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Marginal Revolution

The Apprenticeship Option

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Recently Marginal Revolution blogger and economist Alex Tabbarok linked to an article he wrote a year ago suggesting that the United States would be well served by adding a focus on putting students into technical apprenticeships to the current push to get kids into college.

He starts out by applauding the now familiar push by governors in many states to provide incentives to students pursuing STEM fields over Liberal Arts. “We should focus higher-education dollars on the fields most likely to benefit everyone, not just the students who earn the degrees.”

I particularly oriented in on the part of the article where he notes,

“In 2009 the United States graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math, and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual-and-performing-arts graduates in 1985.”

Wow, that is pretty great, huh? But he goes on,

There is nothing wrong with the arts, psychology, and journalism, but graduates in these fields have lower wages and are less likely to find work in their fields than graduates in science and math. Moreover, more than half of all humanities graduates end up in jobs that don’t require college degrees, and those graduates don’t get a big income boost from having gone to college.

Most important, graduates in the arts, psychology, and journalism are less likely to create the kinds of innovations that drive economic growth.

I initially felt a little indignant at the idea that graduates in the arts aren’t spurring innovation. But then I started wondering if the arts sector needs to take a little responsibility for this. It seems this might be a result of a lack of training and good public relations.

There is an on going conservation about training arts students to take a more entrepreneurial approach to their work so there is already an acknowledgment that this is an area to be improved. Perhaps part of that training should emphasize not undervaluing your work so that people don’t undervalue the work that artists do.

In terms of public relations, I think there is a lack of circulation of stories about successful creatives like those I recently cited about the winners of MIT’s Entrepreneurship Competition (one with a BA in East Asian Studies and Chinese Lit., the other with a BA in Aerospace Engineering) and the Rotman School of Management’s design competition.

The main thrust of Tabbarok’s argument isn’t so much to diminish the liberal arts degree as to advocate for apprenticeships. He notes that some people are simply not suited for college but vocational education programs have a stigma of being the dumping ground for high risk kids. He points to the model of Germany (among other European countries) where students normally opt for technical training and apprenticeships that provide real world work experience while the students are in high school.

What appealed to me about this was the idea that if there is room in the day for a high school student to receive vocational training, then you have to allow that there is time in the day for arts classes.

But I am not suggesting that some kids be allowed to paint while the other kids go learn to weld. I think high school vocational training should seek to provide opportunities for students to train and apprentice at local arts organizations as well. Who says you can’t take some of your welding classes in a scene shop or art studio or that you have to do your apprenticeship in a shipyard?

Apprenticeship programs like this could strengthen ties between schools and arts organizations and reinforce the idea that vocational skills don’t have to be applied in purely practical ways.

On the other side of the coin, I have a vague recollection of reading an article that suggested many visual artists today don’t have a good understanding of the materials they use because they haven’t had a lengthy exposure working/playing with them. Even if my recollection isn’t correct, the opportunity to work with materials still exists.

The reality is, four years of college isn’t the entire key to becoming an artist either.

Americans Need A Cultural Stipend?

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Via Marginal Revolution, we learn Brazil’s Congress has approved a monthly Cultural Stipend for poorer workers.

“Now we are creating food for the soul; Why would the poor not be able to access culture?” the minister said.

Suplicy said the new incentive, approved by Congress and endorsed by Rousseff late last month, is expected to be introduced some time this year. “The money will be put in the hands of the worker who will decide how to spend it, by going to the movies, to the theater, to an exhibition or the museum,” she explained.

Other possible uses include purchases of books, music or DVDs.
[…]

Employers will cover 90 percent of the cost of the stipend but can then deduct the amount from their income tax. Workers will pay the remaining 10 percent, but can opt out if they choose to do so.

The first time I read about it, I thought it was a government funded program and might be hard to implement on a national level in the U.S.

However, since it is largely employer funded, the plan could actually work quite well in the U.S. since it allows the businesses to write it off their taxes much like companies and individuals can write off charitable donations in the U.S. I am not sure the government would have to create any new laws to make it possible. Though their encouragement would certainly help. The arts community could just make a big push for companies to declare their participation.

I imagine it would be great publicity for companies since they could collect testimonials from employees about the enjoyment they derived from books, music, performances and museum attendance thanks to their employers’ involvement.

Since employees have to contribute a little bit toward putting money on their culture cards, it gets potential audiences in the habit of paying to participate but doesn’t place the entire burden on them.

Granted, audiences may not end up using the money to purchase experiences at non-profit arts organizations. This won’t absolve arts organizations from the responsibility of making their offerings relevant and interesting. But along the lines of my letter to the president post, it starts to institutionalize the idea that all citizens should participate in cultural experiences.

When I did think this was a government program and was trying to devise a way to adapt it to the U.S., I thought about the dividend Alaska pays to its citizens from the oil proceeds. With that in mind, I was going to propose NY State use some of the tax money it collects from its great native resources- Broadway and Wall Street- to offer these cards to all citizens of NY. The population of the state has been dwindling so I thought it would be a great way to reward those who stayed and hopefully stimulate arts organizations in other parts of the state.

I suspect much of it would find its way back to Broadway. Though parts of Rochester NY are one of America’s Top 44 ArtPlaces so I wouldn’t count other parts of the state out.

Yes Virgina, There Is A Cost Disease

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Over on the Marginal Revolution blog, Tyler Cowen opines that the arts are not impacted by Baumol’s cost disease.

2. I do not see the arts as subject to the cost disease very much at all. As for the “live performing arts,” the disease seems to afflict the older and less innovative sectors, such as opera and the symphony. There is plenty of live music these days, it is offered in innovative ways, and much of it is free.

I was a little confused by this point since all it really proves is that people aren’t charging for live music and doesn’t really address that there are costs involved with the performance.

Admittedly, he does seem to imply that innovation in the way the artistic product is offered makes all the difference. Back in June, I noted that Jon Silpayamanant made the point that there are alternative ways to make money when offering an experience.

Cowen goes on to say, (my emphasis)

“4. In many sectors of the arts, especially music, consumers demand constant turnover of product. Old music becomes “obsolete” — for whatever sociological reasons — and in this sense the sector is creating lots of new value every year. From an “objectivist” point of view they are still strumming guitars with the same speed, but from a subjectivist point of view — the relevant one for the economist – they are remarkably innovative all the time in the battle against obsolescence. A lot of the cost disease argument is actually an aesthetic objection that the art forms which have already peaked — such as Mozart — sometimes have a hard time holding their ground in terms of cost and innovation.”

I will grant him that some of the cost disease problems can be attributed to an adherence to aesthetic ideals rooted in the past and a resistance to innovation.

But I am not sure if consumers are truly demanding a constant turnover in product. There is reluctance to sample anything new and unfamiliar among consumers. This isn’t necessarily confined to symphony and opera where you might argue the new material is being presented to the wrong audiences (i.e. older existing audiences whose tastes are already set).

There is as much a sense of risk aversion among audience as among content creators. Broadway shows are often revivals or derivative of works that have already proven their success. Playwrights bemoan the fact that regardless of their proximity to Broadway, few theatres are producing new works.

The same is true with movies. The most well attended movies this summer were based on comic books. Even the plots of those stories had been revamped numerous times in the comics format. The plan for the adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit went from two movies to three leaving fans to wonder, if the three books of the Lord of the Rings took three movies to tell, (albeit with much left out), how is the one book of The Hobbit going to be stretched to three?

A fair bit of emotion and nostalgia is responsible for perpetuating the conditions which contribute to Baumol’s cost disease. One of the points Cowen makes reinforces this:

“Live music” may seem like it doesn’t change much, but lifting the embargo on Cuba would boost the quantity and quality of my consumption of spectacular concert experiences, as would a non-stop flight to Haiti.

Opportunity rather than innovation is the only thing having any bearing on the quantity and quality of his consumption. It isn’t necessary for Cuban musicians to made any changes whatsoever since 1962 when the embargo began, they just need to be available.

There is an element of his aforementioned “aesthetic objection that the art forms…have already peaked” in this point as well. It is difficult to take an entirely objective view of a product or service possessing an artistic element.

If quality of product could be maintained by paring down performers and replacing them with technology, The White Stripes would have been a model everyone emulated. As interesting as the band’s work might have been, there wasn’t a rush to form duo performance groups.

It may be a difficult to define Platonic ideal, but there is a minimum one can offer before the perception of the experience suffers. Ultimately, because it is his area of expertise, I might find myself having to concede Cowen’s point in the face of a more detailed argument. But I think given that the resources necessary to provide the central experience remain generally constant, Baumol’s cost disease does indeed impact the arts significantly.

As for the solution, at this point I keep coming back to Jon Silpayamanant’s idea that ancillary elements surrounding the experience need to be developed in order to support it.

iPad Will Make Your Performance…Forgettable

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One option for preserving the performing arts is often mentioned is a greater use of multi-media either in a performance or as a medium to transmit the performance. However, reading an article on Time magazine’s website (h/t Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution) about how it is more difficult to remember things you read in electronic format versus paper format, I wondered if moving to electronic media might be a disservice to the arts.

Second, the book readers seemed to digest the material more fully. Garland explains that when you recall something, you either “know” it and it just “comes to you” — without necessarily consciously recalling the context in which you learned it — or you “remember” it by cuing yourself about that context and then arriving at the answer. “Knowing” is better because you can recall the important facts faster and seemingly effortlessly.

“What we found was that people on paper started to ‘know’ the material more quickly over the passage of time,” says Garland. “It took longer and [required] more repeated testing to get into that knowing state [with the computer reading, but] eventually the people who did it on the computer caught up with the people who [were reading] on paper.”

The thought is that spatial context is very valuable in helping us to remember things. We recall where places are physically located based on landmarks. Though it may seem hard to believe it can be that significant a factor, we are better able remember information because we have a sense of where it appeared on a page. E-books don’t have that sort of physical context.

In addition, apparently size matters as well.

“He says that studies show that smaller screens also make material less memorable. “The bigger the screen, the more people can remember and the smaller, the less they can remember,” he says. “The most dramatic example is reading from mobile phones. [You] lose almost all context.”

Based on these findings I wondered if the arts might actually seem less relevant if digital media was the only way to access it. While a performance obviously loses its impact when it is not seen live, it may quite literally be less memorable when viewed on a smaller screen as well.

I would be interested to learn if there are studies comparing the experiences of people who watched a movie in a theatre vs. on a television vs. a small screen. (I am sure movies watched on airplane seatback screens will be memorable or forgettable due to myriad factors other than screen size 😉 )

Will movies seen on a very small screen be less memorable because the distances between people and things are so compacted? Desperate lunges to save someone may make less of an impression when reduced to fractions of an inch. Panoramic shots of gorgeous landscapes may pass by unnoticed in small scale.

Digital media may increase your reach by giving you access to a larger distribution channel, but if the scale makes it difficult to distinguish your product from thousands of others, you may have to question its worth.

You may basically be in the position you are now with YouTube where everyone posts something in the hopes it goes viral. I am sure YouTube won’t always be the standard, but if you can use it to test things now. Watch a video on the largest computer screen you can find and then watch the same one on a cell phone screen and judge the effectiveness. Better yet, watch the smaller version first and then watch the larger and see how much you may have missed just in terms of emotional expression.

Teachers Don’t Know From Creative

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We all know that arts classes and opportunities have been disappearing from schools at varying rates for decades. It may or may not surprise you to learn that creativity is not encouraged in schools either. While you may have suspected it all along, Alex Tabarrok links to a number of studies from the Marginal Revolution blog.

He cites in one study,

“What the paper shows is that the characteristics that teachers use to describe their favorite student correlate negatively with the characteristics associated with creativity. In addition, although teachers say that they like creative students, teachers also say creative students are “sincere, responsible, good-natured and reliable.” In other words, the teachers don’t know what creative students are actually like.”

As Tabarrok notes, the classroom process is not conducive to impulsive creative expression. Self control is valued in students in order to create an environment for a group to learn in. I would note though that this is not to equate self-control with smothering creativity. Even in self-directed learning environments where students are more in control of the pace and manner of their learning, a degree of self-control is still expected.

It occurs to me that part of the fight to restore arts education to schools needs to include advocating for a learning environment that encourages creativity. Arts people may hold certain assumptions about that arts in education involves cultivating creative expression, but it might not necessarily be so. Everyone probably has a story about a teacher who nearly killed their interest in an artistic discipline.

It may seem like incrementalism in the face of the size of the struggle to get arts education restored, but in the process, it will be important to try to preserve opportunities for creative expression still have left lest they slip away.

Think about it– outside the classroom the only place where a child is still permitted to indulge their screaming anarchist tendencies is on the playground and a lot of schools are doing away with recess. Without recess, there is another moment of a child’s life where they are expected to behave.

Now granted, for all I know kids today may stand around at recess playing on their Nintendo DSes and ignore their screaming anarchist tendencies without any help from their schools and such advocacy is for naught anyway.

My point is that while fighting for the restoration of arts, it is probably important to make teachers aware of what creative students are actually like and provide tools/guidance for dealing with them rather than requiring them to conform to expectations all the time.

Essentially the approach of “Arts offer X, Y, Z to your students. But since you may not provide opportunities in the coming academic year, we will happily help you to recognize the creativity of your students and engage it in your classroom to some degree since these kids are likely the ones you have pegged as disconnected.”

Will Perform For Snacks

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On the Marginal Revolution blog, Tyler Cowen has a short post about a psychology professor who requires his students take turns bringing a homemade snack in to each class. If they don’t bring in a snack, he doesn’t teach. I was initially pretty cynical about this approach as a valid teaching technique and was surprised to learn he had actually been doing it for over 30 years before it became an issue.

While I was still a little cynical after reading about his rationale for the requirement, I could understand how it fits into a psychology class that runs 3 hours at a stretch.

Parrott said that he’s teaching students to work together to set a schedule, to work in teams to get something done, and to check up on one another, since everyone depends on whoever has the duty of bringing snacks on a given week. Typically, no individual should be involved in preparing the snack more than twice a semester, he said.

Parrott said that considerable research shows that students learn more if they develop the skills to work in teams, to assume responsibility for projects, and get to know their fellow students. Team members need to count on one another, he said, and his students learned Thursday that if someone fails at a task for the team, there are consequences. “They need to learn to check on one another and clearly they didn’t get that done,” he said. “This was an important lesson.”

It struck me that this might be a good approach for building/engaging community around an arts organization (with the punitive elements de-emphasized, of course.) An arts organization might have a performance/gallery series where attendees were required to bring food as payment. Some times it might be the orange ticket holders, other times the blue ticket holders, so that an attendee isn’t bringing food for the whole audience every time they attend.

Allowing for a snack period like this will change the dynamics of the relationship with the audience. It isn’t going to pay the light bill, but it can get people involved and invested enough in the organization in other programs that do earn revenue and donations. I suspect the staff will do a much more effective job of convincing people their organization is worthy of support while chatting over chocolate chip cookies than pitching them during a curtain speech.

I can envision scenarios where groups bond over their shared responsibility to provide snacks to try to outdo the other groups. If that turns into its own type of headache and introduces stress to an event intended to be informal, that impulse could be channeled to support a more formal series of events to increase the investment in its success.

Who Will Punch Our Sacred Cows?

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I was reading a post on the Marginal Revolution blog about professionalism vs. amateurism. I had moved past it before a section of it percolated through my consciousness.

Amateurism is splendid when amateurs actually can make contributions. A lot of the Industrial Revolution was driven by the inventions of so-called amateurs. One of the most revolutionary economic sectors today — social networking — has been led by amateurs….

Amateurs are associated with free entry and a lot of experimentation. Barbecue quality is very often driven by amateurs, and in general amateurs still make contributions to food and cooking. The difficulty of maintaining productive amateurs is one of the reasons why scientific progress periodically slows down. Specialization, however necessary it may be, can make big breakthroughs harder at some margin.

I am guessing it was the sensory part of my brain thinking about good barbecue (MMMMM barbecue!) that prompted me to scroll back up. The amount of time and money people spend competing in barbecue cook offs can be pretty amazing.

It didn’t take long before I started wondering about the ways in which amateurs have driven changes in the performing arts recently. I have to confess, other than some people who financed movies by maxing out credit cards before landing a distribution deal, I couldn’t think of too many ways. Other than suggesting new ways to finance a movie, I am not sure these films brought about a lot of change. Though it did seem like the faux documentary format became popular after The Blair Witch Project. As I scour my memory it seems like, hip-hop was the last big amateur generated development in performing arts.

The easy answer is that the rest of the world has passed live performing arts by aided by technology. True, technology has provided alternative means of expression and dissemination. Shows like American Idol and Glee have inspired people to make an effort at expressing themselves through performance. But has that driven improvements in quality?

If people were showing up at an event with higher expectations of a performance as a result of YouTube videos or “nobody to star” shows, that would be great. It doesn’t seem to be happening. Or if people were coming to auditions better prepared than usual or with little formal training and knocking the socks off people, having absorbed lessons from these shows about cultivating ones abilities, that would equally desired. But I can’t think of any recent development that is widely acknowledged as a factor in forcing artists to step up their game.

I know there are groups using technology to enhance their performances or allow audiences to influence performances in real time via feedback. A lot of that is isolated and individual. The sort of change I am talking about is the type we are witnessing regarding food where people are concerned about where what they eat is sourced. Regardless of how you feel about such efforts, it has clearly influenced the way we eat and the way in which food is presented to us on a large scale. Restaurant menus now feature notes on such details. I can’t think of a similar influence in the performing arts which has forced the sector to acknowledge it.

The argument that live performing arts use antiquated means of production doesn’t seem valid. Cooking barbecue uses the same basic means of production in terms of heat, spices, enzymes, etc. Improvements have come as a result of applying those means in myriad permutations. Does the same hold true for the performing arts?

Social media tools exist that can allow someone to spread the word about their accomplishments so it is tough to claim that people are doing great work in obscurity and have no means to spread the word to other performers. The amateur barbecuing world is something of a niche community with closely guarded secret recipes, but apparently enough word gets around to influence change in restaurants.

Most of the improvements in the technical side of the arts are made by people with big budgets in Las Vegas and Broadway. LED lighting has its problems, but it holds the promise of enormous power savings and versatility that allows one instrument to replace many. Achieving the spectacle of these things is pretty expensive right now so while it may be argued they can provide improvements in environmental terms, it hasn’t been accomplished by amateurs.

Despite the high costs of creating a technically appealing production, I don’t think it can be said that there are too many barriers to entry preventing amateurs from influencing the performing arts. There are community venues across the country available as performance spaces. Not that you would necessarily need one when any space in a park or empty storefront can serve. One can self produce musical work thanks to personal computers rather than depending on gatekeepers at media companies to approve of them. There are plenty of available tools to support innovation.

I might be claimed that the performing arts community is so insular and devoted to preserving a particular way of doing things that the professionals are utterly ignoring the efforts of the amateurs and the burgeoning successes they are having. I don’t think this is the case for a couple reasons. First, a heck of a lot of people have to be complicit in this. I read a lot of articles and blogs in the course of a week and I have to believe there are at least a couple who would be pointing to the results amateurs are having and urging the rest of us to get on board or get left behind. While these sentiments have been expressed about social media and relationships with one’s community, I can’t think of an instance where people have claimed that the amateurs were eating the profession’s lunch.

Second, if there was such a change I don’t think it would be possible to completely ignore. People would be giving cues. It would be like the slow food/localvore movement and people would be asking where our metaphoric produce was sourced from. In the literal context of the localvore movement, Scott Walters’ Center for Rural Arts Development and Leadership Education may potentially be the next big movement, but it hasn’t manifested as such yet. Granted, it is entirely possible cues have been delivered time and time again and have been ignored.

Related to the idea of insularity, I also considered the possible claim that the performing arts was suppressing new innovation in this direction. I can’t believe there is enough of this stultifying energy present in the general culture of the performing arts to prevent the rise of a movement that thumbs its nose at everyone else and blazes its own trail.

Honestly, I think I am asking these questions because part of me is afraid an environment has been created where no one is invested in the performing arts enough to think it worth the effort to thumb their nose and punch a few sacred cows. Scoff all you want at the amateur, they are needed to drive change.

So I open it up to the readership. Show me where I am wrong. I am happy to learn otherwise. Perhaps there is a movement that is just developing legs that I haven’t recognized. I referenced hip-hop before. It started in the 70s but it really didn’t enter popular awareness until the 80s & 90s. It may be the same with whatever is coming. I should note that amateur lead change need not manifest itself in the destruction and supplanting of the old, it could be any sort of innovation that lead to change. In this context, perhaps the adoption of something has been so gradual and organic I have missed it.

The change also doesn’t need to have been something that achieved great popularity and acclaim. It could be an artistic development or new theory/approach whose impact is recognized internally to the performing arts but not necessarily widely acknowledged. Think Stanley McCandless, the father of modern theatrical lighting. Trained as an architect, his theories about how to approach lighting are the foundation for all lighting design today, nearly a century later. Few in audience members of the early 20th century likely recognized his efforts at improving lighting design were providing them with an better attendance experience much less knew he was responsible.

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Butts In The Seats by Joe Patti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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