Comments
MOST READ TODAY:
-
RIP
Conductor, 74, died doing what he loved best
The late Rafael Kubelik, suffering heart tremors while…
-
Orchestras
Festivals terminate NY Philharmonic suspended players
The Taipei Music Academy and Festival has sacked…
-
News
NY Philharmonic suspends two key players
The management of the New York Philharmonic last…
-
Orchestras
Latest: Crisis intensifies at New York Philharmonic
Two players have been suspended while the board…
That’s impressive. That’s almost as much as two days in Iraq.
Or roughly 8,5 hours of Federal Reserve quantitative easing.
Forgive my economic ignorance, but how does it “add to the economy?” The money spent on opera (all well spent, I believe) doesn’t come from outer space. Isn’t it money that otherwise would have been spent on other things? A dollar more for opera, a dollar less for domestic wine, or football games?
This is actually correct. The claim that it “adds to the economy” is actually misleading, and a product of the way in which the size of that economy is measured – chiefly through the summing of transactions to produce the GDP number. The only way to increase the size of an economy in any material way is to increase the production of goods and raw materials. Opera and music in general contribute no material benefit to the economy (I do not regard consumption as a material benefit, as it merely involves moving capital from Peter to Paul, as you point out). Their non-material benefits, however, are innumerable, and do much to drive the economy in a significant way, though this contribution is largely obscured by reducing economic benefits to the sum of transactions within a given system.