(How would that even be implemented? By paying inspectors to come to people’s houses to check whether they’ve drawn any pictures that day? Extra sales tax on art supplies?)
Allow the visual art industry to have all the usual taxes on goods sold, exhibition prices and education. Don’t subsidise the field at all via grants or via university tax breaks. No commando raids on kindergartens to catch off-the-books, under-the-table finger painters required.
No, the status quo is heavy subsidization. I have an essay on how there is too much art & fiction (http://www.gwern.net/Culture%20is%20not%20about%20esthetics.html) and one of my points is that the arts are heavily subsidized both directly and indirectly, which contributes to the over-supply.
I don’t buy the claim that copyright law amounts to a subsidy. Copyright law is an enforced monopoly, which is not the same thing.
Of course, you’re not focused on the specific works (which is what copyright grants a monopoly on) but on the industry as a whole. So perhaps monopoly on specifics amounts to a subsidy on generalities? But copyright law doesn’t have the same effects as a subsidy overall. A subsidy should lead to a higher quantity at a lower price, but copyright law surely leads to a higher price.
(Defenders of copyright usually argue that it also leads to a higher quantity, and I entirely agree with your scepticism that this would actually be a good thing. It’s obvious to me that copyright law is bad through and through, regardless of its effect on quantity. Still, anti-copyright activists have a valid point that it’s not obvious that copyright actually increases quantity either, since it makes distribution and derivative works harder.)
Nothing. If people wish to write as their recreation, that’s fine. I’m not arguing that gardens be banned either. The suggestions in my linked essay are that the subsidies be dropped and possibly a Pigovian tax imposed on commercial fiction.
(Am I being unreasonable in expecting people to read the essay which is all about how much fiction/art is produced, its value, and what we should do about it? It seems to me that much of the math discussion is isomorphic.)
I admit I read your essay very quickly, and skipped the footnotes.
I don’t think fiction is very heavily subsidized compared to the amount that’s produced. Copyright enforcement is the only thing you list that I think matters, and I believe we’d be drowning in fiction even without it.
The more I think about it, the harder I find justifying any subsidy.
No disagreement.
But higher production isn’t always good; production can be misguided or wasted
But if something is wasted what matters is not that there was too much of it, but that an opportunity to produce something else was lost. You’re focused on there being too much literature—when the relevant complaint is that there is too little of other things. An unread book does no harm. A year spent writing the book when something else could have been done with that year represents a lost opportunity. Maybe this is the focus of your concern, but it does not seem to be.
Suppose we all have 100 apples. Our lives do not revolve around apples, though we like them well enough. But still, 100 is too many
Indeed, most of these apples will be wasted if not sold, and this represents an opportunity lost to produce something else with the soil, but I think the analogy to novels is weak, as I will argue.
Now, can we apply this analogy? I don’t have 100 apples, but perhaps I have − 100 novels.
There are various ways in which 100 novels is not like 100 apples. For one thing, 100 novels is like 100 varieties of apple. You may prefer one variety of apple; your neighbor may prefer another. The novel Twilight, for example, appeals to many people and does not appeal to me. There are, meanwhile, novels that appeal to me but would probably not appeal to a typical fan of Twilight.
For another, creativity requires variation as well as selection. The vast majority of the variants are not selected, but that does not mean that they are wasted, because a reduction in variation reduces the raw material on which selection can act. In particular, in order that one brilliant writer be found, many must make the attempt. Reduce the number attempting, and you may well reduce the number of great writers found.
In short, if 1000 novels are written and only one is widely read and preserved, that does not necessarily mean the other 999 were wasted. They made up the variation that selection acted upon.
If the industry had imploded before Mistborn was published, I would have read Long Sun instead.
Sure, you can always manufacture hypothetical scenarios, and cherrypick real ones, in which the work of selection is already done, in which the superior variant and only the superior variant is produced in the first place. But that’s simply fantasy. In reality, variation is needed as raw material for selection.
The connection to other aspects of modern life and akrasia is apparent: there’s a Gresham’s Law whereby cheap yet unsatisfying works will push out more satisfying but more demanding entertainment. Humans suffer from hyperbolic discounting; we may know that in the long run, Mistborn will be forgotten when Long Sun is remembered, and that once we get started, we will enjoy it more—yet when the moment comes to choose, we prefer the choice of immediate pleasure.
I believe you have misapplied both Gresham’s law and hyperbolic discounting. For instance, there’s an important reason that Gresham’s law applies to money, and novels aren’t money.
Any field over a century old has built up a stock of masterpieces that could fill a lifetime.
This could be said at almost any point in history. You seem to be using it to imply that new works are unnecessary. But it would be equally good as an argument that Beethoven need not bother writing his masterpieces, since, after all, Bach had already written enough to fill a lifetime. But anyone who has listened to Beethoven knows that, even though Bach had already written enough to fill a lifetime, we are nevertheless enriched for having Beethoven, even though Beethoven necessarily displaces Bach to some extent.
Generalizing: even though we are already filled to capacity with art, literature, and music to spend all our lives on, we are nevertheless further enriched by new creation.
Society ought to discourage economically inefficient activities.
Yes, but efficiency is relative to what people want, which is difficult to discover except by observing their choices. And we see that they overwhelmingly choose contemporary fiction. My theory is that contemporary fiction really and truly does give the audience that chooses it greater satisfaction than most great old fiction, even though future generations will find most of it wanting. See for example that often Shakespeare will be updated in certain respects (such as setting—West Side Story, Ran, Forbidden Planet) for a new audience, and Shakespeare himself updated older stories for his own audience. For another example, the movie Clueless is an update of the Austen novel Emma. The novel Twilight takes place in contemporary America; in a hundred years it will be hopelessly out of date, but for much of its audience, Dracula by Bram Stoker, classic that it is, is not contemporary enough.
Because of this, there is a never-ending demand for contemporary fiction and for updates of old fiction, and this will keep writers in business indefinitely. You may judge this wrong by certain standards which you offer, but efficiency depends on what people want, and this is what they want. You don’t get to make the concept of efficiency mean something different.
Consumers of new art would be equally satisfied by existing art.
Evidently not. I see you argue against this, but I find your argument completely unpersuasive. What we have in front of us as evidence is consumer behavior. We see the choices people make. Against this you present hypotheticals and a couple of quotes from people. For example, someone whose grandson happens to be into old music at the moment.
Meanwhile we see that updates of classics, such as Clueless and West Side Story, do very well in the market. This validates the choice that the movie producers made, which choice is based in part on the assumption that there is a significant audience for an update—i.e., people who would in fact not be equally satisfied by the originals without update.
I wasn’t talking about subsidization, I was talking about taxation. The logic of the discussion was as follows: (1) Johnicolas said there should be an art tax; (2) I said “how would you do that?”; (3) wedrifid said “subject art to standard sales taxes”; (4) I pointed out that art already is subject to standard sales taxes—so far as I know it isn’t specifically exempt; hence wedrifid’s response doesn’t work as an answer.
The part of wedrifid’s comment that I quoted defined the scope of my remark, which you misunderstood.
Any meaningful discussion of taxation focuses on the net, not on arbitrary subdivisions and labels. If art were taxed at 50% sales tax but also came with a tax deduction of 100%, I would feel real physical pain to see someone argue ‘oh, but we are discouraging and taxing heavily artwork! Just look at that 50%!’
Which is why I bring up the subsidies. If art is being hugely subsidized, then just being taxed like everything else (in your impoverished sense) still leads to art being cheaper than it should.
That may or may not be a fair point to make, but in that case your comment should have begun with “Yes, but...” instead of “No...”.
On the merits, I disagree on every point: that there is too much art, that current art subsidies are “heavy”, and that art subsidies necessarily cancel out sales taxes for the purpose of interpreting government policy (which may simply be incoherent and non-uniform).
(I had let the parent be, not wanting to emphasise disagreement but the follow up prompts a reply.)
The proposal, as I understood it, was to have additional taxes specific to art.
I do not share your interpretation. The relevant quote is:
Similarly, I would tax visual art rather than subsidize it.
… A general sentiment regarding where he would place a slider on a simplistic one dimensional scale of financial incentive vs disincentive. It is definitely not a proposal for specific intervention in any particular jurisdiction.
Come to think of it your status quo claim is way off. The following is definitely not the status quo:
Don’t subsidise the field at all via grants or via university tax breaks.
Incidentally, investment in culture and education—even with respect to visual arts—is something I approve of. I just note that your questioning was rather disingenuous:
By paying inspectors to come to people’s houses to check whether they’ve drawn any pictures that day?
Taxation and subsidisation are well understood. This objection is silly (your other soldiers are better).
A general sentiment regarding where he would place a slider on a simplistic one dimensional scale of financial incentive vs disincentive.
Right; and he was wanting to place it to the right of zero (on the “disincentive” side) whereas you were talking about moving it from the left of zero to zero. This is the distinction I was pointing out.
Come to think of it your status quo claim is way off. The following is definitely not the status quo:
Don’t subsidise the field at all via grants or via university tax breaks.
See the very comment you linked, which contains a reminder that my “status quo” remark did not apply to that aspect.
By paying inspectors to come to people’s houses to check whether they’ve drawn any pictures that day?
Taxation and subsidisation are well understood. This objection is silly (your other soldiers are better).
The main point of that was to emphasize transaction costs of taxation. You will note that I immediately followed it by a more “reasonable” suggestion so as to forestall accusations of being overly rhetorical.
The obvious thing would be some sort of excise tax, like the “sin taxes” on alcohol and the like. That might extend to art supplies, but not necessarily; just charge it on the sale of the final product (if you sell it).
Not that I’m for this; otherwise I agree with your reaction to the proposal.
Allow me to clarify: Tax art rather than subsidize it, at a roughly comparable rate to other industries. I don’t think it matters much whether it’s exactly the same, slightly higher, or slightly lower.
One of the techniques of rational argumentation is called the “Principle of Charity”. When reading and interpreting what someone said, you should infer missing details in order to make their argument the strongest argument possible. In a lw-centric example, Eliezer’s idea of “The least convenient possible world” is the principle of charity, specialized to interpreting hypothetical situations.
I don’t understand the point of your paragraph explaining the principle of charity as if I might never have heard of it. If the implication is that I was being uncharitable to you by not interpreting “tax X” to mean “fail to exempt X from the default taxes”, I strongly disagree. When someone says, for example, that cigarettes should be taxed, they don’t just mean that the same sales taxes that apply to everything else should also apply to cigarettes (as if the default were to exempt cigarettes). Rather, they mean that there ought to be a specific tax on cigarettes in addition to whatever taxes would ordinarily apply, in order to discourage consumption of cigarettes. (This is known as a “sin tax”.)
In the context of the above discussion, the only reasonable interpretation of your remark was that you favored a sin tax on art, analogous to existing sin taxes (in some jurisdictions) on “harmful” products such as alcohol, cigarettes, and the like. If you hadn’t meant this, and simply meant that art should be treated like any other product, you would have simply said “I wouldn’t subsidize art”; as opposed to saying “I would tax art rather than subsidize it”, i.e. “not only would I not subsidize art, I would actually tax it”.
In case this needs still further clarification, the reason this is the only reasonable interpretation is that (so far as I know) art is not exempted from existing taxes. If it were, then the interpretation of “tax art” to mean “subject art to the same taxes as everything else” (i.e. “remove the exemption”) might make sense. As it is, however, “tax art” is highly misleading if what you mean is merely “remove subsidies” (where “subsidies” mean things like government grants, university salaries, etc, rather than tax-exemptions, which, again, don’t currently exist).
Allow the visual art industry to have all the usual taxes on goods sold, exhibition prices and education. Don’t subsidise the field at all via grants or via university tax breaks. No commando raids on kindergartens to catch off-the-books, under-the-table finger painters required.
That’s the status quo. The proposal, as I understood it, was to have additional taxes specific to art.
No, the status quo is heavy subsidization. I have an essay on how there is too much art & fiction (http://www.gwern.net/Culture%20is%20not%20about%20esthetics.html) and one of my points is that the arts are heavily subsidized both directly and indirectly, which contributes to the over-supply.
I don’t buy the claim that copyright law amounts to a subsidy. Copyright law is an enforced monopoly, which is not the same thing.
Of course, you’re not focused on the specific works (which is what copyright grants a monopoly on) but on the industry as a whole. So perhaps monopoly on specifics amounts to a subsidy on generalities? But copyright law doesn’t have the same effects as a subsidy overall. A subsidy should lead to a higher quantity at a lower price, but copyright law surely leads to a higher price.
(Defenders of copyright usually argue that it also leads to a higher quantity, and I entirely agree with your scepticism that this would actually be a good thing. It’s obvious to me that copyright law is bad through and through, regardless of its effect on quantity. Still, anti-copyright activists have a valid point that it’s not obvious that copyright actually increases quantity either, since it makes distribution and derivative works harder.)
I think the major way fiction is subsidized is people producing fiction in spite of it not being at all lucrative for most of them.
What are you planning on doing about fan fiction?
Nothing. If people wish to write as their recreation, that’s fine. I’m not arguing that gardens be banned either. The suggestions in my linked essay are that the subsidies be dropped and possibly a Pigovian tax imposed on commercial fiction.
(Am I being unreasonable in expecting people to read the essay which is all about how much fiction/art is produced, its value, and what we should do about it? It seems to me that much of the math discussion is isomorphic.)
I admit I read your essay very quickly, and skipped the footnotes.
I don’t think fiction is very heavily subsidized compared to the amount that’s produced. Copyright enforcement is the only thing you list that I think matters, and I believe we’d be drowning in fiction even without it.
Some responses.
No disagreement.
But if something is wasted what matters is not that there was too much of it, but that an opportunity to produce something else was lost. You’re focused on there being too much literature—when the relevant complaint is that there is too little of other things. An unread book does no harm. A year spent writing the book when something else could have been done with that year represents a lost opportunity. Maybe this is the focus of your concern, but it does not seem to be.
Indeed, most of these apples will be wasted if not sold, and this represents an opportunity lost to produce something else with the soil, but I think the analogy to novels is weak, as I will argue.
There are various ways in which 100 novels is not like 100 apples. For one thing, 100 novels is like 100 varieties of apple. You may prefer one variety of apple; your neighbor may prefer another. The novel Twilight, for example, appeals to many people and does not appeal to me. There are, meanwhile, novels that appeal to me but would probably not appeal to a typical fan of Twilight.
For another, creativity requires variation as well as selection. The vast majority of the variants are not selected, but that does not mean that they are wasted, because a reduction in variation reduces the raw material on which selection can act. In particular, in order that one brilliant writer be found, many must make the attempt. Reduce the number attempting, and you may well reduce the number of great writers found.
In short, if 1000 novels are written and only one is widely read and preserved, that does not necessarily mean the other 999 were wasted. They made up the variation that selection acted upon.
Sure, you can always manufacture hypothetical scenarios, and cherrypick real ones, in which the work of selection is already done, in which the superior variant and only the superior variant is produced in the first place. But that’s simply fantasy. In reality, variation is needed as raw material for selection.
I believe you have misapplied both Gresham’s law and hyperbolic discounting. For instance, there’s an important reason that Gresham’s law applies to money, and novels aren’t money.
This could be said at almost any point in history. You seem to be using it to imply that new works are unnecessary. But it would be equally good as an argument that Beethoven need not bother writing his masterpieces, since, after all, Bach had already written enough to fill a lifetime. But anyone who has listened to Beethoven knows that, even though Bach had already written enough to fill a lifetime, we are nevertheless enriched for having Beethoven, even though Beethoven necessarily displaces Bach to some extent.
Generalizing: even though we are already filled to capacity with art, literature, and music to spend all our lives on, we are nevertheless further enriched by new creation.
Yes, but efficiency is relative to what people want, which is difficult to discover except by observing their choices. And we see that they overwhelmingly choose contemporary fiction. My theory is that contemporary fiction really and truly does give the audience that chooses it greater satisfaction than most great old fiction, even though future generations will find most of it wanting. See for example that often Shakespeare will be updated in certain respects (such as setting—West Side Story, Ran, Forbidden Planet) for a new audience, and Shakespeare himself updated older stories for his own audience. For another example, the movie Clueless is an update of the Austen novel Emma. The novel Twilight takes place in contemporary America; in a hundred years it will be hopelessly out of date, but for much of its audience, Dracula by Bram Stoker, classic that it is, is not contemporary enough.
Because of this, there is a never-ending demand for contemporary fiction and for updates of old fiction, and this will keep writers in business indefinitely. You may judge this wrong by certain standards which you offer, but efficiency depends on what people want, and this is what they want. You don’t get to make the concept of efficiency mean something different.
Evidently not. I see you argue against this, but I find your argument completely unpersuasive. What we have in front of us as evidence is consumer behavior. We see the choices people make. Against this you present hypotheticals and a couple of quotes from people. For example, someone whose grandson happens to be into old music at the moment.
Meanwhile we see that updates of classics, such as Clueless and West Side Story, do very well in the market. This validates the choice that the movie producers made, which choice is based in part on the assumption that there is a significant audience for an update—i.e., people who would in fact not be equally satisfied by the originals without update.
I liked the linked essay. I suspect an even stronger case could be made that there’s too much supply of news.
I wasn’t talking about subsidization, I was talking about taxation. The logic of the discussion was as follows: (1) Johnicolas said there should be an art tax; (2) I said “how would you do that?”; (3) wedrifid said “subject art to standard sales taxes”; (4) I pointed out that art already is subject to standard sales taxes—so far as I know it isn’t specifically exempt; hence wedrifid’s response doesn’t work as an answer.
The part of wedrifid’s comment that I quoted defined the scope of my remark, which you misunderstood.
Any meaningful discussion of taxation focuses on the net, not on arbitrary subdivisions and labels. If art were taxed at 50% sales tax but also came with a tax deduction of 100%, I would feel real physical pain to see someone argue ‘oh, but we are discouraging and taxing heavily artwork! Just look at that 50%!’
Which is why I bring up the subsidies. If art is being hugely subsidized, then just being taxed like everything else (in your impoverished sense) still leads to art being cheaper than it should.
That may or may not be a fair point to make, but in that case your comment should have begun with “Yes, but...” instead of “No...”.
On the merits, I disagree on every point: that there is too much art, that current art subsidies are “heavy”, and that art subsidies necessarily cancel out sales taxes for the purpose of interpreting government policy (which may simply be incoherent and non-uniform).
(I had let the parent be, not wanting to emphasise disagreement but the follow up prompts a reply.)
I do not share your interpretation. The relevant quote is:
… A general sentiment regarding where he would place a slider on a simplistic one dimensional scale of financial incentive vs disincentive. It is definitely not a proposal for specific intervention in any particular jurisdiction.
Come to think of it your status quo claim is way off. The following is definitely not the status quo:
Incidentally, investment in culture and education—even with respect to visual arts—is something I approve of. I just note that your questioning was rather disingenuous:
Taxation and subsidisation are well understood. This objection is silly (your other soldiers are better).
Right; and he was wanting to place it to the right of zero (on the “disincentive” side) whereas you were talking about moving it from the left of zero to zero. This is the distinction I was pointing out.
See the very comment you linked, which contains a reminder that my “status quo” remark did not apply to that aspect.
The main point of that was to emphasize transaction costs of taxation. You will note that I immediately followed it by a more “reasonable” suggestion so as to forestall accusations of being overly rhetorical.
The obvious thing would be some sort of excise tax, like the “sin taxes” on alcohol and the like. That might extend to art supplies, but not necessarily; just charge it on the sale of the final product (if you sell it).
Not that I’m for this; otherwise I agree with your reaction to the proposal.
Allow me to clarify: Tax art rather than subsidize it, at a roughly comparable rate to other industries. I don’t think it matters much whether it’s exactly the same, slightly higher, or slightly lower.
One of the techniques of rational argumentation is called the “Principle of Charity”. When reading and interpreting what someone said, you should infer missing details in order to make their argument the strongest argument possible. In a lw-centric example, Eliezer’s idea of “The least convenient possible world” is the principle of charity, specialized to interpreting hypothetical situations.
I don’t understand the point of your paragraph explaining the principle of charity as if I might never have heard of it. If the implication is that I was being uncharitable to you by not interpreting “tax X” to mean “fail to exempt X from the default taxes”, I strongly disagree. When someone says, for example, that cigarettes should be taxed, they don’t just mean that the same sales taxes that apply to everything else should also apply to cigarettes (as if the default were to exempt cigarettes). Rather, they mean that there ought to be a specific tax on cigarettes in addition to whatever taxes would ordinarily apply, in order to discourage consumption of cigarettes. (This is known as a “sin tax”.)
In the context of the above discussion, the only reasonable interpretation of your remark was that you favored a sin tax on art, analogous to existing sin taxes (in some jurisdictions) on “harmful” products such as alcohol, cigarettes, and the like. If you hadn’t meant this, and simply meant that art should be treated like any other product, you would have simply said “I wouldn’t subsidize art”; as opposed to saying “I would tax art rather than subsidize it”, i.e. “not only would I not subsidize art, I would actually tax it”.
In case this needs still further clarification, the reason this is the only reasonable interpretation is that (so far as I know) art is not exempted from existing taxes. If it were, then the interpretation of “tax art” to mean “subject art to the same taxes as everything else” (i.e. “remove the exemption”) might make sense. As it is, however, “tax art” is highly misleading if what you mean is merely “remove subsidies” (where “subsidies” mean things like government grants, university salaries, etc, rather than tax-exemptions, which, again, don’t currently exist).