. I’ve never played with a kitten, I’ve never felt a cat’s fur, I don’t know what a ‘purr’ sounds like. But I’ve seen pictures and videos of cats.”

I don’t think the main problem with AI-generated entertainment is that it is always terribly executed. More often than not it is, but these fakes will get better. I don’t think the main issue is putting real artists out of work. I am (naively?) optimistic that enough people feel like I do about real music and real writing. And that a greater appreciation can be developed in the young to recognize what is authentic and what is worthwhile.

The main problem for me is that the point of art is human connection. It is not about the “content” of what is being produced; it is about an artist trying their best to connect with listeners and readers. I might be tricked by AI masquerading as human - no doubt I already have been at times. But once I know it was a trick, I’m out. I’m not just looking for a sequence of words. I want to hear from somebody who has lived.

Charles Taylor’s The Ethics of Authenticity came recommended to me (thank you, Jessa!), and as a fan of Taylor’s I wondered why I was not familiar with it. So I ordered a used copy, and when it arrived and I opened it I found that not only did I already have a copy, I had also read it, back in the day, but under its Canadian title The Malaise of Modernity. So a young fellow I know who is studying philosophy gets the copy of Authenticity, and, since this deals with some common themes of a new book I wanted to read - Samuel Scheffler’s One Life to Live - I set out to re-read my Canadian paperback. You could consider this my second post in a row about the challenges, internal and external, facing liberalism.

The book is drawn from Taylor’s Massey Lectures of 1991 - these lectures are a big deal in Canada, broadcast over CBC radio. Reading Malaise we can hear Taylor’s voice, carefully setting out what questions he wants to address, and reminding us periodically about where we are in the discussion. It is a great, short introduction to his ideas, and requires no background in academic philosophy (though he will introduce some famous names along the way - I really do need to read some Herder).

There are three aspects of the malaise he wants to consider. People disagree over whether these are problems arising since maybe the 1950s, or the Industrial Revolution, or modernity itself, though that is something of a side issue; what matters is where we are now. And Taylor’s take from 1991 feels remarkably contemporary in some ways - I am interested into how the malaise has evolved in the thirty-five years since.

The first aspect is that the liberal commitment to people being able to live authentically - to determine for themselves what projects are worth pursuing, what sort of lives they want to lead, how they want to present themselves to the world, who they want to be - has in practice led to isolation (“atomism”, to take a word from another of Taylor’s essays), a turn into the self and away from our communities, and, according to its strongest critics, to a moral relativism, or even moral nihilism, self-centeredness and narcissism. And remember Taylor is giving this lecture pre-smart phone, pre-”social” media, those powerful accelerants to living a disembodied, disconnected life. The second aspect is the rise in the use of instrumental reason in bureaucracies, public and private, such that much of life seems governed entirely by questions of efficiency, to be solved through cost-benefit analysis, in which individual concerns disappear into estimated aggregated effects - if we feel detached from society, this must be related to the institutions with which we interact treating us as detachable units. The third aspect, which can be seen as arising out of a combination of the first two, is a withdrawal from self-government and politics, save for action on specific political issues of most concern to us, since we lack community foundations, and any sense that political participation could lead to actual change for the better through projects for the common good.

He spends most of the lectures on the first issue, but that leads to ways to think about the other two.

Taylor wants to defend the ideal of authenticity from its critics, but also from its boosters who sometimes take the idea of self-realization into a rather shallow and self-centered moral relativism. We can strive for self-actualization and making choices about our lives that are true to ourselves, sure, but only within a socially determined horizon of what choices actually matter, as opposed to those that are simply about tastes and pleasures. And what matters is determined through dialogue with others, using a common moral language. Even the idea “I should be free to live my life as I choose” is a moral position that cannot simply come from solitary reflection, but instead arises in the context of “this is an important moral stance,” which depends upon what our culture deems “important.” I recently re-read Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, which was still recent and quite salient when Taylor gave these lectures, and while Taylor does not want to follow Bloom all the way down his pessimistic path, he agrees that Bloom has a point that the college students of that time had adopted far too easily the language of moral relativism and “do your own thing” without understanding that it actually requires some work to come to that stance. It might be right that we are free to make significant life choices as we see fit, but we cannot on our own decide what counts as “significant.” Even the thought that being true to oneself is important cannot be arrived at purely through self-reflection; it is a conclusion arrived at in dialogue with others, using common language and understandings.

Taylor says this applies to the “solitary artist” as well. The artist alone cannot decide what constitute important choices in creating a work; what is important depends on the horizon defined by the imagined audience for the work. And while the move from the classical style of representation of nature into the Romantic era led artists to look inward for inspiration, it was with a sense of unity with the whole - it could never be severed from the actual world. Taylor uses a fragment from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” to illustrate:

And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

As with the desire to live authentically, so with the use of instrumental reason in bureaucracies: complex modern societies need some method of reasoning over decisions. The problem lies in such reasoning being “disembodied”, detached from the people who live and move through a real world of families, jobs, goals and frustrations, and, crucially, other people. We cannot get away from a market economy - even contemporary socialists don’t want to nationalise everything. But the field of economics relies on the method of methodological individualism; people exist as entirely independent units with their preferences over consumption goods and their human capital for the labour market all determined in an imaginary isolation, and so firms and governments come to treat them as such. (“New technology disrupts current employment? No worries, the unemployed can just take their embodied human capital to a new job”).

Finally, with the atomization of moral thinking, and the economy, comes a shift in political participation towards a focus on salient specific issues, which might only be of benefit to a small class of people, and away from projects that benefit the wide majority. Along with this, he notes, especially in the United States (though increasingly so in Canada as well), all political initiatives are challenged in court, with the legal system determining what shall be permitted and what shall not, and this can leave the ordinary citizen without the resources to pursue such cases with a sense of hopelessness of democratic participation.

What can we make of this in 2026? On his first concern, as to whether liberal ideals can lead to moral relativism if not actual nihilism, I thought at the time of Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, and to some degree of this lecture by Taylor, that the evidence of this attitude among young people was exaggerated. I spent forty-two years teaching in a variety of public universities, all decent ones but none particularly selective in their student intake, and both then and now I didn’t see it; students tend to hold a softer version of liberalism - free to make choices about identity and projects, but not without limit, and still with an ordinary sense of right and wrong beyond the core principle of leaving others alone. With friends of my own generation (and this is a biased sample of course - I’ll return to this) I see a sense of obligations to others, whether family or community, that come at a price, worth paying, in terms of seeking purely personal fulfillment. I do worry that as subtlety in language is possessed by fewer students, and as culture becomes flat, “listless”, there is less scope for imagination, of ways for young people to express themselves and to develop ideals. A culture of authenticity requires rich soil, and it is being depleted.

On the other hand, the other two aspects of the malaise seem much more striking today. There has been a noticeable shift from when I was in my early twenties to what people in their early twenties in 2026 face from employers, who now treat unstable employment as simply a norm, and who treat the idea of teaching a fresh employee how to do a job as not their business (“you need experience to do this job, and it’s not up to us to provide it”). Other bureaucracies increasingly force interactions with computer programs rather than with humans. There is tremendous disillusionment (and universities ought to be held to account for creating some of those illusions in the first place) among young people trying to get a foot in the door of adult life.

In politics, one can only say that government in the United States is simply dysfunctional. There is no clear idea of what various departments and agencies are even for, traditional understandings of public service have been obliterated, and even the simplest functions now seem to be beyond the reach of Congress. Local government is somewhat better, because potholes need filling and people across a wide range of political opinion like the idea of clean water coming from their kitchen tap. But even there, even in my quiet college town, big new projects will be litigated for years, because somebody, somewhere, doesn’t like it.

I don’t often write about the Trump administration on this blog. I used to, but came to find it pointless. Why write an article about why he is wrong about tariffs, or interest rate policy, or Canada, or that his cabinet consists in knaves and fools doing untold damage? “Reason” is not the medium of discourse with him and the politicians who have made the choice to give him all the freedom he wants. Props to those who have the stomach to tackle these issues day in day out, but I can’t.

But I’ll make an exception here. Because if I didn’t see in my students the moral nihilism Allan Bloom warned about, the lack of any external constraint on the pursuit of personal goals, and I don’t see it in my friends and colleagues, it is entirely evident in Trump. Words cannot capture his degree of self-regard, and of seeing the entire world and its inhabitants as just so many means to his ends. The “tech bros” who support him (though they don’t think he is awfully smart either) join with him in seeing human beings as disposable, and as such with no need for any restraints on how new technologies might upend lives.

[“Capture in a single image the various strands of the contemporary malaise”].

In their minds government itself is something of a joke: public servants can be fired at will - after all, they weren’t doing anything of value - and there are no such things as public goods or public obligations. If the state is good for anything it is for pursuing personal retribution, or the imposition of quack medicine, but there’s no call for the richest society in human history to even care about those parts of the world less well off.

The malaise of modernity has not come from the liberals (although they wrote the philosophical treatises on living authentically) or even the economist neoliberals with their methods of policy analysis and “abundance”. It manifests itself through what used to be called “conservatism” has become: a movement that sees people as disposable, “social welfare” as an illusion, politics as a means of rewarding supporters and punishing enemies, all led by someone without a gram of empathy or generosity towards others.

Taylor tries to offer a way back in terms of clarifying our thinking, of tying each of our unique, individual selves to a common good of humanity, indeed of all of nature. But it seems awfully distant right now.

(Kudos to the art director who chose that American flag done with handprints - it’s perfect).

I enjoyed reading Becca Rothfield’s “Listless Liberalism” in The Point, in which she reviews Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, and Cass Sunstein’s Liberalism, and also asks the question of why the aesthetics of a liberal society, barely addressed in either of these books’ defenses of liberalism, seems such weak tea:

There are reams of writing about fascist military parades and socialist-realist murals, yet there is almost nothing comparable about the dull tint at the end of history. Where is liberalism’s “Fascinating Fascism”? Who is its Riefenstahl? At least in its most recent incarnation, it tends to disdain these questions. In its dreams of itself, it is unadorned—a skeletal set of principles and policies without any attendant body. Its heroes are too busy scanning polls and skimming white papers to bother with self-fashioning: in the quintessentially liberal TV series The West Wing, harried wonks pace the halls of the White House in ill-fitting suits and sensible shoes, trying to appear as if they eschewed the distractions of appearance altogether.

The challenge to the arts presented by liberalism is its principle of non-perfectionism - that the state, and society at large, has no business telling people what projects, what goals, what art, they ought to value. We are all to sort that for ourselves, so long as we don’t tread upon each other’s goals. The state can still have its own projects, but they are focused upon an efficiency in public services that everybody ought to agree on (Klein and Thompson) and on legal rules that protect our liberal rights (Sunstein). In this liberal world, the government doesn’t have a role in the arts, as it would violate the principle of state neutrality over what things in life are more worthy pursuits.

So in the end a liberal order produces whatever art is sustainable on its own, hoping at least some audience fragment will buy into it, and this is going to produce something of a hodgepodge, without a defining aesthetic, or, as Rothfield says of the most pro-liberal products of this entertainment economy, almost an anti-aesthetic:

Among the marquee mannerisms of recent liberalism we find chains selling salad bowls, mixed-use developments featuring glassy apartment complexes, the television show Parks and Recreation, the grocery store Trader Joe’s, the word “nuance,” glasses with rectangular frames, group-fitness classes, the profession of consulting, news startups focusing not on criticism or reporting but on commentary, and nonfiction that is a little too good for an airport bookstore but a little too slick and credulously economics-heavy for a literary magazine. The smug yet unconvincing performance of non-aesthetics amounts to aesthetics too.

It is because so many of liberalism’s most prominent defenders fail to recognize this patent fact that they are so mystified by their harshest critics. What so-called post-liberals like Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen and Vice President J. D. Vance rail against is not their antagonists’ doctrine—not really. Indeed, the post-liberals play so fast and loose with the actual tenets of liberalism that they are scarcely intelligible, so long as they are regarded as participants in a contest of ideas. But it is a mistake to suppose, as so many earnest liberals do, that these details matter. What the post-liberals get right—and the reason they are winning—is that the end of history has been sallow, ugly and deflating. Theirs is decidedly not an intellectual objection. It is not even an ethical objection, though it is often trussed up in the trappings of moral outrage. At its core, it is an aesthetic aversion. The long and short of it is that the post-liberals do not like liberalism’s manners. Would-be proponents of a waning world order can only hope to parry this attack if they confront it on its own terms.

Rothfield thinks the best liberal culture in America was able to produce was Partisan Review in its glory years:

One model for this kind of cultural production is the journal in which Trilling first published these lines: the fabled Partisan Review, a literary and political magazine that ran from 1934 until 2003 and that is perhaps the best that American cultural history—and certainly the best that American left-liberalism—has to show for itself. The Review published essays and roundtables alongside fiction from the likes of Kafka and Bellow. Its contributors argued about politics, but they also reviewed all sorts of art, from theater to paintings to novels. Its offerings were smart but never slick; its tone was learned but never condescending; its writers addressed the reader not as if she were a neophyte requiring illumination, but as if she were an interlocutor working out her principles in tandem. Its writers bickered with each other often—indeed, the magazine is bursting with passionate and sometimes bitter disagreement—but they never talked down to each other, much less to their audience. Its writers were proffering the most arduous efforts of their minds, and they were proffering them not in the certainty of rectitude or in the expectation of congratulations but in the hope of correction. The resultant essays were good because they were informed yet curious; the magazine as a whole was good because it was as variegated and crackling as the country itself.

I agree it was grand, but it was a liberalism with a clear sense of what art and criticism was about. There were judgments involved - criticism, obviously, demands it. In recent years, cultural policy in the US has been adrift because of a reluctance on the part of policy-makers to make any sort of claims regarding the support of excellence in the arts. Everything is about quantity, more “arts participation”, or simply “more art”, hoping the claim that these are good things is not too judgmental (I know I harp on about this, but “guaranteed income for artists” programs are the ultimate in “who are we to judge? - just do whatever” arts policy). The National Endowment for the Arts was founded around the mid-life of Partisan Review, and was a part of what was a liberal consensus that a small dose of perfectionism can be compatible with liberal principles; pure liberalism and full-on Nietzscheism are not the only two options.

Art can explicitly proclaim liberal values, though trying too hard can simply produce something dull and preachy (I’ll admit to never having made it all the way through a single episode of West Wing), or it can more subtly represent the artist’s desire to experiment with form and narrative. But it never comes from nowhere; great art cannot help but draw from what has come before. Even a liberal art world requires young people, audiences, budding artists, to know something about tradition, about why people thoughtful about the arts particularly value some works and some artists.

Thomas Nagel, in Equality and Partiality, said this about the strict Rawlsian anti-perfectionist position:

That there are things good in themselves … seems to me a position on which reasonable persons can be expected to agree, even if they do not agree about what those things are. And acceptance of that position is enough to justify ordinary tax support for a society’s effort to identify and promote such goods…

I’m with him. It’s possible to uphold liberal freedoms to be who you want to be and pursue those projects that you find most valuable while at the same time supporting a foundation of the best of our culture, in education and in public policy, and in supporting artists who have promise to do great things. If liberal culture now seems pretty listless, it is maybe because we have departed from what used to be, I think, a more reasonable balance between liberalism and recognition of what is most valuable in our culture. But we’re now to the point where the most prominent liberal writers can’t find anything at all to say about art or our cultural lives.

My previous post was about the tax deduction for donations to nonprofit arts. I reposted it at artsjournal.com, and received a friendly note there from antonio cuyler. His questions are (always) provocative, and I thought it worth sharing his note and my response here.

antonio writes:

I appreciate the systematic simplicity of your analysis, Michael. I take it that you believe conserving the system, with a tweak away from tax deductions to tax credits, is the best that we can do? Still, you have not answered six lingering questions that challenge the sector. First, are cultural organizations that receive tax exemptions and inure tax deductions to their corporate, foundation, and individual donors charities? If yes, do they have to carry out their missions in a charitable manner? If yes, what does it mean for a nonprofit cultural organization to carry out its mission in a charitable manner? If “the arts subsidy delivered through the charitable donation is more than ten times larger than direct government grants to the arts,” would the sector benefit from knowing an estimated valuation of this large gift to get the realistic whole picture (direct + indirect) of how the U. S. funds the arts? If yes, and not for the public who you suggested typically only gets involved when there is a bad grant, who is arts policy for, exactly? Finally, is tax policy toward arts nonprofits as currently practiced, which you would like to conserve with a tweak, suggestive of democracy or plutocracy?

As an illustrative case, the Metropolitan, and legacy cultural organizations do not need tax exemptions and deductions to achieve artistic excellence or sell tickets. Indeed, millions of artists and corporations achieve these outcomes without the protections of competing in the market afforded them by the nonprofit status. But, if Mr. Gelb wants to show that the art form is “not dying,” he could use human-centered design to serve as much of NYC as possible because there are people waiting to be convinced that opera is, indeed, a public good. Or is the sector most comfortable limiting the public’s involvement to a consequential point in the grantmaking process? He should also make haste to Chicago to see safronia. It’s a show about the Great Migration that New Yorkers deserve to see and contributes to sustaining opera’s 400+ years of holding humans’ attention.

Here was my response:

Hello Antonio, I appreciate your comments. I’ll tackle your questions in order.

First, here is the IRS:

“It has long been the position of the Service that “cultural” type organizations qualify for recognition of exemption under IRC 501(c)(3). S.M. 1176, C.B. 1, 147 (1919), holds that an association organized and operated exclusively for the purpose of giving musical concerts of an educational character is exempt.”

Your first three questions are moot: A musical recital, a production of Twelfth Night, or of Safronia, or a retrospective exhibition of the paintings of Mary Cassatt, put on by a nonprofit organization, are exempt. We can argue until the cows come home (and there is a neighbouring blogger who has done this) whether this is “charitable” in some sense, but it does not advance policy at all. This question has been put to bed.

On the fourth question, there are estimates I have seen of the magnitude of the tax expenditure related to the income tax deduction for giving to nonprofits, though I haven’t looked in a while. But they are out there.

The fifth question is a tough one: my book The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts gives varying answers to the question “who is this for”, and in the end I don’t try to say that any one of the possibilities is obviously the right one. It will always be a contested question.

Last question: our elected representatives to Congress have the power to change the policies and the allocations to the National Endowment for the Arts, and they also have the power to amend the language and the numbers of the Income Tax code. They can eliminate the charitable deduction entirely, they can change it to a credit, they can do lots of things. In that sense, both the income tax policy regarding nonprofit organizations and the nature of direct public funding is democratic. That some very rich people have a choice in the indirect public funding of the arts is something Congress can take away if it likes. It has chosen not to.

Finally: if arts policy folks think the government ought to take a closer look at which nonprofit arts organizations are worthy of being tax exempt and which are not, I remind them we are in the presidency of Donald J. Trump, and if someone were to suggest to his advisors there ought to be scrutiny on which arts organizations ought to get a tax exemption, I warn that the outcome might not be a pleasing one. cf. The “Trump Kennedy Center”.

I was at a seminar today given by Professor Philip Hackney of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, given (via web) at the Marxe School at Baruch College, on “Tax Policy Toward Arts Nonprofits: Democracy or Plutocracy?” It’s a good question! I won’t try to summarize what Professor Hackney said (if a link to a video recording is ever posted, I will link to it here. UPDATE - here it is). But it sparked me to try to articulate my own take.

I’ve come at this from a few angles in the past - here is an article I wrote for the academic journal Cultural Trends (paywalled, but just send a note if you want a copy), and here is a blog post on how the IRS looks at all this - but in this post I will try to be brief and somewhat systematic.

I think we can break it down into three questions:

One: Should the state be in the business of subsidizing the arts at all? Opinions differ, but I will venture that since almost all cities and states in the US, as well as the federal government, devote some direct funding to the nonprofit arts, even where there are Republican super-majorities, there is a broad agreement (mostly!) that yes, there is some value in doing this. That value is hard to express without being either crudely economistic or vague and handwaving, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist - after all, what we personally value in our favourite works and genres of art is very hard to express in words too. So let’s assume a “yes” in answer to this question.

Two: Should the state be in the business of subsidizing, through a tax break, at least some donations to nonprofit organizations? Here again, I’m going to say the long-standing tradition of doing so, with very little political opposition to it, indicates the answer is, broadly speaking, “yes.” There are opponents - in my home and native land Neil Brooks led a long, and, it has to be said, rather lonely opposition to the practice. He came at it from the political left, and said that charitable contributions were in effect just an ordinary use of income, not fundamentally different from private consumption; if taxation ought to be based upon ability-to-pay, there are no good grounds for giving donors, typically quite well off, a tax break for this sort of expenditure. Goods and services that are truly for the public benefit ought to be financed directly by government, and funded through a progressive income tax that does not give deductions for discretionary use of that income. But, again, I just don’t see elimination of the tax deduction having any sort of political traction in the US (nor was there in Brooks’s Canada).

Three: If the answers to the first two questions are “yes” then should nonprofit arts organizations be included in the 501(c)(3) list of types of organizations that ought to be eligible for tax deductions by donors? It’s hard to see why not. After all, direct government subsidies to the arts indicate the assumption that there is some value from the arts beyond the personal and private, and so it is hard to see why there would be a tax deduction for donations to nonprofit schools, hospitals, animal shelters, and social services but not the arts.

What then would be arguments against the policy?

One might be that since charitable donations are subsidized through a tax deduction, the rich, who are in a higher tax bracket (which is appropriate!) get more subsidy per dollar donated than a middle income person: If my marginal income tax rate is 40%, then if I give $100 to the Shelbyville Symphony my taxes fall by $40, but if my marginal tax rate is only 20% then when I give $100 to the Symphony I only get a $20 reduction in taxes. Here I do sense some general disquiet. One solution, a very worthwhile Canadian initiative, is to subsidize charitable donations through a tax credit instead of a deduction: Anybody who gives $100 to the Shelbyville Symphony gets an $X tax break regardless of their personal income tax rate. So this is a problem solved fairly easily without much disruption (Canada did the shift from deductions to a credit in the 1980s and it was, as the kids say, nbd).

A second problem is that it is simply wrong to let very rich arts patrons effectively be in charge of where the public subsidy is allocated, rather than through a more democratic process (this was one of Professor Hackney’s main concerns). I’d respond with three points. First, the numbers are such that the dollar value of the arts subsidy delivered through the charitable donation is more than ten times larger than direct government grants to the arts. If someone wants to argue against the charitable donation and for its replacement with greater direct government support, they have to be realistic that there is simply no way that direct support would ever be increased to fully replace the subsidy through the charitable donation. End the deduction, watch donations fall (and they would), but don’t dream that the NEA budget of $200 million (ballpark) is going to increase to $2 billion. The public generally supports arts funding, but not like that. Second, and I know this might be controversial: donors are not the worst judges in the world. They are generally close to organizations, have been ticket buyers, have some sense of their priorities and professionalism. The NEA and state arts agencies do fine work, but it is at a distance. And not all that democratic. How much public input is there into direct government support? Typically the only time the public gets involved is when there is a bad grant. Third, for anyone arguing there ought to be a greater amount of direct government support for the arts in proportion to private donations, I remind them that the President of the United States is Donald J. Trump. You don’t get to say “there ought to be a bigger hand of government in the arts, and also the government has to be one that I like.”

A third problem, which I have seen raised by some arts policy people, is to question which arts organizations are truly “charitable” and which are, well, a bit too artsy, producing works that only a knowledgeable audience would appreciate, out of touch with “the community” and their social needs. Should there be distinctions drawn between which organizations qualify for the charitable deduction and which do not? I don’t think so. The public value of the arts might be in a small community theatre, or it might be in the striving for something far beyond the ordinary in our best and most “elite” artistic institutions. Public policy, wisely, has not sought to say that one sort of thing is deserving of higher subsidy than another: tax breaks for gifts to nonprofits do not make distinctions, and I don’t sense that either the IRS or the state Attorneys General in charge of the regulation of nonprofits have a lot of appetite for getting into the weeds of the specific activities of charities beyond the basics.

An effort to steer arts institutions into becoming social service organizations doesn’t make a lot of sense: existing social service organizations are going to be much more effective at community development than your local dance company, and your local dance company can do something your local social service organizations cannot do - put on interesting and rewarding dance recitals.

Summing up: what arts policy is for is really hard to articulate (I used to take a harder line that arts councils ought to do more to express the purpose of what they are doing, but I’ve softened with age). So our policies for giving public financial support to the arts are going to look vague and maybe imperfect. But when you take the fuzz off the peach, it’s actually hard to find improvements to the current system that would have broad-based support. A rather small-c conservative position, I know. But, with the exception of moving from tax deductions to tax credits, I’m not sure I see a clear way to improve the basic design.

In my past life I spent some time in university administration, and one of my jobs at this public university was to take proposals for new degree programs that the university had approved of to the state board of higher education, for their necessary approval. In those proposals we had to include a section on forecasts for employment demand for graduates of the program, and there were a few quasi-official agencies who would produce such numbers. One of my PhD fields was labour economics, and I knew, and kept quiet about, the fact that these forecast job numbers were, respectfully, dubious. Not lies or anything meant to deliberately mislead, but numbers that were guesses meant to suggest careful application of economic science, but that actually were just extrapolation of trends. Nothing enhances a guess like a table of numbers.

The problem wasn’t that the labour market forecasts were being done by incompetent people. It’s that we just cannot know very much. The essence of future technological change is that we don’t know what it will be - if we did know then we would already have the technology. We cannot know whether some specific applied technique we teach now will be highly valued or useless ten years from now.

There’s a good op-ed in the Times today by Michael Steinberger on the uncertainty that the development of Artificial Intelligence is imposing onto labor markets, especially for recent college graduates. Degrees that ten years ago universities and state boards of higher education would have said were sure things are, in the end, not so sure at all. I don’t write much about AI (except for this piece on a hapless attempt by our university to get ahead of the game) and its future impact on work, or on arts and culture, because I would only be guessing as to what sorts of impacts it will have, or whether they will be big or easily absorbed.

So if I had any influence on higher education1 I would be resisting calls to be “nimble” and “responsive to future industry needs” in degree programs, since shifting direction in educational focus at a university is slow and expensive, with unrecoverable costs should you guess incorrectly. Instead, we might avoid the highly specific, or temporarily in high demand, and let students choose from a wide variety of more general options that in their view will be interesting and stimulating and a good fit. Have faith in the knowledge that is decentralized amongst individuals, as Hayek would have put it.2

Alas. Universities are in a rush to be relevant, hoping for actual degrees in AI no less, and our state government has said that degree programs that don’t pay decent wages at the moment ought to be cut (including, at my university, a bachelors degree in music in one of the very best public university schools of music in the country).

Nobody knows anything. It takes a couple of years to launch a new degree and hire faculty, then students need at least four years to get the degree, and then where are we? In the mid-2030s, with a labour market and technologies we just don’t know - can’t know - much about at all.

If a student wants to major in computer science, or epidemiology, or oboe, let them. Don’t try to steer them into fields for which you claim high potential but for which you don’t really have any idea. A student majoring in music knows there’s not much money there. A student being told that the new degree in AI is the ticket for the future is taking your word for it, and might borrow heavily on that promise, and we all need to be very careful about leading them on to what might be a dead end.

This recent book is open access, here. And my full review in the International Review of Public Policy is also open access, here. My review begins:

There is an old joke: An American tourist is visiting Oxford for the first time, and on his first morning signs up for a guided walking tour. The group sees the Ashmolean Museum, the Bodleian Library, the beautiful college quadrangles, and they pass beneath the Bridge of Sighs, before finally going for a pub lunch at the Lamb & Flag. At lunch the tourist asks the guide: but when will we get to see the University?

American cultural policy is something like our tourist’s experience. Despite observing the various publicly funded granting agencies, charitable foundations, individual donors who receive tax-preferred status, tax credit schemes to promote commercial film and television production and music recording, and local investments in cultural infrastructure, we are still left asking: but where is the cultural policy?

Eleonora Radaelli is a professor in the School of Planning, Public Policy, and Management at the University of Oregon. … In Invisible Cultural Policy in America, she seeks to solve the problem of where exactly an observer can discern the nature of American cultural policy and why it is, for the most part, “invisible.” …

Arts administration and policy folks, especially those with a public administration focus, should check it out.

Footnote: A version of the Oxford anecdote is in Gilbert Ryle’s A Theory of Mind (1949).

Brink Lindsey takes his title from one of my favourite essays, John Maynard Keynes’s “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (which I wrote about here). Keynes, in 1930, wondered what lives might be like in our present. There are three big predictions in the essay, interrelated, of which I would say he got two right, which ain’t bad.

The first right prediction was about how the world’s material wealth would continue to grow, such that by this time we would be much more affluent in aggregate terms. We would have solved what he called the “economic problem”, which has dogged us since our clans roamed the savannah, of where we are going to find enough food, water and shelter to survive. His predictions on income growth, to come from growing productivity, were remarkably good given the long time period he was considering.

His wrong prediction, famously, was that he thought the trend he saw in declining hours of work, partly a result of that increased material wealth, would continue, such that by now even a fifteen-hour work week wouldn’t be strictly necessary. If anything, I continue to see commentators on the right suggest we don’t work enough - kids need to “get their hands dirty” earlier (they mean other people’s kids, not their own), and we need to push back the retirement age, a claim which indicates a lack of familiarity with people who do physical labour for a living.

His third prediction, and this is the other one he got right, was that it would not be easy, would not be a seamless transition, to go from worrying about the economic problem to worrying about our “permanent problem”: how can we ensure this material abundance is shared, and how can we learn to lead happy and fulfilling lives that do not have paid work at their centre?

Lindsey wants to address the permanent problem, with the knowledge, that Keynes could not have had, of how our lives have changed during the past century, not always in ways that have left us feeling better off.

Keynes wrote:

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in our morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession - as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and the realities of life - will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be on themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.

Keynes, and Lindsey, recognize the need for a cultural change, but public policy can only go so far in trying to nudge our values in a particular direction, if in fact an elected government would even wish to do so, before a natural human resistance to being nannied would kick in. So what can be done?

Lindsey’s first point is that the “economic problem” can never really be “solved”: human flourishing needs to allow for economic dynamism, new technologies and practices and things, first because it is simply in our nature to want to create new things, and second because efforts to achieve greater equality in human well-being and capabilities is much easier when economic opportunity continues to expand. Otherwise, redistribution takes place in a zero-sum game, and that’s a game the poor do not have good odds of winning.

Consider, for example, housing affordability. A few weeks ago, and I am quoting from memory here, Trump was asked at a press conference what he was going to do about it, and he said he doesn’t want to do anything about it: people who own homes have worked hard to achieve that goal, their home is often their most important capital asset, and they don’t want to see house prices fall. Well, stopped-clock-twice-a-day etc, he was saying a true thing. Even in my very outwardly progressive college town, where everyone publicly agrees something ought to be done about the housing crisis, unstated among those same people is “but not at the expense of the value of my house.”

Lindsey says the best means to housing affordability is to find new places to build, and to ensure that incomes are not left stagnant in the left-hand side of the distribution.

Lindsey cares about the state of our natural environment (he admits to being a bit slow to come around to environmental risks), but here again the trick is not to slow down economic growth, but to encourage new technologies that solve the twin goals of higher incomes and greener living.

Throughout, Lindsey is a technological optimist. But what can we say about technology in Artificial Intelligence that might have a tremendous, and involuntary, effect on working hours, making Keynes’s permanent problem rather immediate? Universal Basic Income could give short-term relief, but it would be an unstable and unhappy way to support half the working-age population. On this question Lindsey, running counter to trends that show no slow down in urbanization, thinks that the solution might lie, at least for some hearty souls, in new, small, planned communities. These would be towns where as much as possible was done locally: schooling, elder care, health, building, and food production. Even energy can now be harnessed at small scale due to advances in solar panels. It would be a way to an affordable and fulfilling life for those who are not going to have whatever jobs remain in major centres, looking at screens (and he is quite right to note that the financial “services” industry already takes up far too much human potential). And these communities would give residents and their children (of whom he expects there would be more) the chance to, as they say, touch grass, and to have better opportunities for forming the deep relationships that are so essential to our well-being. He calls this an “economic independence” movement, and recognizes that people who took it up would lose some familiar urban and suburban creature comforts.

Is all this viable? I’m all for expanding the domain of choice in what John Stuart Mill called experiments in living, but frontier communities, to this day, can turn out very badly indeed, and we’ve had plenty of recent evidence of the number of people who would take a chance to play dictator in such a place if they could get away with it. Lindsey, as I do, hopes for a world of increased face-to-face human connection, but I see that as achievable in existing towns, big and small, without starting from scratch.

Coda: this is sort of an arts policy blog, and so I am obliged to note that the arts as we know them do not really make an appearance in the book (though it was a very important consideration for Keynes), except to say, rightly, that we could be more creative if copyright and patent laws were scaled back a bit. Arts policy debates happen within an arts policy bubble, with very little influence in these sorts of general what-is-to-be-done books. Just saying.