The common man of yore was not so interested in beauteous paintings, nor in beauteous physics equations.

To require progress in arts and science to be dictated by what the market wants is a recipe for stagnation.

But state patronage does lead to the ills mentioned in the article. Is there a solution? Yes there is.

But before that, let me come back to the basic fallacy in your position, which is that of applying the free-market concept, which requires monetizability of goods as an axiom, to inherently non-monetizable goods.

Euler’s results in Number Theory are useful to cryptography now, but could we monetize it then? You do realize that all the prosperity that allows you the leisure to so speculate upon things, is due to the inherently non-monetizable products of geniuses of yore?

Sorry for the jumbled rantish comment, I I’ll make a more coherent post on this shortly.

What you say about art in medieval times is not entirely true. In north India, music and dance was indeed patronized by kings. But in the south, music flourished mostly in temples. (That is also one reason why Carnatic has a plebian and therefore greater following than Hindustani.) Thyagaraja could have had royal patrons if he wanted, but he chose not to. Tulsidas had no royal patron.

There is market for philanthropy and the the promotion of arts and sciences. It is a mistake to assume that market means profit.

Regards

The US has an excellent system with its National Science Foundation, etc. for disbursal of grants where researchers, artists or their organizations thereof compete in the “marketplace” for said grants. The head of such org. are themselves veteran researchers/artists.

This creates a healthy incentive based system as opposed to the problems of state institutions alluded to in the article. That is what I meant in my earlier comment when I said that there is a “solution” — of state sponsorship of research w/o the stink of state interventions.

US senators have little control over NSF, etc. other than setting the budget limits.

Research and Art should not be at the mercy of philanthropy. For that would be a misunderstanding of their purpose as needless past-times of affluence. They are not — in fact I’d argue they are the prime purpose of humanity in the first place.

They are not the effect of affluence, they are the cause!

You are way off the mark about the importance of NSF. The total annual NSF budget is about $5 billion. Contrast that with $16 billion that the household sector gives away annually to nonprofit research foundations in the US. We are not including how much universities would fund out of their own corpus (largely collected from alumni donations) and from private-corporate-funded research.

In addition household donate about $10 billion to musuems and libraries.

Regards

And where is the government going to get the money to pay for your fine ideas? I suppose taxation or deficit financing (fancy term for printing more money and causing inflation). I’d rather avoid.

Uma, I agree. Artists who put out begging bowls in front of the government repulse me. Come on, there must be a priority list for goverment and I think support for arts and culture should be way way down (ideally not there at all).