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NEW DIRECTIONS IN CULTURAL POLICY RESEARCH

The Moral Foundations

of Public Funding for the Arts
Michael Rushton
New Directions in Cultural Policy Research

Series Editor
Eleonora Belfiore
Department of Social Sciences
Loughborough University
Loughborough, UK
New Directions in Cultural Policy Research encourages theoretical and
empirical contributions which enrich and develop the field of cultural pol-
icy studies. Since its emergence in the 1990s in Australia and the United
Kingdom and its eventual diffusion in Europe, the academic field of cul-
tural policy studies has expanded globally as the arts and popular culture
have been re-positioned by city, regional, and national governments, and
international bodies, from the margins to the centre of social and eco-
nomic development in both rhetoric and practice. The series invites con-
tributions in all of the following: arts policies, the politics of culture,
cultural industries policies (the ‘traditional’ arts such as performing and
visual arts, crafts), creative industries policies (digital, social media, broad-
casting and film, and advertising), urban regeneration and urban cultural
policies, regional cultural policies, the politics of cultural and creative
labour, the production and consumption of popular culture, arts educa-
tion policies, cultural heritage and tourism policies, and the history and
politics of media and communications policies. The series will reflect cur-
rent and emerging concerns of the field such as, for example, cultural
value, community cultural development, cultural diversity, cultural sus-
tainability, lifestyle culture and eco-culture, planning for the intercultural
city, cultural planning, and cultural citizenship.
 Michael Rushton

The Moral
Foundations of Public
Funding for the Arts
Michael Rushton
O’Neill School of Public/Env. Affairs
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN, USA

ISSN 2730-924X     ISSN 2730-9258 (electronic)

New Directions in Cultural Policy Research
ISBN 978-3-031-35105-1    ISBN 978-3-031-35106-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35106-8

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
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For Maggie, Paul, and John
 All students of man and society who possess that first requisite for so
difficult a study, a due sense of its difficulties, are aware that the besetting
danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking
part of the truth for the whole. It might be plausibly maintained that in
almost every one of the leading controversies, past or present, in social
philosophy, both sides were in the right in what they affirmed, though
wrong in what they denied; and that if either could have been made
to take the other’s views in addition to his own, little more would have
been needed to make its doctrine correct.
—John Stuart Mill, “Coleridge”
 Acknowledgments

This book was formed out of years of teaching the course in Public Policy
and the Arts to students at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental
Affairs at Indiana University Bloomington, and I am grateful to my stu-
dents for their participation and discussion as we considered and probed
the various ideas that are presented here. I also thank participants over the
years in the O’Neill School’s Center for Cultural Affairs Workshop where
early versions of chapters were presented. My Center colleagues Karen
Gahl-Mills and Joanna Woronkowicz each gave careful readings and com-
ments to various chapters, for which I am very grateful. Support from the
O’Neill School, and from Indiana University’s Presidential Arts and
Humanities Program, enabled me to travel to Ireland and England during
2022 to present various parts of this work. I am very thankful to the
School of Art History and Cultural Policy at University College Dublin,
the Centre for Cultural Policy and Leadership, and the Centre for Cultural
Value, at the University of Leeds, The Institute for Cultural Practices at
the University of Manchester, and the Sheffield Methods Institute, and
the Cultural Industries Research Network, at the University of Sheffield,
for the chance to present, discuss, and be rigorously challenged on these
ideas, as well as for their very generous hospitality during my visit. I thank
Eleonora Belfiore, the Editor of the Palgrave New Directions in Cultural
Policy Research series, for her support of this project, and for two anony-
mous referees whose suggestions greatly improved the book. Jenny Noble-­
Kuchera supported me in this project from the beginning; no words are
adequate for the depths of my gratitude.

ix
Praise for The Moral Foundations of Public Funding
for the Arts

“This book is an essential contribution to our field; it offers both a synthesis of the
moral foundations of arts funding through different philosophical traditions, and
an original outlook and interpretation of the subject matter.”
—Jonathan Paquette, University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
 Contents

1 Introduction  1

2 The Economic Method 15

3 Liberalism, Neutrality, and the Arts 41

4 Egalitarianism and Public Funding for the Arts 67

5 Communitarianism 93

6 Conservatism115

7 Multiculturalism141

8 Keynes’s Grandchildren169

Index181

xiii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The Cleveland Orchestra, of Cleveland, Ohio, is considered one of the

finest symphony orchestras in the United States. It was founded in 1918
by Adella Prentiss, and came to world attention under the leadership of
George Szell, appointed in 1946 (Horowitz 2005). It has an endowment
of over $200 million, more than four times its annual expenses (Cleveland
Orchestra 2020), and in 2021 the orchestra received a gift of $50 million
from the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation. The Cleveland
Orchestra also receives financial support through the public sector. It
received $40 thousand from the (federal government) National
Endowment for the Arts for fiscal year 2021, $587 thousand from the
(state government) Ohio Arts Council for fiscal year 2021, and since the
founding of the local government-based Cuyahoga Arts and Culture in
2007, has received over $1 million every year through the present
(National Endowment for the Arts 2021; Ohio Arts Council 2020;
Cuyahoga Arts and Culture 2021); the relative size of these figures reflects
the highly decentralized nature of direct government support for the arts
in the United States.
Cleveland, although a century ago one of the wealthier cities in the
United States, is now one of its poorest, with over 30 percent of its resi-
dents living in poverty; it has never fully adjusted to the decline of the
manufacturing sector in the American Midwest, and epitomizes what has

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
M. Rushton, The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts,
New Directions in Cultural Policy Research,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35106-8_1
2 M. RUSHTON

come to be called the “rust belt.” The local arts funding body, Cuyahoga
Arts and Culture (named for the county in which Cleveland is situated)
came into existence through a voter referendum in 2006, and was renewed
in 2015. Its revenues come from a tax on cigarettes, of 30 cents per pack.
There are significant public health benefits to reducing the incidence of
smoking, and a tax on cigarettes aids in the effort to get smokers to quit,
and to deter young people from starting the habit. But it is also true that
cigarette taxes are regressive, which is the term used for a tax that collects
a lower proportion of income for higher-income taxpayers than it does for
lower-income taxpayers. Cigarette taxes are regressive for two reasons:
first, because taxes on consumption in general tend to be regressive, since
the rich spend a lower proportion of their income, and save a higher pro-
portion, than the poor do; and second, because cigarettes in particular are
consumed at a higher rate by lower-income people (Remler 2004; note
that governments which use the profits from state-run lotteries to finance
public expenditures on the arts are similarly using a regressive tax, as
spending on lotteries is disproportionately by lower-income individuals).
How can one justify using taxes to transfer funds to the operating bud-
get of the Cleveland Orchestra? This book examines different ways one
could try to answer that question. It will broaden its scope by considering
all manner of tax-financed state support not just of prestigious orchestras,
but also smaller, community-based arts presenters, state-run arts organiza-
tions, individual artists, and arts consumers. But I begin with the case of
the Cleveland Orchestra for a reason, that it presents starkly, although not
uniquely, the difficulty: individuals, many of them low income, and who
will never in their lives attend a concert or listen to a recording from the
Cleveland Orchestra, paying more in taxes, and so having less discretion-
ary spending power, to fund a wealthy orchestra and provide a benefit to
its generally wealthy patrons. To seriously address what is perhaps the core
question of arts policy—why should the state fund the arts?—it will be
worth keeping the example of the Cleveland Orchestra in mind.

Why Public Funding for the Arts?

In the Anglo-American world, public funding for the arts is generally
administered through “arm’s length” arts councils, public sector bodies
with a degree of independence from the government departments that
oversee them. Arts Council England, the National Endowment for the
Arts, and the Canada Council for the Arts, for example, have a similar
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

basic form (see Upchurch (2016) for the history of these councils). Their
prime mover was the economist John Maynard Keynes, the first chair of
the Arts Council of Great Britain, who sought a means of providing public
funds to support the arts while avoiding what might be the stifling bureau-
cracy of a government department, although recognizing that ultimately
the policies of the arts council would be answerable to the elected legisla-
ture. In practice, “arm’s length” means that within the goals and param-
eters set for the arts council, the council makes its recommendations for
funding based upon the judgment of panels of artists, arts administrators,
and laypersons, through the directorship of the council, without political
interference from the elected government, although those goals and
parameters must be set with the consent of the government. Elected gov-
ernments always have the power to simply end the existence of the arts
council, which must be remembered in any discussion of independence.
Decades ago, Karen King and Mark Blaug (1976) asked “Does the Arts
Council know what it is doing?” They were referring to the Arts Council
of Great Britain, and they used the technique known as cost-effectiveness
analysis: suppose one wishes to evaluate whether a policy is worthwhile,
but cannot weigh the costs and benefits because while costs are easy to
identify, in terms of expenditures, benefits are very difficult to value in
monetary terms. Unmeasurable benefits are common across policy areas:
national defense, for example, or different means of improving public
health. And so, with cost-benefit analysis ruled out since benefits are
immeasurable, cost-effectiveness analysis takes policy goals as given, and
asks about the effectiveness of the means employed to reach the goals,
often comparing the chosen means with alternatives. Could the goals have
been obtained at less cost? King and Blaug take Arts Council annual
reports dating back to its founding to ask whether the rhetoric and stated
goals in the reports align well with actual expenditures, and whether
changes in stated goals lead to changes in patterns of the allocation of
funds (not surprisingly, given the inevitable inertia in allocations, rhetoric
might change for purposes of relations with stakeholders while the alloca-
tions themselves do not shift so much).
I am taking one further step back from King and Blaug, and looking
into how the broad goals of public arts funding could be shaped from dif-
ferent perspectives in moral philosophy. King and Blaug, as economists,
see that public arts funding can be justified in terms of market failure;
markets on their own will not provide the right amount, or the right sort,
of arts production and consumption. The economic method,
4 M. RUSHTON

consequentialist, and heavily influenced by utilitarianism, is one possible

moral framework—though as I will describe in Chap. 2 it comes with
many, often unstated, assumptions within its workings. But there are other
approaches to be considered as well. How do social contract theories of
the state, with their focus on individual rights rather than the sum of all
consequences to individuals, justify, or not, state funding for the arts? Or
communitarian theories that would reject both the economists and the
social contract theorists on the grounds that they are based upon an unre-
alistic conception of the individual and society? There are implications for
public funding for the arts from each of these models. In this way, while I
will sometimes, necessarily, engage in some abstract theorizing, I will
always attempt to bring the theories down to earth in terms of their direc-
tion on the existence of public funding for the arts, and on what it ought
to prioritize if it is to exist at all.
This book is not about the administration of public arts councils, or
about the various interactions of centers of political power who try to use
their weight to influence the criteria for funding such that it will work for
their private interests. Rather, my intent is to take a few steps back, and ask
more fundamental questions about the very existence of public arts fund-
ing, and, where it exists, its purpose and justification. As such, I will raise
at various places specific programs for funding the arts, but only insofar as
they help illustrate the way in which a particular ethical approach would
justify or evaluate such a program. Around the world there are a variety of
methods for giving state support to the arts: ways of giving grants to pre-
senters, to artists, to consumers; different ways of organizing the bureau-
cracy of arts funding; and different methods for evaluating what gets
funded and what does not. These are all very interesting questions, but
not the focus of this work. Likewise, the COVID-19 pandemic, in addi-
tion to the devastating loss of lives worldwide, led to widespread disrup-
tion in the cultural sector. Different nations approached the question of
how to give temporary emergency support to artists and arts presenters
differently, and there may be some practical lessons that arise in terms of
how the more permanent structures for public arts support work, includ-
ing from the quickening of the pace of digital arts consumption. Again, I
leave this to the many scholars who have engaged in this topic (for a start,
see the special issue of the journal Cultural Trends introduced by Banks
and O’Connor (2021)).
Is there much point in my project of looking to the foundations of
public arts support? Obviously, I think so; let me try to illustrate with a
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

recent case. In May, 2021, the French government introduced the

“Culture Pass”: a smartphone app that gives 300 Euros to every 18-year-­
old in the country for cultural spending (New York Times 2021). Three
months later, it was found that over 75 percent of all purchases were
books, and about two-thirds of those books were manga, Japanese
comic books:

In a speech to launch the Culture Pass in May, President Emmanuel Macron,

who had made the initiative one of his campaign promises, said that France
would mark a “formidable victory” when young people stop saying, “This
work of literature, this movie is not for me.”
Yet critics argue that letting 825,000 teenagers loose with free cash and
expecting them to be nudged away from the nearest multiplex and into an
art-house movie theater is a naïve waste of taxpayer money.
Jean-Michel Tobelem, an associate professor at the University Paris 1
Panthéon-Sorbonne who specializes in the economics of culture, said that it
was a laudable effort but that it would largely benefit the mainstream media.
“You don’t need to push young people to go see the latest Marvel
movie,” he said. There is nothing wrong with pop music or blockbusters, he
stressed, acknowledging that “you can enter Korean culture through K-Pop
and then discover that there is a whole cinema, a literature, painters and
composers that go with it.” (New York Times 2021)

The Culture Pass debate involves a challenging question, one that has
been debated for a very long time (as we shall see later in this book): is it
the role of the state to try to guide people (and I am treating 18-year-olds
as adults here, not schoolchildren) toward what it judges is most worthy
in culture, or should arts policy follow the existing tastes of individuals,
financing whatever is their preference? Is pushpin as good as poetry? Is
manga as good as Flaubert? If pleasure is the only thing that matters, then
we must ask: why restrict a transfer of funds to teenagers to culture in the
first place? What if they would rather have 300 Euros for railway tickets, or
some new clothes, or for some proper kitchen utensils for their first apart-
ment? If the concern is that only teenagers from wealthier and/or more
formally educated families will take part in culture, what of it, if other
teenagers would really rather have funds to spend on something else?
And this is the narrow path arts policy must tread: on the one side it
wants to say the arts matter in a very specific way to people’s well-being.
But it also as far as possible wants to avoid being too prescriptive. What
King and Blaug wrote in the 1970s remains true:
6 M. RUSHTON

[T]he Council has never openly assumed the dynamic role of catalyst in the
Arts. Repeated references in the Annual Reports suggest that the conflict
between a hands-off policy and one of ‘effective leadership’ has never been
decisively resolved. The problem is that of avoiding the Scylla of laissez-faire
while likewise avoiding the Charybdis of artistic paternalism. (1976, p. 103)

I hope that this book can help shed at least some light on this longstand-
ing issue, among others, and in the process provoke discussion of the
foundations of arts policy.
Before giving an outline of the book, let me first say what I will not be
doing. While I will be presenting descriptions of different ways of thinking
about applying moral philosophy to arts funding and will note what criti-
cisms have arisen for the different approaches, I will not be advocating for
one approach or another in particular; rather, my goal is to try to articulate
what people working in applied moral philosophy have said and how fol-
lowing their ideas leads to ways of thinking about arts funding. I will try
to find where there is some overlapping consensus on arts funding between
approaches, and where there are irreconcilable differences, such that mak-
ing a choice cannot be avoided. This book neither advocates for a particu-
lar moral philosophy, nor does it advocate for a particular policy of arts
funding. It is descriptive, comparative, and focuses on the implications of
different ways of thinking about the arts. There is no deep critique here of
any of the strands of moral philosophy discussed, since that would demand
far more pages than can fit; I try in the references to each chapter to point
readers to more detailed treatments. I do not assume much prior knowl-
edge of what is discussed, and hopefully I can provide a useful introduc-
tion for students, as well as scholars, of cultural policy.
Alternative moral frameworks tend to emphasize one specific goal over
others, but I take the approach of Isaiah Berlin (1990) in recognizing that
the various ideals we might wish to pursue nearly always involve trade-offs
of one over another, such that there is no formula for an optimal policy. All
we can hope for is a balance we can live with. To illustrate, suppose we
think (and as it turns out, I do think) that all of the following are good
things to have: an efficient use of our scarce resources to satisfy the prefer-
ences of individuals over public and private goods; the freedom of indi-
viduals to form their own conception of a life worth pursuing, without the
government trying to steer them into this or that direction; greater equal-
ity between individuals in their quality of life; and excellent and lasting
achievement in artistic creation. But the economist’s goal of the efficient
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

use of resources can mean interference in people’s liberty, as they are made
to pay taxes for things they do not wish to fund, it might mean policies
that work against greater equality between individuals, and there is no
guarantee at all that following the preference of the population on arts
funding is the route to excellence. A strict pursuit of “neutrality” by the
state, and not undertaking any funding of the arts unless there is near
unanimity in the populace, can prevent policies that would satisfy the cri-
terion of efficiency, and prevent any support for the pursuit of excellence
in the arts. A government committed to excellence might well be going
against what the general population thinks is worth spending money on.
And so on. While I hope this book is able to stimulate thinking in new
ways about public funding for the arts, it does not arrive at a solution to
the problem.
The book is limited in its scope of applied moral philosophy, working
almost exclusively within the Anglo-American tradition. This is not
because it is more worthy than other philosophical traditions, but simply
reflects the limitations of the author: I am writing about philosophers I
know better than I know others. I realize that this fact about me itself
raises questions about diversity and inclusion in cultural education, but I
hope that others will take up the challenge to discuss arts funding in philo-
sophical traditions where I am not qualified to do so.
In Chap. 2, “The Economic Method,” I examine the economic
approach to public funding for the arts. The goal here is to bring to the
fore the moral assumptions that guide mainstream economic analyses of
public policy in general, and arts policy in particular. Specifically, the eco-
nomic method is solely concerned with the aggregate consequences of
policy, notwithstanding concerns about, for example, individual liberties,
and restricts the consideration of the consequences of policy to the effect
on people’s welfare; like utilitarianism, it is welfarist. Further, individual
welfare is judged by people’s own conceptions of well-being, and changes
in well-being are measured by how much a person would be willing to pay
to achieve it. So, for example, the value to Abi of a new work of public art
in her neighborhood is measured by the amount she would be willing to
pay in taxes for it to be installed, and the value to the community is the
sum of the willingness-to-pay by all affected individuals. If the value to the
whole community is greater than the cost of the installation, then eco-
nomic policy analysis would recommend the project go forward. This is
true even if there are some people who will be paying higher taxes even
though they do not like the proposed artwork at all, and is true even if the
8 M. RUSHTON

primary beneficiaries of the installation are already relatively well-off. The

value of spillover effects from arts institutions like museums and theatre
companies is measured in the same way. Economics relies on consumer
sovereignty in terms of valuing goods, even where the goods are provided
by, or subsidized by, the government. Willingness-to-pay proves to be dif-
ficult to measure, though techniques for doing so, if imperfect, have been
developed and used by cultural economists. But beyond measurement
issues, what is key is that voter preferences are the foundation of value.
People might take actions to try to change how they value different genres
of art, engaging in learning to understand and appreciate art forms that
are not easily accessible. But again, these are individual choices. Attempts
were made in past decades to incorporate the idea that consumer prefer-
ences might be “wrong” in different ways: too hasty or impulsive, too
influenced by a biased presentation of choices, or not what people would
see as their best selves. But these attempts have not made much headway
in the study of arts policy, since it is not clear at all what would represent
“good” as opposed to “bad” preferences. De gustibus non est disputan-
dum. In general, economists and sociologists, for analytical purposes, do
not make judgments on the quality of people’s cultural preferences. This
does not mean a person cannot ever criticize someone else’s taste, or that
there is no such thing as better taste. But social science, appropriately,
stays out of such arguments. The implications of the economic method for
arts policy are that public funding for the arts is very public driven, and
what constitutes valuable public goods, or externalities worth subsidizing,
are determined by the public.
In Chap. 3, “Liberalism, Neutrality, and the Arts,” I consider the lib-
eral, egalitarian social contract framework of John Rawls, and how he
comes to conclude that public funding for the arts, unless it can be accom-
plished with near unanimous support in the community, cannot be justi-
fied, even when it satisfies the criteria set by economic policy analysis.
Rawls begins with the thought experiment of people negotiating and
coming to consensus on a social contract, where the participants debate
from an original position not knowing what their attributes—strengths
and weaknesses, preferences and life goals—will be in the society they cre-
ate. He believes they would agree to extensive personal liberties and equal
opportunities, with inequalities to be permitted only where they work to
the benefit of the worst off, and that there would be no place for the state
to pursue any form of “perfectionism,” promoting certain goods even
where not everyone particularly valued them, for their own good.
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

Participants in his social contract would fear that the state could choose to
pursue goals quite at odds with their own personal goals. Can a liberal
state support the arts? There are different ways to approach this. One is to
see if there is a way that mild forms of perfectionism can be consistent with
Rawls’s principal goal of fairness, that is, a social framework on which all
participants could basically agree. For example, people might agree that
there are forms of excellence, in science and the arts, that deserve respect,
and in turn support, even if they do not personally understand them or
feel much interest in trying to understand. Or it might be that the arts,
with the support of public funding, enhance the mutual respect we give to
one another, noting that having the bases of self-respect is considered by
Rawls to be a “primary good” that would be valued by all and ought to be
distributed equally. A different way to try to reconcile liberal neutrality
with public funding for the arts is Ronald Dworkin’s approach, which is to
consider equality between generations: we have an obligation to provide
to future generations a cultural heritage at least as rich as the one we inher-
ited from prior generations, such that future generations have a set of
cultural opportunities that would enable them to imagine and reflect upon
different conceptions of a life worth leading. The difficulty here is in the
details. If we were concerned about future generations having a rich cul-
tural inheritance, then what specifically ought we to subsidize? Would it be
the canon of Western “high art,” leaving popular and folk art to the com-
mercial sector? Would it be to protect art genres particularly at risk of
extinction if not otherwise supported, and if so, would this apply to all
such art genres or only those that pass some test of timeless value? The
unavoidable question in arts policy is whether it is right to permit state
funders of the arts to be non-neutral, and to make value judgments on the
arts that might be at odds with the preferences of the public.
In Chap. 4, “Egalitarianism and Public Funding for the Arts,” I ask
whether public funding for the arts can serve egalitarian goals. The ques-
tion here is not “how can arts council spending be more egalitarian?”, but
rather “would an egalitarian support public funding for the arts at all?” An
egalitarian is someone who puts equality between individuals as a moral
priority, even if not the only goal of public policy. Any egalitarian must
consider the question of what sort of equality matters. Pursuit of equality
in income might in some cases work against equality of welfare, and vice
versa. In this chapter I consider three possible “currencies” of egalitarian
justice: resources, capabilities, and welfare. Resource equality is the usual
concern of economists, and also of liberal egalitarians such as Rawls and
10 M. RUSHTON

Dworkin; concern with resources, specifically income and wealth, leaves

individuals free to decide how to use their resources according to their
wants. Economists who study questions such as “how progressive should
the income tax be?” are focused on income equality, and assume a rather
simple correlation with well-being. In general, though not always, redistri-
bution of income is more efficient than trying to redistribute amounts of
various commodities. But this approach leaves little room for public fund-
ing of the arts as an egalitarian measure (although there might still be
other reasons for public funding of the arts). The capabilities approach to
equality takes as it concern whether individuals have the specific resources
needed to obtain valuable “functionings,” which are various things we can
do and people we can be—what sort of lives can we lead? Equal resources
might still leave inequalities in people’s ability to fully participate in the
social, economic, political, and cultural life of their community. There
have been recent attempts in cultural policy scholarship to see whether
capabilities could serve as a justification, and focus, for arts funding.
Finally, I consider equality of welfare. This is rather difficult to measure,
since the actual subjective welfare of people depends on many more fac-
tors than the more easily measured levels of income and primary goods. As
such, it seems difficult to see how “equality of welfare” could be made
operational as a goal. But there is one angle to this approach that might be
very relevant for arts policy, and that is the question of “expensive tastes.”
Suppose there are some people whose level of well-being is highly depen-
dent on their ability to consume some quite specific goods, and, unfortu-
nately for them, these goods happen to be very expensive to obtain,
because of market conditions. Should public policy aim to help such peo-
ple, by subsidizing their ability to obtain these goods? Consider, for exam-
ple, a small group of people who very highly value particular cultural
practices, but because they are small in number the practice is expensive on
a per person basis, as there are no opportunities to exploit economies of
scale. A subsidy could make a large difference in their well-being, with the
aim not to make them better off than everyone else, but just to raise their
well-being to that held by people whose cultural tastes are much more
cheaply provided in the market.
In Chap. 5, the analysis takes a different turn from the first half of the
book. The economic approach of Chap. 2, the liberal social contract of
Chap. 3, and the egalitarian perspectives of Chap. 4, have in common a
methodological individualism: a way of thinking about society, and, in
turn, public policy, where the individual, with her tastes and life goals, her
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

attributes, and her well-being, are the unit of analysis. Economists and
social contract theorists alike take the value of public goods, and questions
around the appropriate role of the state in providing funding for the arts,
in terms of what individuals believe is worthwhile, or fair. Chapter 5 looks
at the communitarian critique of methodological individualism, in terms
of how it frames the individual’s place in society, and, in turn, the implica-
tions for public policy. In simple terms, communitarianism reverses the
lens between individuals and society, and sees the individual as a creation
of the society in which she lives, rather than the other way around. The
values we place on cultural practices and artistic traditions are formed by
our social and cultural attachments, which means, first, the value we place
on the arts comes from the fact that it is a shared culture (which is not a
universal culture, but is specific to our time and place and attachments),
and, second, that we cannot use methods from methodological individual-
ism to value that culture, since the culture itself shaped our values. Asking
people how much they value the arts is an impossible question not just
because people don’t often think about it, and might give biased or unin-
formed answers, but because the question itself is logically impossible. The
implications for public funding for the arts are difficult to assess. On the
one hand, a communitarian would advocate for a cultural policy that pre-
serves and enhances the traditions of the shared culture, over simply leav-
ing matters to individual choice, and this would require judgment from
policymakers in the arts on what aspects of culture most matter, which
might be some combination of folk traditions and the high arts. On the
other hand, such a cultural policy requires a light touch, recognizing that
an emphasis on what is considered the “true” local or national culture has
the danger of leading to very illiberal restrictions on expression, and on
the politicization of arts institutions. The strongest case for a liberal
approach to arts, and to personal freedoms in general, comes from seeing
from history, and, unfortunately, from some contemporary examples, the
results of governments that have opted to oppose liberalism in favor of
national cultural goals.
Chapter 6 asks what a philosophically conservative arts funding policy
would look like. This is somewhat of a challenge in the context of this
book in that conservatism has no structured framework as such, but com-
bines what has been called the conservative disposition—the value placed
on what is ours and what is familiar, over and above practical usefulness—
with a conservative approach to politics. The conservative disposition is
just that: not a theory but a way in which people, to varying degrees, are,
12 M. RUSHTON

with attachments to present goods and practices, over promises of an even

better and improved future. Political conservatism holds that politics is an
activity that ought not to be guided by any firm theoretical doctrine or
utopian goals, but instead is a practical activity that follows, rather than
leads, the desires of its population for stable laws, institutions, and practi-
cal solutions to collective problems. It eschews what Michael Oakeshott
referred to as “rationalism in politics,” which is the notion that one can
apply formulas or systematic rules, drawn from abstract theory, to the
world of political practice, the ordinary activities of making sure the street-
lights are turned on, laws enforced, and, maybe, some funding for the arts.
It is against radical change, and what change is called for ought to arise
organically out of changes in society itself. “Cultural” conservatism arises
in the nineteenth century, and I summarize the views of three preeminent
cultural conservatives who also happened to be poets: Samuel Coleridge,
Matthew Arnold, and T.S. Eliot. Each of these saw the importance of cul-
tural education, and an understanding of cultural heritage, as crucial to
social harmony as well as the cultivation of the arts. Drawing these threads
together, I list features of what conservatives might agree to as a guide to
arts policy, including an appreciation of artistic tradition, recognition of
standards of quality and excellence in the arts, a distinction between enter-
tainment and art proper, say as proposed by R.G. Collingwood, and a
rejection of politicization of the arts, which only distracts and diminishes
artists from their most valuable contribution to society (though one might
see this list as being itself very political). The chapter concludes by noting
that the problem of reconciling a liberal, democratic political order with
the pursuit of perfectionism in policy remains unresolved.
Chapter 7 concerns multiculturalism. The presence of different races,
ethnicities, and cultures within a single nation tends to hamper the ability
of governments to gain consensus on how to tax and spend. Where there
is a majority culture, and one or a few minority cultures, those minorities
can feel particularly vulnerable in terms of losing their distinct traditions
and languages, either through gradual assimilation, or through active poli-
cies by the majority to discriminate or to suppress. The policy of multicul-
turalism can take a variety of forms, but in essence involves efforts by the
state to recognize, respect, and support minority cultures, whether they
have had a long presence in the country, or are relatively recent
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

immigrants. Most of this book is about whether and how one could justify
public spending on the arts, and in this chapter the analysis goes a little
further, asking, within the context of different moral frameworks, whether
a multicultural policy is justified. Not everyone would agree it is justified:
has the world not become a global mix of offerings, allowing cultural
omnivores to enjoy the fruits of every sort of creative expression, along
with the technologies and higher incomes that make them widely accessi-
ble? And is this cosmopolitanism not good for individuals being able to
shape, and question and revise, their sense of self and of what is valuable,
and not be defined by the cultural boundaries of their upbringing?
Chapter 8 goes back to why Keynes believed there ought to be an arts
council, looking to his personal beliefs on what is ultimately good in life,
and his hopes for the future (which could be thought of as the situation of
the current generation). For him, beauty and contemplation are intrinsic
goods, and a good life will involve taking the time to learn to properly
appreciate them, and to put aside the drive for the acquisition of material
wants. I propose two lessons from what we can gather from the material
we have surveyed: one is a dilemma that must be faced squarely, the other
is a caution in the practical aspects of arts funding, and the criteria that
ought to guide it.
Is it justified to use public funds to subsidize the Cleveland Orchestra,
or a local theatre-in-the-park with free admission, or to give a “Culture
Pass” to teenagers to spend on any goods they choose that sit under the
umbrella of what is considered “culture”? If there were unanimity, or very
close to it, among people as to whether it was worth giving any public
funds to the arts, and agreement on how those funds would be best allo-
cated (or even agreement that a panel of experts ought to be left to
decide), then matters would be quite simple. What makes discussion of
arts funding difficult is that people do not agree on how funds ought to
be allocated, and they do not agree whether there should be any public
funding at all. Advocates for public arts funding need to be able to make
a coherent case for why it should exist even in the face of some people not
supporting it, and their not believing they receive anything of value from
the subsidized arts. I hope this book provides some perspective and con-
tributes to the ongoing conversation concerning the proper role for the
state in our cultural lives.
14 M. RUSHTON

References
Banks, Mark, and Justin O’Connor. 2021. ‘A Plague Upon Your Howling’: Art
and Culture in the Viral Emergency. Cultural Trends 30 (1): 3–18.
Berlin, Isaiah. 1990. The Pursuit of the Ideal. In The Crooked Timber of Humanity.
London: John Murray.
Cleveland Orchestra. 2020. 2019/2020 Annual Report. Cleveland: Cleveland
Orchestra.
Cuyahoga Arts and Culture. 2021. Grantmaking History by Organization.
Cleveland: Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.
Horowitz, Joseph. 2005. Classical Music in America: A History. New York: Norton.
King, Karen, and Mark Blaug. 1976. Does the Arts Council Know What It Is
Doing? In The Economics of the Arts, ed. M. Blaug, 101–125. London:
Martin Robinson.
National Endowment for the Arts. 2021. Winter Award Announcement for Fiscal
Year 2021. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts.
New York Times. 2021. France Gave Teenagers $350 for Culture. They’re Buying
Comic Books. (July 28).
Ohio Arts Council. 2020. Annual Report: Fiscal Year 2020. Columbus: Ohio
Arts Council.
Remler, Dahlia K. 2004. Poor Smokers, Poor Quitters, and Cigarette Tax
Regressivity. American Journal of Public Health 94 (2): 225–229.
Upchurch, Anna Rosser. 2016. The Origins of the Arts Council Movement. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
 CHAPTER 2

The Economic Method

Economic analysis is a tool that can be used to evaluate public funding of

the arts: when it would be valuable, and how it would be best allocated. It
is but one way of thinking about the world, although it has become an
especially powerful one in practice, for good or ill (Berman 2022).
This chapter looks at how economists treat the question of public fund-
ing of the arts, the moral assumptions that underlie their methods, even if
often unstated, and the implications of following the economic method
for how funding should be allocated.
Economic analysis is consequentialist: as the word suggests, it assesses
policy initiatives, such as whether to increase arts funding, in terms of
what the consequences would be, rather than in terms of rights and duties
which might apply regardless of consequences. Further, and more restric-
tive, it is welfarist: the only consequences that matter are those that affect
individuals’ well-being. There is no room for “art for art’s sake”; rather,
welfarism restricts itself to “art for people’s sake.” Economic method is
focused on individuals, that is, it uses a methodological individualism: it is
individual well-being that matters, with the benefits of policy summed
across all individuals, rather than any notion of a community of individuals
which has its own social welfare greater than the sum of the individual
parts. And economic method generally assumes, with some cautious

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 15

Switzerland AG 2023
M. Rushton, The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts,
New Directions in Cultural Policy Research,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35106-8_2
16 M. RUSHTON

exceptions that will be discussed later in the chapter, consumer sovereignty:

individuals are their own best judge of what constitutes an improvement
in their well-being, and of what constitutes a preferred choice.
In this chapter I first outline the economic case for public funding as it
is typically presented in handbooks and textbooks on cultural policy, and
then turn to the implications. For the most part this chapter will focus on
the efficiency rationale for public funding for the arts, or how arts policy
could improve aggregate welfare, rather than considerations of equality,
which are discussed in depth in Chap. 4.

The Power of Markets

Economists approach the subject of public economics—the analysis of gov-
ernment taxation, spending, and regulation—from what might seem to be
a surprising direction. Specifically, they begin by considering a world in
which the government is rather superfluous. In short, the first theorem of
welfare economics holds that if markets are competitive, and there is a com-
plete set of markets, then the equilibrium outcome of the market process
will be efficient, requiring no government intervention. This needs some
unpacking.
By competitive we mean that in each market there are many buyers and
many sellers, each of whom is well-informed about prices and the goods
and services on offer, and each of whom can enter or leave the market as
they prefer, and no single buyer or seller is so large with respect to the
other traders that she has the power to influence market prices.
By complete set of markets we mean that every good that affects our well-­
being has a market price and is tradeable (we will see below that this is an
important consideration for arts funding).
By equilibrium we mean the set of prices, and purchases and sales, to
which markets will tend, at which no person, given the set of prices, has
any incentive to change what they buy or sell.
And by efficient we mean that there is no conceivable rearrangement of
markets that could make at least some people better off without at the
same time making at least some people worse off. This particular way of
conceiving efficiency is known as Pareto efficiency. A change in arrange-
ments which does make some better off while leaving no one worse off is
known as a Pareto improvement.
The claim of the first theorem is a limited one. Market failures, either
through lack of competition, lack of complete information, or simply the
 2 THE ECONOMIC METHOD 17

lack of a market at all, are commonplace in the real world. And a Pareto
efficient outcome could be one with tremendous inequality of welfare.
And yet at the same time the result is astonishing. Buyers and sellers,
out and about pursuing their own interests (which need not be selfish
ones), without any authority ordering them to buy more of this and less of
that, to grow more rye and less wheat, are led as if by an invisible hand to
generate an outcome that is efficient. If in my town of Bloomington the
equilibrium competitive price for a basic haircut is $24, and about 21,000
haircuts are sold each month, there is no good reason for the state to ques-
tion that outcome, to mandate a different price, or to say that the haircuts
ought to have gone to others rather than to the people that actually
bought them. In fact, as Hayek (1945) made clear, this decentralized
method of markets is the only way to reach such an efficient outcome,
since there is no way a centrally planned economy could possibly accumu-
late, update, and process all the necessary information about consumer
and supplier preferences in haircuts, as well as the ever-changing condi-
tions in every other market.
How does this world of buyers and sellers lead to an efficient outcome?
Let’s stay with the example of haircuts. The number of haircuts per month
that, in aggregate, people will want to purchase depends on the market
price. With a higher price, at least some people (it doesn’t need to be
everybody) will wait longer between professional haircuts, or might even
switch to just cutting their own hair at home. If the equilibrium price is
$24, then while some buyers would have been willing to pay more than
this (we call the difference between what a person would have been willing
to pay and what they actually pay consumer surplus), there are buyers who
are just on the margin, who find it worth paying $24 but no more. On the
supply side, openings for haircuts are also a function of the market price:
the higher the price, the more openings a barber will be willing to sched-
ule, and the more people will decide to open a barber shop. If the equilib-
rium price is $24, then for most haircuts this is a good exchange for the
barber; some might be willing to cut hair even if the price is only $20, but
they are able to charge $24. But at the margin, there are some openings
that are just barely worth it, and if the price were only $23.90 the barber
would not stay open quite so many hours. If we put the two sides of the
market together, it means that at equilibrium, the value of a haircut to the
marginal buyer is exactly equal to the cost of providing the cut to the mar-
ginal seller, with each of these being equal to price. But in any optimiza-
tion problem, we want a level of activity to the point where marginal
18 M. RUSHTON

benefits equal marginal costs, but no further. If Bloomington, owing to

some external constraint, were unable to provide the equilibrium 21,000
haircuts per month—say the government imposes a quota of just 15,000
cuts—then some people will wish they could get a cut, and be willing to
pay a price that some seller would happily accept, yet the mutually benefi-
cial transaction is prohibited. That’s not Pareto efficient, since by allowing
the number of cuts to rise to the competitive equilibrium there are buyers
and sellers who would mutually gain. Likewise, having more than 21,000
haircuts per month does not make sense, since that would take us to a level
where the value of the cut to the marginal buyer is less than what the seller
is required to receive.
At equilibrium in a competitive market, the marginal value of the good
or service to buyers is just equal to the marginal cost to sellers of providing
the good or service, and any departure from this outcome will make at
least some people worse off.

The Arts and Market Failure: Public Goods

So why subsidize the arts? Aren’t there markets for concerts and films and
paintings? For economists, the standard story is that there are market fail-
ures, mainly of two types.
The first is what we call public goods. Economists have a very particular
way of defining this: it means goods that are (1) non-rival—once provided
to the public, any extra users do not diminish the benefits to anyone else
enjoying the good, and (2) non-exclusive—once provided to the public,
there is no practical way to keep people from enjoying the good, no fea-
sible way to set up gates and a ticket booth. Public art generally fits this
bill—sculptures and murals and other installations. My pausing to enjoy
an outdoor work doesn’t block anyone else from doing the same at the
same time, and it would be impractical to try to sell tickets to see the work.
We could also add non-commercial public broadcast radio to the list of
public goods, as it is non-rival and non-exclusive. (Non-arts examples of
public goods would be national defense, city streets and streetlights and
sidewalks, small urban parks, etc.)
Markets do not work well for public goods, since these goods entail a
cost—for public art, this would include the space taken up by the work,
the creation of the work itself, for which the artist must be compensated,
and upkeep and maintenance—but since they are non-exclusive there is no
easy way for the supplier to collect revenue. And yet it might well be the
 2 THE ECONOMIC METHOD 19

case that an addition to a town’s collection of public art is worth more to

people, in aggregate, than what it would cost to provide the addition.
As an exception to the general rule, we can think of cases where a public
good can be financed privately without any problem. Consider three
roommates sharing an apartment, and the microwave oven has reached
the end of its useful life. All three roommates use the microwave, and they
could (one hopes!) arrange to each contribute to the cost of purchasing a
new one. If the microwave is worth buying at all, it must be that the sum
of the benefits to the roommates exceeds the cost. If one of the room-
mates rarely uses the microwave, relative to the other two, it might be that
she is willing to contribute 10 percent of the price while the other two are
each willing to pay 45 percent. If the benefits of the new microwave exceed
the cost, there must be some possible allocation of the cost that leaves no
one feeling worse off; in other words, a Pareto improvement.
Finding an allocation of costs to fund public goods so that no one is
worse off is going to become exponentially, impossibly high as we move
from three roommates to the entire population of a city. The breaking
point will be when the costs of getting all affected parties together and
negotiating an arrangement become impracticably high. In larger groups,
beyond one’s roommates and friends, beyond one’s social club or house
of worship, people can be less than forthcoming about the benefits they
would receive from a public good, hoping to “free ride” on others who
would step forward to offer to pay for it. And so public goods at the local,
provincial, and national levels are funded from tax revenues.
Funding public goods, such as public art, thus has the problem that
even if it is estimated that the total benefits from expanding the city’s col-
lection of public art, which would be the sum of the benefits at the margin
to each individual, exceeds the cost of the additions, some people will be
made worse off—they have no interest in the art, might even find it an
eyesore, and yet are paying taxes to fund it. Rushton (2003) (drawing on
Atkinson and Stiglitz (1980)) finds that the more people diverge in their
preferences for public spending on the arts, the more likely we will have at
least some of the population feeling worse off (just as the more consensus
there is on public spending on a budget item, the more likely something
close to an actual Pareto improvement is possible).
Note that the test for the funding of public goods—that the sum across
all individuals of benefits from the good at the margin exceeds the cost at
the margin of providing it—takes consumer preferences as given (dis-
cussed further below). And it assumes that the value of a public good can
20 M. RUSHTON

be expressed purely and exclusively as the sum of the benefits to individu-

als (we will shine particular light on this conception of public goods in
Chap. 5 on Communitarianism).
And it is here that we come to a position taken by the economic method
and cost-benefit analysis with very important moral implications: so long
as the sum of benefits from a public good, or any other public spending or
regulatory policy, exceeds its cost, it is justified, on the grounds that,
mathematically, those who experience a net gain from the spending could,
in principle, compensate those who experience a net loss in such a way that
no one is left worse off. Importantly, the compensation need not actually
take place; what matters is that it would, although perhaps very impracti-
cably, be possible. This is known as a Potential Pareto Improvement, also as
the Kaldor-Hicks criterion, after the economists who proposed it (Kaldor
1939; Hicks 1939); it is a foundation of contemporary cost-benefit analy-
sis (see Sugden and Williams (1978) for example; also see Harberger
(1971) for a defense of the method). It is a method that puts questions of
equitable distribution to one side. This doesn’t mean that a policymaker
would necessarily approve a policy that passed the Kaldor-Hicks cost-­
benefit test even though low-income people were most harmed and high-­
income people received the lion’s share of the benefits. But the
distributional considerations would be separate from the basic framework
for evaluating spending on public goods (or, as we see below, subsidizing
positive externalities).
The Kaldor-Hicks criterion can be defended as follows, taking the
example from Kaldor (1939): the repeal of the Corn Laws in Britain in
1846, freeing trade in grain. From this change in policy, landlords suffered
a loss, and other manufacturers and consumers gained. Can we say that in
aggregate welfare improved? Economists can estimate the changes in
incomes resulting from a policy change, and in this case aggregate income
certainly rose. But economics gives no guidance on aggregate welfare,
because it is unknowable how much the loss in income to landlords cost
them in terms of well-being; we cannot compare well-being across indi-
viduals, I cannot compare my happiness to yours. All we can observe are
changes in income. But, Kaldor points out, we can say that since national
income rose as a result of the repeal of the Corn Laws, it is at least possible
that those who gained monetarily from the change could compensate the
landlords for their loss such that after the transfers nobody suffered a loss,
and at least some people gained; that is, there is a Potential Pareto
Improvement. Whether such compensation should be paid is a separate
 2 THE ECONOMIC METHOD 21

question, and beyond the expertise of economics—it falls to morals and

politics.
Using the Kaldor-Hicks criterion to evaluate a policy change is not a
matter of economists saying the distribution of gains and losses does not
matter. It is, rather, economists saying that the ethics of distribution is a
question that goes beyond what economists can do within the economic
method. If a new work of public art would cost five dollars in extra taxes
from each resident, and some people would value the new art at more than
five dollars, and some would value it less, but the total value placed upon
it would exceed the total cost, then cost-benefit analysis, using the Kaldor-­
Hicks criterion, would advise going forward with the project. In essence,
it values monetary gains and losses as if the circumstances of the winners
and losers did not matter; a gain worth one dollar to Abdul is valued as
equivalent to a gain worth one dollar to Benjamin, regardless of Abdul
and Benjamin’s relative income or welfare.
Note that the effects of arts policy on the overall distribution of income
in practice are going to be slight. The distribution of income is far more
dependent upon other policies: the tax and transfer system, the provision
of health insurance and public education, the bargaining power of labor,
competition policy restricting the formation of powerful monopolies and
cartels, and macroeconomic policies that contribute to stable long-term
economic growth.
Is this defense of the Kaldor-Hicks criterion adequate? Scitovsky (1941)
draws attention to the implicit, unstated assumption behind the analysis
that the distribution of income prior to the policy change is already at a
desired level, achieved through various taxes and transfers that influence
distribution:

For instance, it might be argued that the abolition of the Corn Laws should
not have been advocated by economists in their capacity of pure economists
without advocating at the same time the full compensation of landowners
out of taxes levied on those favoured by the cheapening of corn. Yet, in a
sense, and regarded from a long-run point of view, such propositions are not
independent of value judgments between alternative income distributions
either. For, going out of their way to preserve the existing distribution of
income, they imply a preference for the status quo. (p. 79)

That said, Atkinson and Stiglitz (1976) show that if we have something
of an optimal income tax and transfer system in place, optimal in the sense
22 M. RUSHTON

of balancing efficiency concerns with a judgment on how to weigh varying

levels of income when calculating social welfare, then the Kaldor-Hicks
criterion can be justified; with an optimal tax system, we have already
solved the problem of an additional dollar to one person being of equiva-
lent value to an additional dollar to another person. This suggests that the
more we believe the actual tax and transfer system in play departs from an
optimal one, the more cautious one would need to be in applying the
Kaldor-Hicks criterion.

The Arts and Market Failure: Externalities

For the most part arts councils do not provide much funding for the econ-
omist’s conception of public goods. Concerts, film screenings, museums,
are all exclusive, it being possible, and common, to charge for admission,
and to restrict from entering those who will not pay. When it comes to
public subsidy for the arts, economists have tended to focus on
externalities.
An externality occurs when activities of firms or consumers affect third
parties in a beneficial or harmful way, and where there is no market or
transaction in those third-party benefits or costs. In other words, the effect
is external to the price system. These effects are also known as “spillovers.”
In arts policy, the claim has long been made in the field of cultural eco-
nomics that there are possibly positive (i.e., beneficial) externalities from
the arts, and this would warrant some form of subsidy.
Why a subsidy? Ordinary competitive markets are good at producing an
efficient level of output, one that brings into equality the marginal benefits
to consumers and the marginal costs to suppliers. With an externality,
however, there are benefits (for positive externalities) or costs (for negative
externalities) that are ignored by the market participants, who are simply
seeking the best outcome for their own interests. With positive externali-
ties, the social benefits at the margin for the good, which involve the ben-
efits to consumers as well as the external benefits, are greater than the
private benefits to actual consumers of the good, meaning from a social
perspective we would ideally like output to be higher than what the mar-
ket will yield. A subsidy, which could take the form of subsidies to produc-
ers of the good (in the arts, grants to artists and/or arts presenters) or to
consumers (say in the form of “vouchers” for the arts that could be
redeemed by consumers for eligible arts-related purchases, an example
being the French Culture Pass discussed in Chap. 1), is meant to increase
 2 THE ECONOMIC METHOD 23

the production and consumption of the arts. It is important that the sub-
sidy actually do something in terms of increasing the activity which is pre-
sumed to generate the externality; a grant to an orchestra that is mostly
wasted on unnecessary internal expenditures, and that does not affect the
artistic output of the orchestra in any way, is pointless, as it is not fulfilling
the purpose of the subsidy.
But first, it is important to be clear on what is, and what is not, an exter-
nality. The third-party effects must be external to the price system. So, to
take an example suggested by Cheung (1973), the fact that apple growers
benefit from bees pollinating their crop does not in itself suggest a positive
externality from beekeepers to apple growers, as a quick internet search in
any region where apples are grown will reveal that in fact markets do exist
for this service, and beekeepers will locate hives in one’s orchard for a
price; there is no rationale on these grounds for any sort of subsidy to
beekeepers.
With externalities, the key is that it is difficult to design a market.
Ronald Coase (1960), in what became known as the Coase theorem,
showed that as long as property rights were clear—who owns what, who
is liable or not for damages—and transaction costs, being, as the name
suggests, the costs of drawing up a contract, negotiating prices, monitor-
ing the contracted performance, and all the other costs of engaging in a
market transaction, are low, then the relevant parties would be able to
come to an efficient arrangement of contracts and prices. Coase’s point
was not that the market would solve any and every externality problem.
Rather, it was that the core of the problem is transaction costs, just as it is
for the market failure of public goods.
One confusion that has arisen around externalities and the arts has to
do with the distinction between the “intrinsic benefits” of the arts and
“instrumental benefits” of the arts. Suppose I attended a live theatre per-
formance. I enjoyed the play: it was well-written and well-acted, had many
memorable scenes, and left me thinking about what I had seen well after I
left the theatre. These have been called intrinsic benefits. But there were
other things I liked. I had the chance to chat with other audience mem-
bers, some of whom I knew but had not seen for some time, and it pleased
me to reconnect. One of the people I met let me know about a job oppor-
tunity that had just come open that might be ideal for me; I never would
have learned about this had I not gone to the play. I’ve been advised that
I ought to get out more, that it is not good for me to spend so many
nights at home. These are “instrumental benefits,” benefits to me that
24 M. RUSHTON

were not strictly related to the work of art that I experienced, but were
simply a function of “a night out at the theatre.” But none of these instru-
mental benefits are externalities, since they are all benefits to me. There are
no third-party effects. What happened was that the benefits of going to
the theatre took many forms. But they did not benefit third parties at all.
The intrinsic / instrumental divide does not give us much to work with
when it comes to public subsidy; much more to the point is whether the
benefits of my going to the theatre all accrue to me, or whether there are
others that are affected.
An economic factor in the cultural sector, particularly (but not exclu-
sively) in the live performing arts, is “cost disease” (Baumol and Bowen
1965). Neither does this constitute an externality. Cost disease is the phe-
nomenon of different sectors of the economy having different abilities
over time to adopt labor-saving technological advances. The average rate
of productivity increase across the economy determines the growth in
wages, and wage differentials across sectors for workers of roughly equiva-
lent levels of skills and training cannot become too high, for if they did all
workers would leave low-wage sectors for where the pay is better. This
means that over time the relative costs of producing goods and services
where labor-saving technology rates have been high will fall, and the rela-
tive costs of producing goods and services where labor-saving technology
rates have been low will rise. Examples of the latter would be education
(one schoolteacher can have only a limited number of students in the
classroom at one time, and the students can only learn so much at a time),
many aspects of health care (there have been major technological advances
in health care, to be sure, but there is a human element to care from doc-
tors and nurses that cannot be replaced by technology), and the live per-
forming arts. Manufactured goods, information and communication
technology, transportation of goods and people, agricultural goods, have
all had relative cost and price declines over the decades. Services that
require a certain amount of person-hours of labor at a more or less con-
stant rate—classroom instruction, haircuts, personal counseling, perfor-
mances of Twelfth Night—have all become relatively more expensive.
Recorded arts have generally fallen in price, in terms of the costs of obtain-
ing recordings and the cost of good-quality equipment on which to play
it. Live performance is a different thing. But this is not an externality;
there are no third-party effects lacking a functioning market. It does mean
that some arts presenters are going to face challenges in balancing their
budgets over the long term, but that is going to be true of any firm
 2 THE ECONOMIC METHOD 25

providing personal services. The relative price of my getting a haircut has

risen faster than other prices over the decades, but that is not in itself
grounds for subsidizing the hair-styling sector. Note that “cost disease” is
an odd term, since it implies something has gone wrong. But it is a result
of the economy becoming richer, not poorer, a function of rising wages
across the economy.
Finally, so-called economic impacts are not an externality, even though
they are endlessly, and to me incomprehensibly, promoted as a rationale
for public support of the arts. An “economic impact” study begins by
calculating the total spending on a particular good, for example the entire
creative sector, or perhaps just non-profit arts organizations, for a particu-
lar city or region. It then uses input-output tables to generate estimates of
how the incomes generated by that arts spending were subsequently spent
by its recipients. That next round of spending becomes income for yet
another group, and so on. Each round has a diminishing magnitude,
resulting from people saving some of their income, and some spending
being on imported goods. All these rounds of spending are called “indi-
rect” effects, and when added to the original spending are called the total
“economic impact.” But there is no externality or other market failure in
play here; this is simply a sum of different market transactions, one that we
could calculate for any sector. One of the odd things about the use of the
studies in advocacy for public spending on the arts is that rather than mak-
ing a claim that the arts are different from other goods, it presents the arts
as just another sector, no different from restaurants, accounting services,
or barbershops. No economist takes these studies very seriously, and so we
move on.
So what are the possible externalities from the arts? Here I draw from
common suggestions of texts in cultural economics, including Cowen
(2006), Frey (2000), Heilbrun and Gray (2001), Netzer (1978), O’Hagan
(1998), Throsby (2001, 2010), and Towse (2010). Peacock (1969) is an
early analytical piece on arts externalities.
It is helpful here to separate externalities from funding individual artists
and externalities from funding arts presenters, like festivals, performing
arts companies, galleries, and the like.
For individual artists, there are two principal market failures. The first is
in investment in human capital. A young person wishing to pursue a career
in the arts needs time and guidance in building skills and an artistic vision.
The hoped-for return from this investment in human capital are the
rewards that come from working as an artist. But financing human capital
26 M. RUSHTON

investment is very different from financing investment in physical capital;

one cannot borrow against highly uncertain future earnings. A young per-
son can more easily acquire financing for a car than a year at art school,
since the finance company will insist the car is insured against damage, and
the car can be repossessed should the borrower fail to repay the loan.
Personal investment in printmaking or cello technique cannot be repos-
sessed in such a manner. This is why governments almost universally sub-
sidize higher education and training: private capital markets do not work
efficiently when it comes to investments in persons. Note this is true for all
skilled professions, and is an argument for subsidizing the education of
future financial advisors and arc welders as well as painters and musicians.
The building of an artistic career requires years beyond the conservatory,
and so support for artists trying to become established post-graduation
can also be justified on the grounds of it being very difficult to finance in
the market.
The second market failure involving individual artists is in the realm of
intellectual property. Copyright gives the opportunity for artists to earn a
return on their investments in creating their works. But copyright only
protects specific expressions of an idea or inspiration—the text of a novel;
the lyrics and musical phrases of a song—but does not protect a new style
of writing fiction, or songs, or painting, new styles that can inspire other
artists (and commercial firms) in their own art and design. Innovative art-
ists create works which are only to a degree covered by copyright, but also
contain elements of what immediately becomes a public good. Firms
investing in research and development have a similar issue; patents protect
specific aspects of design, but not the new ideas they spur in other firms.
So, just as many governments subsidize firm spending on research and
development through various tax expenditures, so there is a case for sub-
sidizing new creative ideas in the arts.
There is an important point to be made here, sometimes lost in policy
discussions: the goal of subsidies to individual artists, whether they are
starting out or experienced, is to ultimately increase the amount and/or
quality of art produced for the benefit of the public that consumes and
experiences it. Artists receive the funds, market failures are corrected
through granting them funds, but the goal is not to have a transfer pro-
gram to artists for their benefit alone. From Adam Smith, “Consumption
is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the pro-
ducer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for pro-
moting that of the consumer. The maxim is so perfectly self-evident that it
 2 THE ECONOMIC METHOD 27

would be absurd to attempt to prove it” (Smith 1981/1776, p. 660). For

example, if we take the recently (2022) enacted pilot program, Basic
Income for the Arts, in Ireland, which provides to working artists, selected
by lottery, a grant of 325 Euros per week (of taxable income), the policy
goal, for an economist, would be that Ireland has more and better art for
its people to enjoy, correcting for the market underproduction consider-
ing the positive externalities from the arts. Artists will undoubtedly be
pleased to be selected for the program. But that would be true for any sort
of worker selected to receive such an income supplement, and cannot be
the rationale for the program; why not a similar grant for hair stylists or
physio therapists? The purpose of grants to artists is, in the end, art for
consumers, not the happiness of artists.
I now turn to arts presenters, and the possibilities for positive externali-
ties. First, there might be in some individuals a sense of regional or national
pride in its arts presenters and their traditions and renown, that exists even
if they do not themselves attend (remember, a person who does attend the
theatre and enjoys it for a variety of reasons, including some reasons not
directly associated with the experience of the art, does not in itself consti-
tute an externality, which relies on benefits from other people attending).
Although this possibility is commonly mentioned in cultural economics
textbooks, the evidence for the externality, particularly in the subsidized
arts sector, is not immediately obvious.
Second, it might be that people believe that society is made better by
people participating in the arts, that literature, theatre, music, and visual
art aid in mutual understanding and empathy between individuals, and
this makes life better for all, even those who do not directly participate
themselves. Evidence on this question is mixed: there do seem to be cor-
relations between measures of empathy and the reading of literature, but
we cannot tell if people who are generally empathetic to begin with are
drawn to literature, or if reading literature is a cause of the empathy. Carey
(2006) believes that literature alone has the ability to enable this sort of
perspective-taking, while it is very difficult to see how other arts have this
capability; see Rushton (2017) for a review of this literature. We also have
to be wary of believing in positive externalities from art in terms of com-
munity and empathy without recognizing there might be art which has
the opposite effect, reinforcing biases toward others rather than ameliorat-
ing them (Goffin and Friend 2022).
Third, there is concern for future generations, and concern for our
future selves. “Option demand” is the idea that one benefits from others
28 M. RUSHTON

attending the ballet, for example, even if not attending oneself, on the
grounds of wanting the art form, and the presenting organization, to sur-
vive into the future so that the option of one day being able to attend will
be preserved.
Preserving the arts for future generations is a topic that will recur in this
book—see Chap. 3 on liberalism and Chap. 6 on conservatism—and here
I will focus on the economic approach. Arts conservation is an externality
if one gets personal satisfaction, even if not attending the arts, that it is
being preserved for the future. Scheffler (2018) asks us to consider the
world depicted in P.D. James’s (1992) novel The Children of Men, in
which the entire human population of the earth has become infertile, and
is gradually dying off; at the time the novel is set the youngest humans are
in their late teens. The England she portrays is a melancholy place, to say
the least, where people can listen to a record, or view a painting, knowing
that in a few years’ time there will be no one left to enjoy that music or
painting, it will have come to an end. A part of the value we place on art
is that it will last for generations yet to be born, whom we will never know.
There is also the question of our obligations to future generations.
Welfare economics, and the utilitarian tradition generally, has held that it
is wrong to discount the well-being of future generations as being of lesser
importance that the well-being of the current generation. We discount our
own personal consumption, in preferring goods now to goods later, and
we might take account of the likely probability that future generations will
be materially richer than this generation, through ongoing improvements
in productivity. But future well-being still matters as much as our own.
This moral claim is in the seminal work on saving and investment for the
future (Ramsey 1928), through Parfit (1984), and in contemporary work
on the economics of climate change: “there is no serious ethical argument
in favour of pure-time discounting” (Stern 2022, p. 1279).

Contingent Valuation
The arts have a positive externality not because cultural economists have
thought of plausible ways in which they might, but because individuals
actually place a value on these external effects, just as they do for public
goods. The value of public art and arts externalities, if any, are in the eye
of the beholder. But how could that value be measured?
The problem to be overcome is that there are no market prices to guide
us in calculating how the public values government spending on the arts.
 2 THE ECONOMIC METHOD 29

I can learn, at the margin, how consumers value haircuts, blueberries, and
hats, simply by looking at market prices; the data sits right in front of us.
For some public goods, there are no direct market prices to see, but there
are related prices that can give us some indications. For example, if the
government department of transportation is looking at spending on an
upgrade to a highway, and wondering whether the expenditure would be
worthwhile, it can obtain estimates of how many people typically use the
existing road, and relevant alternative routes, how much driving time each
driver would save with an improved road, and, based on wage levels, how
much people value time, how much safer the new road would be, and
based on other markets how much people tend to value safety improve-
ments, and so on. But how would one measure the value of new sculptural
works to be placed along the city’s main bicycle path, or of the external
benefits that come from the local orchestra?
Contingent valuation is a method of opinion polling in which a repre-
sentative sample of the population is asked: what if there were a market for
public art, and externalities from the arts? What would be your willingness-­
to-­pay for these goods? The central difficulty with the method is that peo-
ple are being asked a question of valuation that they almost certainly have
never considered before. I shop at the grocery store a few days a week and
have long observed how prices in the fruits and vegetables section fluctu-
ate week to week, season to season, and am very used to making judg-
ments over whether a particular good is worth buying this week, or that
its current price is too high, such that I should seek out a substitute. I am
used to market prices for ordinary goods and make purchases accordingly.
Even in the arts, I am used to making judgments on prices: is this play, this
used vinyl record, this art book, worth buying or not? But I don’t think
about the personal monetary value of public goods or externalities because
I never have to make decisions about them. The contingent valuation
survey taker is asking me something very new, whether how much I value
the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen (Hansen 1997), or a Scandinavian
music festival (Andersson et al. 2012), or libraries in England (Fujiwara
et al. 2019).
Contingent valuation has stirred an extensive literature (especially in
the field of environmental policy, where it was first applied; valuation of
the natural environment and the cultural environment have a lot of issues
in common) on best practices and on whether the difficulties in getting
accurate information from respondents are simply insurmountable; see
Diamond and Hausman (1994), Carson (2012), and Hausman (2012).
30 M. RUSHTON

These practical issues are important, but the primary interest here is the
concept: that the values people place on public goods and externalities are
to be found through the thought experiment of imagining a market where
none currently exists and invoking the principle of consumer sovereignty
in that imaginary market. Responses to the survey are taken as data, and
there are no ”correct” answers as to whether someone who does not use
public libraries in England values them at 5, 20, or 40 pounds.

Merit Goods
The economic approach to public goods and externalities takes consumer
preferences as given; the preferences are assumed to be “rational,” which
here has the narrow definition of consistency (if I prefer the blue tie to the
red tie, and prefer the red tie to the green tie, rationality means I must
therefore prefer the blue tie to the green tie, but does not imply much
else), and does not question the ends for which the consumer makes
choices. Economics also works on the assumption that individuals are the
best judge of their own interests, and so does not question what choices
are made, again so long as they are consistent.
There are a few angles from which we could question this working
assumption. The first is the recognition that people might make efforts to
change their own preferences. The second is that there might be levels of
preferences, where whatever we might decide to do on impulse, we would
see in the cool calm of reason is not actually in our best interests. The third
is that people might make decisions against their own best interests even
when they have had time to reflect. And a fourth is that we might have
preferences over community outcomes that are entirely separate from our
personal interests. We look at each of these in turn.
People often take actions to change their own preferences. Suppose
there is a genre of art that you really have never quite understood, and yet
you know that there are many people who are knowledgeable about it and
seem to get a great deal of satisfaction out of it. I grew up in a household
that was relatively rich in music, but where no one knew much about or
was very involved in visual art. As an adult, I took it upon myself to read
about it, attend gallery openings, and make a point of going to museums
when I visited cities, in order to understand better the history and con-
temporary state of visual art, and in turn have something new in my life
that was enjoyable and stimulating. I also made a point of trying to see
classic films, in the hope of being able to get a deeper pleasure out of
 2 THE ECONOMIC METHOD 31

watching great movies. In E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End (1989/1910)

Leonard Bast hopes that enough exposure to high culture will lift him to
a new plane of understanding. Reading John Ruskin, “he felt that he was
being done good to, and that if he kept on with Ruskin, and the Queen’s
Hall concerts, and some pictures by Watts, he would one day push his
head out of the grey waters and see the universe” (p. 62).
Economists, maybe not surprisingly, have formalized this notion. Gary
Becker and Kevin Murphy’s (1988) theory of “rational addiction” sup-
poses that an individual gets pleasure from ordinary goods, and also some
goods where the pleasure received from them depends on her history of
consumption of it. Knowing this, she might begin to consume a good, say
opera, even if it doesn’t immediately yield a lot of pleasure, on the expecta-
tion that eventually it will, and the future pleasure will be more than worth
the initial cost of sometimes being befuddled or bored by what is happen-
ing on stage. People who have done long-distance running for many years
will advise someone just getting started that at first it is hard to feel moti-
vated, that one might be tempted just to stay in if feeling tired, or the
weather is inclement, but that eventually what you want will change, and
that you become addicted to your daily run. Everybody is different, and
so will perceive the beneficial possibilities of various possible addictions
(and note their paper is mostly, though not exclusively, addressed to harm-
ful addictions) differently. People who do not heavily discount future ben-
efits are more likely to try to develop a beneficial addiction (and less likely
to cultivate a destructive one).
Importantly, there is, at least to this point, no market failure, no oppor-
tunity for beneficial government intervention. Mr. Bast can simply go on
reading his Ruskin and listening to Beethoven at Queen’s Hall.
Now consider that we might have different levels of preferences, that
people make some decisions on impulse, or through a habitual short-cut
in reasoning, that is at odds with what they themselves would recognize as
their best interests. We procrastinate on tasks to a degree that makes us
worse off than if we had simply got the task done when it was presented
to us (for academics, grading papers is a familiar example). We choose
default options on complicated transactions without looking closely at
what our actual best option would be. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
(1962) writes that a man can be unjust toward himself by allowing the
irrational part of his soul to frustrate the desires of the rational part, and
(echoing Plato) the rational needs to rule over the irrational within us just
as the ruler of a state must govern the ruled (1138b). Economists have
32 M. RUSHTON

long recognized that we have different levels of preferences (see Pigou

(1938), for example), but the question has remained what if anything
ought to be done about it.
The field of behavioral economics represents an effort to incorporate
various aspects of that “irrational part of our soul” into the field of eco-
nomics, to better understand why people make the choices they do, and
perhaps to find public policies that improve our well-being. Thaler and
Sunstein’s (2003) paper on “libertarian paternalism” led to their book of
recommendations Nudge (2009), where “nudges” have now entered the
policy lexicon. Does the term “libertarian paternalism” make sense?
Suppose we define “paternalism” (following Le Grand and New (2015))
as a government intervention to address individual failures of judgment,
for the individual’s own good. A “libertarian paternalism” would not force
individuals to make a particular choice, or pay them subsidies to do so (or
to tax them to steer them away from particular choices), but would simply
design the architecture around which we make choices to favor what most
individuals would agree is in their long-run interest. So, for example, peo-
ple have a tendency to assent to what is presented as the status quo option.
If people agree that saving adequately for one’s retirement is a sensible
thing to do, then companies that make enrollment in the company pen-
sion plan the status quo option for new employees, though where they
retain the right to opt out, is a superior design to a company that requires
new employees to opt in to the pension plan. A cafeteria that puts healthier
food options at the front of the line, and puts desserts at a separate table,
will induce people to choose a better lunch, while still allowing people to
pick from the offerings whatever they want. State regulations that enforce
a “cooling off” period for major financial and legal transactions also serve
to lead people to better choices without actually restricting their choices.
It is important to note that these “nudges” are meant to steer people
toward choices they would agree are in their best interests, but might not
choose under different choice architectures. Nudges are not about getting
people to do what they would not choose under careful reflection. They
do go somewhat further than simply providing information—a sign put
up by park authorities that a particular trail is so infested with ticks that
hiking is not recommended is useful information, since most hikers might
not realize this, but it is neither paternalism nor a nudge (once in southern
Indiana I chose to ignore this warning, as I was free to do, and came to
regret it).
 2 THE ECONOMIC METHOD 33

Are there implications for cultural policy? These nudges are not about
externalities; they are concerned with individuals’ personal well-being.
Coate and Hoffmann (2022) provide a review of the possible implications
of the findings of behavioral economics for the field of cultural economics,
but the policy implications remain unclear. The key problem is: to what
decisions do we think people ought to be nudged? Proper retirement
planning and a healthy diet are uncontroversial goods that most every-
body’s rational self would agree to. But what does the rational self want
regarding the arts that the irrational self will thwart? Rational, positive
addictions are more likely to be developed when we have a low rate of
discounting future benefits, and one aspect of our irrational self can be a
tendency to adopt discount rates higher than we rationally know make
sense. So maybe we could nudge people toward developing rational addic-
tions to the arts. But what art, exactly? How could people be nudged in
this direction without an explicit paternalism that holds this art form is
difficult and takes time to appreciate but is worth it in the end, and con-
tinuing to wallow in that art form, popular and catchy, will in the long run
fail to generate the same pleasures? The arts are more difficult than deci-
sions over savings and health, where the ends are much clearer.
Next consider a third possible departure from standard economic anal-
ysis, that even with deliberation and full information people make deci-
sions that are contrary to what is truly in their best interest. Richard
Musgrave (1959) introduced into his work on public economics the con-
cept of “merit wants” (also known as “merit goods”). He was looking at
goods supplied by the market, but which were so “meritorious” that they
warranted public subsidy to increase production and consumption beyond
what the market would provide. He was careful to distinguish merit wants
from externalities (which would also warrant subsidy, although for differ-
ent reasons), and claimed that “the satisfaction of merit wants, by its very
nature, involves interference with consumer sovereignty” (p. 13). He
went on: “A position of extreme individualism could demand that all merit
wants be disallowed, but this is not a sensible view“ (p. 13). He advocates
paternalism over some goods, recognizing that this might be subject to
abuse by an authoritarian state, but which could be permissible in a demo-
cratic society.

While consumer sovereignty is the general rule, situations may arise, within
the context of a democratic community, where an informed group is justi-
fied in imposing its decision upon others. … The advantages of education
34 M. RUSHTON

are more evident to the informed than the uninformed. … In the modern
economy, the consumer is subject to advertising, screaming at him through
the media of mass communication and designed to sway his choice rather
than give complete information. Thus, there may arise a distortion in the
preference structure that needs to be counteracted. The ideal of consumer
sovereignty and the reality of consumer choice in high-pressure markets may
be quite different things. (p. 14)

Musgrave (1959) does not specifically mention the arts in his discus-
sion of merit wants. Revisiting the topic almost 30 years later, Musgrave
(1987) tries to set out more details on what merit goods could be. He
notes that many policies we see are in fact paternalistic. In the United
States, aid to poor families with children is partly through “food stamps,”
which are income supplements that not only must be spent on food, but
on particular sorts of eligible “appropriate” foods (note that libertarian
Milton Friedman (1962) opposed this, saying that if we wish to help the
poor by increasing their purchasing power, a cash transfer is called for, and
the poor ought to be as trusted as anyone to make their own spending
decisions; we return to this topic in Chap. 4, on equality). There is a call
for treating the arts as a merit good (although he does not use the term),
from Tibor Scitovsky (1972): “The only valid argument for government
aid to the arts is that it is a means of educating the public’s taste and that
the public would benefit from a more educated taste” (p. 68).
The field of public economics never really “took” to this paternalistic
idea (although the very “soft” paternalism (Kirchgässner 2017) of nudges
has been at least slightly better received). Musgrave claims paternalistic
interventions can be justified in a democratic society, but democracies are
very imperfect vehicles, subject to all manner of irrationalities in public
voting, in legislation, and in bureaucracy. Who decides how the public’s
taste ought to be changed? Scitovsky was explicit: Americans ought to
listen to more classical music. But how can that be justified without step-
ping far beyond the bounds of economic analysis? (We return to this ques-
tion in Chap. 6 on conservative arts policy.)
Finally, a consideration of an aspect of merit goods that Musgrave
introduced in his (1987) New Palgrave entry, that of “community prefer-
ences.” These are also called “ethical preferences” by Harsanyi (1955) and
in Head’s (1991) review of the literature on merit goods, and “commit-
ment” by Amartya Sen (1977). Suppose I don’t really have much interest
in attending the symphony, but I do support government grants to it.
 2 THE ECONOMIC METHOD 35

Why might I do that? One possible reason is externalities; I might feel

benefits from the existence of the symphony and people attending it, even
if I do not attend myself. But suppose I don’t sense any externalities, I
don’t feel in any way affected by symphony concerts that other people
attend, and yet regardless I believe it is the right thing for the government
to support the symphony. It is important for the well-being of others that
there is live classical music beyond what the market alone could support,
that it may be especially important to a small number of people, that it is
an obligation to preserve classical music for future generations, and that in
a fair and just world this is something that ought to be funded. There is a
cost to me in terms of my taxes being used to fund this, and no “egoistic”
benefits to me (as there are with externalities), but it is something I want
to see happen. It is not uncommon for us to make choices out of a sense
of duty than out of personal benefit; for example, we take on the cost of
voting in elections even when the chance of our ballot determining the
outcome of the vote is vanishingly small. Textbooks on cultural economics
frequently raise the preservation of the arts for future generations as an
externality. It certainly does rank as a reason for subsidy, but it would seem
to arise from “ethical preferences” rather than direct gains to personal
welfare.
It is difficult to disentangle externalities from ethical preferences. As
West (1991) notes in his commentary on Head (1991), when he surveyed
people about public funding for the arts (West 1985) there was at least
some support for arts funding even by people who never attended the
subsidized arts, though whether this was from personal benefits through
externalities or rather through a sense that it is simply the right thing for
government to do is hard to determine.
Reflecting ethical preferences in public funding is not paternalistic at
all, it is reflecting the preferences of voters. But the question of how to
recognize where this is the case, or what levels of arts funding would be
appropriate given all the various alternative uses of funds, remains a
challenge.

Implications for Public Funding of the Arts

Consider the following thought experiment: suppose, contrary to what
critics believed would ever be possible, all of the problems that beset con-
tingent valuation estimates were solved, so that we could ascertain with a
great deal of certainty how members of the public, on careful
Another random document with
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might very well have come from the very center of the hottest hell of
mythology, felt strangely inclined to agree with Carlowitz. It didn’t
seem possible that it could get any worse without exploding.
The activity stayed high; ’way too high. The tiny control room
grew hotter and hotter. His skin burned more and his eyes ached
worse. He touched a stud and spoke.
“Phil? Better get me three more bombs. Like these, except up
around. . . .”
“I don’t check you. If you do that, it’s apt to drop to a minimum
and stay there. I’d suggest a wider interval.”
“QX—that’d be better. Two, then, instead of three. Four point nine
eight zero and thirteen point nine four zero. You might break out a jar
of burn-dressing, too; some fairly warm stuff is leaking through.”
“Will do. Come down, fast!”
Cloud landed. He stripped to the skin and his friends smeared
him with the thick, gooey stuff that was not only added protection
against radiation, but also a sovereign remedy for new burns. He
exchanged his goggles for a heavier, darker pair. The two bombs
arrived and were substituted for two of the original load.
“I thought of something while I was up there,” Cloud said then.
“Fourteen kilograms of duodec is nobody’s firecracker, but it may be
the least of what’s going to go off. Have you got any idea of what’s
going to become of the intrinsic energy of the vortex when I snuff it?”
“Can’t say I have.” The Lensman frowned in thought. “No data.”
“Neither have I. But I’d say you’d better go back to the new
station—the one you were going to move to if it kept on getting
worse. The clocks are ticking there, aren’t they?”
“Yes. It might be the smart thing to do—just in case.”
Again in air, Cloud found that the activity, while still very high, was
not too high for his heaviest bomb, but that it was fluctuating too
rapidly. He could not get even five seconds of trustworthy prediction,
to say nothing of ten. So he waited, as close to the horrible center of
disintegration as he dared.
The flitter hung poised in air, motionless, upon softly hissing
under-jets. Cloud knew to a fraction his height above the ground. He
knew to a fraction his distance from the vortex. He knew the density
of the atmosphere and the velocity and direction of the wind. Hence,
since he could also read, closely enough, the momentary variations
in the cyclonic storms within the crater, he could compute very easily
the course and velocity necessary to land the bomb in the exact
center of the vortex at any given instant of time. The hard part—the
thing that no one had as yet succeeded in doing—was to predict, for
a time far enough ahead to be of any use, a usably close
approximation to the vortex’s quantitative activity.
Therefore Cloud concentrated upon the dials and gauges in front
of him; concentrated with every fiber of his being and with every cell
of his brain.
Suddenly, almost imperceptably, the sigma curve gave signs of
flattening out. Cloud’s mind pounced. Simultaneous differential
equations; nine of them. A quadruple integration in four dimensions.
No matter—Cloud did not solve problems laboriously, one operation
at a time. Without knowing how he had arrived at it, he knew the
answer; just as the Posenian or the Rigellian can perceive every
separate component particle of an opaque, three-dimensional solid,
but without being able to explain to any Tellurian how his sense of
perception works. It just is, that’s all.
By virtue of whatever sense or ability it is which makes a
mathematical prodigy what he is, Cloud knew that in exactly seven
and three-tenths seconds from that observed instant the activity of
the vortex would match precisely the rating of his heaviest bomb.
Another flick of his mental switch and he knew exactly the velocity he
would require. His hand swept over the studs, his right foot tramped
down hard upon the firing pedal; and, even as the quivering flitter
rammed forward under five Tellurian gravities of acceleration, he
knew to the thousandth of a second how long he would have to hold
that acceleration to attain that velocity. While not really long—in
seconds—it was much too long for comfort. It would take him much
closer to the vortex than he wanted to be; in fact, it would take him
almost to the crater’s rim.
But he stuck to the calculated course, and at the precisely correct
instant he released his largest bomb and cut his dive. Then, in a
continuation of the same motion, his hand slashed down through the
beam of light whose cutting would activate the Bergenholm and
make the vessel inertialess—safe from any form whatever of
physical violence. For an instant nothing happened, and for that
instant Cloud sat appalled. Neutralization of inertia took time! Not
that he had ever been told that it was instantaneous—he had just
assumed so. He had never noticed any time-lapse before, but now it
seemed to be taking forever!
After that one instant of shocked inaction he went into ultra-speed
action; kicking in the little vessel’s all-out eight-G drive and whirling
her around as only a flitter or a speedster can whirl; only to see in his
plate the vortex opening up like a bell-flower, or like a sun going
nova.
Cloud’s forebodings were more than materialized then, for it was
not only the bomb that was going off. The staggeringly immense
energy of the vortex was merging with that of the detonating duodec
to form an utterly indescribable explosion.
In part the flood of incandescent lava in the pit was beaten
downward by the sheer, stupendous force of the blow; in part it was
hurled abroad in masses, gouts, and streamers. And the raging blast
of the explosion’s front seized the fragments and tore and worried
them to bits, hurling them still faster along their paths of violence.
And air, so densely compressed as to act like a solid, smote the
walls of the crater. Those walls crumbled, crushed outward through
the hard-packed ground, broke up into jaggedly irregular blocks
which hurtled screamingly in all directions.
The blast-wave or explosion front buffeted the flyer while she was
still partially inert and while Cloud was almost blacked out and
physically helpless from the frightful linear and angular accelerations.
The impact broke his left arm and his right leg; the only parts of his
body not pressure-packed. Then, milliseconds later, the debris
began to arrive.
Chunks of solid or semi-molten rock slammed against the hull,
knocking off wings and control-surfaces. Gobs of viscous slag
slapped it liquidly, freezing into and clogging up jets and orifices. The
little ship was knocked hither and thither by forces she could no
more resist than can a floating leaf resist a cataract; Cloud’s brain
was addled as an egg by the vicious concussions which were hitting
him so nearly simultaneously from so many different directions.
 The concussions and the sluggings lightened . . . stopped . . . a
vast peace descended, blanket-wise. The flitter was free—was riding
effortlessly away on the outermost, most tenuous fringes of the
storm!
Cloud wanted to faint, then, but he didn’t—quite. With one arm
and leg and what few cells of his brain were still in working order, he
was still in the fight. It did not even occur to him, until long afterward,
that he was not going to make any effort whatever to avoid death.
Foggily, he tried to look at the crater. Nine-tenths of his visiplates
were dead, but he finally got a view. Good—it was out. He wasn’t
surprised—he knew it would be.
His next effort was to locate the secondary observatory, where he
would have to land; and in that, too, he was successful. He had
enough intelligence left to realize that, with practically all of his jets
clogged and his wings and tail shot off, he couldn’t land his flitter
inert. He’d have to land her free.
Neal Cloud was not the world’s best pilot. Nevertheless, by dint of
light and somewhat unorthodox use of what few jets he had left, he
did land her free. A very good landing, considering—he almost hit
the observatory’s field, which was only one mile square—and having
landed her, he inerted her.
But, as has been intimated, his brain wasn’t working quite so
good; he had held his ship inertialess for quite a few seconds longer
than he thought, and he did not even think of the terrific buffetings
she had taken. As a result of these things, however, her intrinsic
velocity did not match, anywhere nearly, that of the ground upon
which she lay. Thus, when Cloud cut his Bergenholm, restoring
thereby to the flitter the absolute velocity and the inertia she had
before going free, there resulted a distinctly anticlimactic crash.
There was a last terrific bump as the motionless vessel collided
with the equally motionless ground; and “Storm” Cloud, Vortex
Blaster, went out like the proverbial light.
Help came, of course; on the double. Cloud was unconscious
and the flitter’s port could not be opened from the outside, but those
were not insuperable obstacles. A plate, already loose, was torn
away; the pilot was unclamped and rushed to Base Hospital in the
“meat-crate” standing by.
 Later, in a private office of that hospital, the head of the Vortex
Control Laboratory sat and waited—not patiently.
“How is he, Lacy?” he demanded, as the surgeon-marshal
entered the room. “He’s going to live?”
“Oh, yes, Phil—definitely yes,” Lacy replied, briskly. “A very good
skeleton; very good indeed. His screens stopped all the really bad
radiation, so the damage will yield quite readily to treatment. He
doesn’t really need the Phillips we gave him—for the replacement of
damaged parts, you know—except for a few torn muscles and so
on.”
“But he was pretty badly smashed up—I helped take him out, you
know—how about that arm and leg? He was a mess.”
“Merely simple fractures—entirely negligible.” Lacy waved aside
with an airy gesture such minor ills as broken bones. “He’ll be out in
a couple of weeks.”
“How soon can I see him? Business can wait, but there’s a
personal matter that can’t.”
“I know what you mean.” Lacy pursed his lips. “Ordinarily I
wouldn’t allow it, but you see him now. Not too long, though, Phil;
he’s weak. Ten minutes at most.”
“QX. Thanks.” A nurse led the visiting Lensman to Cloud’s
bedside.
“Hi, stupe!” he boomed, cheerfully. “ ‘Stupe’ being short for
‘stupendous’, this time.”
“Ho, chief. Glad to see somebody. Sit down.”
“You’re the most-wanted man in the galaxy, not excepting Kimball
Kinnison. Here’s a spool of tape, which you can look at as soon as
Lacy will let you have a scanner. It’s only the first one. As soon as
any planet finds out that we’ve got a sure-enough-vortex-blower-
outer who can really call his shots—and that news gets around
mighty fast—it sends in a double-urgent, Class A Prime demand for
you.
“Sirius IV got in first by a whisker, but it was a photo finish with
Aldebaran II and all channels have been jammed ever since.
Canopus, Vega, Rigel, Spica. Everybody, from Alsakan to Zabriska.
We announced right off that we wouldn’t receive personal
delegations—we had to almost throw a couple of pink-haired
Chickladorians out bodily to make them believe we meant it—that
our own evaluation of necessity, not priority of requisition, would
govern. QX?”
“Absolutely,” Cloud agreed. “That’s the only way to handle it, I
should think.”
“So forget this psychic trauma. . . . No, I don’t mean that,” the
Lensman corrected himself hastily. “You know what I mean. The will
to live is the most important factor in any man’s recovery, and too
many worlds need you too badly to have you quit now. Check?”
“I suppose so,” Cloud acquiesced, but somberly, “and I’ve got
more will to live than I thought I had. I’ll keep on pecking away as
long as I last.”
“Then you’ll die of old age, Buster,” the Lensman assured him.
“We got full data. We know exactly how long it takes to go from fully
inert to fully free. We know exactly what to do to your screens. Next
time nothing will come through except light, and only as much of that
as you like. You can wait as close to a vortex as you please, for as
long as is necessary to get exactly the conditions you want. You’ll be
as safe as if you were in Klono’s hip pocket.”
“Sure of that?”
“Absolutely—or at least, as sure as we can be of anything that
hasn’t happened yet. But your guardian angel here is eyeing her
clock a bit pointedly, so I’d better do a flit before she tosses me out
on my ear. Clear ether, Storm!”
“Clear ether, chief!”
Thus “Storm” Cloud, nucleonicist, became the most narrowly-
specialized specialist in the long annals of science; became “Storm”
Cloud, the Vortex Blaster.
And that night Lensman Philip Strong, instead of sleeping,
thought and thought and thought. What could he do—what could
anybody do—if Cloud should get himself killed? Somebody would
have to do something . . . but who? And what? Could—or could not
—another Vortex Blaster be found? Or trained?
And next morning, early, he Lensed a thought.
“Kinnison? Phil Strong. I’ve got a high-priority problem that will
take a lot of work and a lot more weight than I carry. Are you free to
listen for a few minutes?”
“I’m free. Go ahead.”
 Chapter 3

▂▂▂▂▂▂CLOUD LOSES AN ARM

TELLURIAN PHARMACEUTICALS, INC., was Civilization’s oldest
and most conservative drug house. “Hide-bound” was the term most
frequently used, not only by its younger employees, but also by its
more progressive competitors. But, corporatively, Tellurian
Pharmaceuticals, Inc., did not care. Its board of directors was limited
by an iron-clad, if unwritten, law to men of seventy years more; and
against the inertia of that ruling body the impetuosity of the younger
generation was exactly as efficacious as the dashing of ocean waves
against an adamantine cliff—and in very much the same fashion.
Ocean waves do in time cut into even the hardest rock; and,
every century or two, TPI did take forward step—after a hundred
years of testing by others had proved conclusively that the “new”
idea conformed in every particular with the exalted standards of the
Galactic Medical Association.
TPI’s plant upon the planet Deka (Dekanore III, on the charts)
filled the valley of Clear Creek and the steep, high hills on its sides,
from the mountain spring which was the creek’s source to its
confluence with the Spokane River.
The valley floor was a riot of color, devoted as it was to the
intensive cultivation of medicinal plants. Along both edges of the
valley extended row after row of hydroponics sheds. Upon the
mountains’ sides there were snake dens, lizard pens, and
enclosures for many other species of fauna.
Nor was the surface all that was in use. The hills were hollow:
honeycombed into hundreds of rooms in which, under precisely
controlled environments of temperature, atmosphere, and radiation,
were grown hundreds of widely-variant forms of life.
At the confluence of creek and river, just inside the city limits of
Newspoke—originally New Spokane—there reared and sprawled the
Company’s headquarters buildings; offices, processing and
synthesizing plants, laboratories, and so on. In one of the
laboratories, three levels below ground, two men faced each other.
Works Manager Graves was tall and fat; Fenton V. Fairchild, M.D.,
Nu.D., F.C.R., Consultant in Radiation, was tall and thin.
“Everything set, Graves?”
“Yes. Twelve hours, you said.”
“For the full cycle. Seven to the point of maximum yield.”
“Go ahead.”
“Here are the seeds. Treconian broadleaf. For the present you
will have to take my word for it that they did not come from Trenco.
These are standard hydroponics tanks, size one. The formula of the
nutrient solution, while complex and highly critical, contains nothing
either rare or unduly expensive. I plant the seed, thus, in each of the
two tanks. I cover each tank with a plastic hood, transparent to the
frequencies to be used. I cover both with a larger hood—so. I align
the projectors—thus. We will now put on armor, as the radiation is
severe and the atmosphere, of which there may be leakage when
the pollenating blast is turned on, is more than slightly toxic. I then
admit Trenconian atmosphere from this cylinder. . . .”
“Synthetic or imported?” Graves interrupted.
“Imported. Synthesis is possible, but prohibitively expensive and
difficult. Importation in tankers is simple and comparatively cheap. I
now energize the projectors. Growth has begun.”
In the glare of blue-green radiance the atmosphere inside the
hoods, the very ether, warped and writhed. In spite of the distortion
of vision, however, it could be seen that growth was taking place,
and at an astounding rate. In a few minutes the seeds had sprouted;
in an hour the thick, broad, purplish-green leaves were inches long.
In seven hours each tank was full of a lushly luxuriant tangle of
foliage.
“This is the point of maximum yield,” Fairchild remarked, as he
shut off the projectors. “We will now process one tank, if you like.”
“Certainly I like. How else could I know it’s the clear quill?”
“By the looks,” came the scientist’s dry rejoinder. “Pick your tank.”
One tank was removed. The leaves were processed. The full
cycle of growth of the remaining tank was completed. Graves himself
harvested the seeds, and himself carried them away.
 Six days, six samples, six generations of seed, and the eminently
skeptical Graves was convinced.
“You’ve got something there, Doc,” he admitted then. “We can
really go to town on that. Now, how about notes, or stuff from your
old place, or people who may have smelled a rat?”
“I’m perfectly clean. None of my boys know anything important,
and none ever will. I assemble all apparatus myself, from standard
parts, and disassemble it myself. I’ve been around, Graves.”
“Well, we can’t be too sure.” The fat man’s eyes were piercing
and cold. “Leakers don’t live very long. We don’t want you to die, at
least not until we get in production here.”
“Nor then, if you know when you’re well off,” the scientist
countered, cynically. “I’m a fellow of the College of Radiation, and it
took me five years to learn this technique. None of your hatchetmen
could ever learn it. Remember that, my friend.”
“So?”
“So don’t get off on the wrong foot and don’t get any funny ideas.
I know how to run things like this and I’ve got the manpower and
equipment to do it. If I come in I’m running it, not you. Take it or leave
it.”
The fat man pondered for minutes, then decided. “I’ll take it.
You’re in, Doc. You can have a cave—two hundred seventeen is
empty—and we’ll go up and get things started right now.”

* * * * *

Less than a year later, the same two men sat in Graves’ office.
They waited while a red light upon a peculiarly complicated
deskboard faded through pink into pure white.
“All clear. This way, Doc.” Graves pushed a yellow button on his
desk and a section of blank wall slid aside.
In the elevator thus revealed the two men went down to a sub-
basement. Along a dimly-lit corridor, through an elaborately locked
steel door, and into a steel-lined room. Four inert bodies lay upon the
floor.
Graves thrust a key into an orifice and a plate swung open,
revealing a chute into which the bodies were dumped. The two
retraced their steps to the manager’s office.
“Well, that’s all we can feed to the disintegrator.” Fairchild lit an
Alsakanite cigarette and exhaled appreciatively.
“Why? Going soft on us?”
“No. The ice is getting too thin.”
“Whaddya mean, ‘thin’?” Graves demanded. “The Patrol
inspectors are ours—all that count. Our records are fixed.
Everything’s on the green.”
“That’s what you think,” the scientist sneered. “You’re supposed
to be smart. Are you? Our accident rate is up three hundredths;
industrial hazard rate and employee turnover about three and a half;
and the Narcotics Division alone knows how much we have upped
total bootleg sales. Those figures are all in the Patrol’s books. How
can you give such facts the brush-off?”
“We don’t have to.” Graves laughed comfortably. “Even a half of
one percent wouldn’t excite suspicion. Our distribution is so uniform
throughout the galaxy that they can’t center it. They can’t possibly
trace anything back to us. Besides, with our lily-white reputation,
other firms would get knocked off in time to give us plenty of
warning. Lutzenschiffer’s, for instance, is putting out Heroin by the
ton.”
“So what?” Fairchild remained entirely unconvinced. “Nobody
else is putting out what comes out of cave two seventeen—demand
and price prove that. What you don’t seem to get, Graves, is that
some of those damned Lensmen have brains. Suppose they decide
to put a couple of Lensmen onto this job—then what? The minute
anybody runs a rigid statistical analysis on us, we’re done for.”
“Um . . . m.” This was a distinctly disquieting thought, in view of
the impossibility of concealing anything from a Lensman who was
really on the prowl. “That wouldn’t be so good. What would you do?”
“I’d shut down two seventeen—and the whole hush-hush end—
until we can get our records straight and our death-rate down to the
old ten-year average. That’s the only way we can be really safe.”
“Shut down! The way they’re pushing us for production? Don’t be
an idiot—the chief would toss us both down the chute.”
“Oh, I don’t mean without permission. Talk him into it. It’d be best
for everybody, over the long pull, believe me.”
 “Not a chance. He’d blow his stack. If we can’t dope out
something better than that, we go on as is.”
“The next-best thing would be to use some new form of death to
clean up our books.”
“Wonderful!” Graves snorted contemptuously. “What would we
add to what we’ve got now—bubonic plague?”
“A loose atomic vortex.”
“Wh-o-o-o-sh!” The fat man deflated, then came back up, gasping
for air. “Man, you’re completely nuts! There’s only one on the planet,
and it’s . . . or do you mean . . . but nobody ever touched one of
those things off deliberately . . . can it be done?”
“Yes. It isn’t simple, but we of the College of Radiation know how
—theoretically—the transformation can be made to occur. It has
never been done because it has been impossible to extinguish the
things; but now Neal Cloud is putting them out. The fact that the idea
is new makes it all the better.”
“I’ll say so. Neat . . . very neat.” Graves’ agile and cunning brain
figuratively licked its chops. “Certain of our employees will
presumably have been upon an outing in the upper end of the valley
when this terrible accident takes place?”
“Exactly—enough of them to straighten out our books. Then,
later, we can dispose of undesirables as they appear. Vortices are
absolutely unpredictable, you know. People can die of radiation or of
any one of a mixture of various toxic gases and the vortex will take
the blame.”
“And later on, when it gets dangerous, Storm Cloud can blow it
out for us,” Graves gloated. “But we won’t want him for a long, long
time!”
“No, but we’ll report it and ask for him the hour it happens . . . use
your head, Graves!” He silenced the manager’s anguished howl of
protest. “Anybody who gets one wants it killed as soon as possible,
but here’s the joker. Cloud has enough Class-A-double-prime-urgent
demands on file already to keep him busy from now on, so we won’t
be able to get him for a long, long time. See?”
“I see. Nice, Doc . . . very, very nice. But I’ll have the boys keep
an eye on Cloud just the same.”
 * * * * *

At about this same time two minor cogs of TPI’s vast machine sat
blissfully, arms around each other, on a rustic seat improvised from
rocks, branches, and leaves. Below them, almost under their feet,
was a den of highly venemous snakes, but neither man or girl saw
them. Before them, also unperceived, was a magnificent view of
valley and stream and mountain.
All they saw, however, was each other—until their attention was
wrenched to a man who was climbing toward them with the aid of a
thick club which he used as a staff.
“Oh . . . Bob!” The girl stared briefly; then, with a half-articulate
moan, shrank even closer against her lover’s side.
Ryder, left arm tightening around the girl’s waist, felt with his right
hand for a club of his own and tensed his muscles, for the climbing
man was completely mad.
His breathing was . . . horrible. Mouth tight-clamped, despite his
terrific exertion, he was sniffing—sniffing loathsomely, lustfully, each
whistling inhalation filling his lungs to bursting. He exhaled
explosively, as though begrudging the second of time required to
empty himself of air. Wide-open eyes glaring fixedly ahead he
blundered upward, paying no attention whatever to his path. He tore
through clumps of thorny growth; he stumbled and fell over logs and
stones; he caromed away from boulders; as careless of the needles
which tore clothing and skin as of the rocks which bruised his flesh to
the bone. He struck a great tree and bounced; felt his frenzied way
around the obstacle and back into his original line.
He struck the gate of the pen immediately beneath the two
appalled watchers and stopped. He moved to the right and paused,
whimpering in anxious agony. Back to the gate and over to the left,
where he stopped and howled. Whatever the frightful compulsion
was, whatever he sought, he could not deviate enough from his line
to go around the pen. He looked, then, and for the first time saw the
gate and the fence and the ophidian inhabitants of the den. They did
not matter. Nothing mattered. He fumbled at the lock, then furiously
attacked it and the gate and the fence with his club—fruitlessly. He
tried to climb the fence, but failed. He tore off his shoes and socks
and, by dint of jamming toes and fingers ruthlessly into the meshes,
he began to climb.
No more than he had minded the thorns and the rocks did he
mind the eight strands of viciously-barbed wire surmounting that
fence; he did not wince as the inch-long steel fangs bit into arms and
legs and body. He did, however, watch the snakes. He took pains to
drop into an area temporarily clear of them, and he pounded to death
the half-dozen serpents bold enough to bar his path.
Then, dropping to the ground, he writhed and scuttled about;
sniffing ever harder; nose plowing the ground. He halted; dug his
bleeding fingers into the hard soil; thrust his nose into the hole;
inhaled tremendously. His body writhed, trembled, shuddered
uncontrollably, then stiffened convulsively into a supremely ecstatic
rigidity utterly horrible to see.
The terribly labored breathing ceased. The body collapsed
bonelessly, even before the snakes crawled up and struck and struck
and struck.
Jacqueline Comstock saw very little of the outrageous
performance. She screamed once, shut both eyes, and, twisting
about within the man’s encircling arm, burrowed her face into his left
shoulder.
Ryder, however—white-faced, set-jawed, sweating—watched the
thing to its ghastly end. When it was over he licked his lips and
swallowed twice before he could speak.
“It’s all over, dear—no danger now,” he managed finally to say.
“We’d better go. We ought to turn in an alarm . . . make a report or
something.”
“Oh, I can’t, Bob—I can’t!” she sobbed. “If I open my eyes I just
know I’ll look, and if I look I’ll . . . I’ll simply turn inside out!”
“Hold everything, Jackie! Keep your eyes shut. I’ll pilot you and
tell you when we’re out of sight.”
More than half carrying his companion, Ryder set off down the
rocky trail. Out of sight of what had happened, the girl opened her
eyes and they continued their descent in a more usual, more
decorous fashion until they met a man hurrying upward.
“Oh, Dr. Fairchild! There was a. . . .” But the report which Ryder
was about to make was unnecessary; the alarm had already been
given.
“I know,” the scientist puffed. “Stop! Stay exactly where you are!”
He jabbed a finger emphatically downward to anchor the young
couple in the spot they occupied. “Don’t talk—don’t say a word until I
get back!”
Fairchild returned after a time, unhurried and completely at ease.
He did not ask the shaken couple if they had seen what had
happened. He knew.
“Bu . . . buh . . . but, doctor,” Ryder began.
“Keep still—don’t talk at all.” Fairchild ordered, bruskly. Then, in
an ordinary conversational tone, he went on: “Until we have
investigated this extraordinary occurrence thoroughly—sifted it to the
bottom—the possibility of sabotage and spying cannot be
disregarded. As the only eye-witnesses, your reports will be
exceedingly valuable; but you must not say a word until we are in a
place which I know is proof against any and all spy-rays. Do you
understand?”
“Oh! Yes, we understand.”
“Pull yourselves together, then. Act unconcerned, casual;
particularly when we get to the Administration Building. Talk about
the weather—or, better yet, about the honeymoon you are going to
take on Chickladoria.”
Thus there was nothing visibly unusual about the group of three
which strolled into the building and into Graves’ private office. The fat
man raised an eyebrow.
“I’m taking them to the private laboratory,” Fairchild said, as he
touched the yellow button and led the two toward the private
elevator. “Frankly, young folks, I am a scared—yes, a badly scared
man.”
This statement, so true and yet so misleading, resolved the
young couple’s inchoate doubts. Entirely unsuspectingly, they
followed the Senior Radiationist into the elevator and, after it had
stopped, along, a corridor. They paused as he unlocked and opened
a door; they stepped unquestioningly into the room at his gesture.
He did not, however, follow them in. Instead, the heavy metal slab
slammed shut, cutting off Jackie’s piercing shriek of fear.
 “You might as well cut out the racket,” came from a speaker in the
steel ceiling of the room. “Nobody can hear you but me.”
“But Mr. Graves, I thought . . . Dr. Fairchild told us . . . we were
going to tell him about. . . .”
“You’re going to tell nobody nothing. You saw too much and know
too much, that’s all.”
“Oh, that’s it!” Ryder’s mind reeled as some part of the actual
significance of what he had seen struck home. “But listen! Jackie
didn’t see anything—she had her eyes shut all the time—and doesn’t
know anything. You don’t want to have the murder of such a girl as
she is on your mind, I know. Let her go and she’ll never say a word—
we’ll both swear to it—or you could. . . .”
“Why? Just because she’s got a face and a shape?” The fat man
sneered. “No soap, Junior. She’s not that much of a. . . .” He broke
off as Fairchild entered his office.
“Well, how about it? How bad is it?” Graves demanded.
“Not bad at all. Everything’s under control.”
“Listen, doctor!” Ryder pleaded. “Surely you don’t want to murder
Jackie here in cold blood? I was just suggesting to Graves that he
could get a therapist. . . .”
“Save your breath,” Fairchild ordered. “We have important things
to think about. You two die.”
“But why?” Ryder cried. He could as yet perceive only a fraction
of the tremendous truth. “I tell you, it’s. . . .”
“We’ll let you guess,” said Fairchild.
Shock upon shock had been too much for the girl’s overstrained
nerves. She fainted quietly and Ryder eased her down to the cold
steel floor.
“Can’t you give her a better cell than this?” he protested then.
“There’s no . . . it isn’t decent!”
“You’ll find food and water, and that’s enough.” Graves laughed
coarsely. “You won’t live long, so don’t worry about conveniences.
But keep still. If you want to know what’s going on, you can listen,
but one more word out of you and I cut the circuit. Go ahead, Doc,
with what you were going to say.”
“There was a fault in the rock. Very small, but a little of the finest
smoke seeped through. Barney must have been a sniffer before to
be able to smell the trace of the stuff that was drifting down the hill.
I’m having the whole cave tested with a leak-detector and sealed
bottle-tight. The record can stand it that Barney—he was a snake-
tender, you know—died of snake-bite. That’s almost the truth, too, by
the way.”
“Fair enough. Now, how about these two?”
“Um . . . m. We’ve got to hold the risk at absolute minimum.”
Fairchild pondered briefly. “We can’t disintegrate them this month,
that’s sure. They’ve got to be found dead, and our books are full.
We’ll have to keep them alive—where they are now is as good a
place as any—for a week.”
“Why alive? We’ve kept stiffs in cold storage before now.”
“Too chancey. Dead tissues change too much. You weren’t
courting investigation then; now we are. We’ve got to keep our noses
clean. How about this? They couldn’t wait any longer and got
married today. You, big-hearted philanthropist that you are, told them
they could take their two weeks vacation now for a honeymoon—
you’d square it with their department heads. They come back in
about ten days, to get settled; go up the valley to see the vortex; and
out. Anything in that set-up we can’t fake a cover for?”
“It looks perfect to me. We’ll let ’em enjoy life for ten days, right
where they are now. Hear that, Ryder?”
“Yes, you pot-bellied. . . .”
The fat man snapped a switch.
It is not necessary to go into the details of the imprisonment.
Doggedly and skillfully though he tried, Ryder could open up no
avenue of escape or of communication; and Jacqueline, facing the
inevitability of death, steadied down to meet it. She was a woman. In
minor crises she had shrieked and had hidden her face and had
fainted: but in this ultimate one she drew from the depths of her
woman’s soul not only the power to overcome her own weakness,
but also an extra something with which to sustain and fortify her
man.
 Chapter 4

▂▂▂▂▂▂“STORM” CLOUD ON DEKA

IN THE VORTEX CONTROL LABORATORY on Tellus, Cloud had
just gone into Philip Strong’s office.
“No trouble?” the Lensman asked, after greetings had been
exchanged.
“Uh-huh. Simple as blowing out a match. You quit worrying about
me long ago, didn’t you?”
“Pretty much, except for the impossibility of training anybody else
to do it. We’re still working on that angle, though. You’re looking fit.”
He was. He carried no scars—the Phillips treatment had taken
care of that. His face looked young and keen; his hard-schooled,
resilient body was in surprisingly fine condition for that of a man
crowding forty so nearly. He no longer wore his psychic trauma
visibly; it no longer obtruded itself between him and those with whom
he worked; but in his own mind he was sure that it still was, and
always would be, there. But the Lensman, studying him narrowly—
and, if the truth must be known, using his Lens as well—was not
sure, and was well content.
“Not bad for an old man, Phil. I could whip a wildcat, and spot him
one bite and two scratches. But what I came in here for, as you may
have suspected, is—where do I go from here? Spica or Rigel or
Canopus? They’re the worst, aren’t they?”
“Rigel’s is probably the worst in property damage and urgency.
Before we decide, though, I wish you’d take a good look at this data
from Dekanore III. See if you see what I do.”
“Huh? Dekanore III?” Cloud was surprised. “No trouble there, is
there? They’ve only got one, and it’s ’way down in Class Z
somewhere.”
“Two now. It’s the new one I’m talking about. It’s acting funny—
damned funny.”
Cloud went through the data, brow furrowed in concentration;
then sketched three charts and frowned.
 “I see what you mean. ‘Damned funny’ is right. The toxicity is too
steady, but at the same time the composition of the effluvium is too
varied. Inconsistent. However, there’s no real attempt at a gamma
analysis—nowhere near enough data for one—this could be right;
they’re so utterly unpredictable. The observers were inexperienced, I
take it, with medical and chemical bias?”
“Check. That’s the way I read it.”
“Well, I’ll say this much—I never saw a gamma chart that would
accept half of this stuff, and I can’t even imagine what the sigma
curve would look like. Boss, what say I skip over there and get us a
full reading on that baby before she goes orthodox—or, should I say,
orthodoxly unorthodox?”
“However you say it, that’s my thought exactly; and we have a
good excuse for giving it priority. It’s killing more people than all three
of the bad ones together.”
“If I can’t fix the toxicity with exciters I’ll throw a solid cordon
around it to keep people away. I won’t blow it out, though, until I find
out why it’s acting so—if it is. Clear ether, chief, I’m practically there!”
It did not take long to load Cloud’s flitter aboard a Dekanore-
bound liner. Half-way there however, an alarm rang out and the
dread word “Pirates!” resounded through the ship.
Consternation reigned, for organized piracy had disappeared with
the fall of the Council of Boskone. Furthermore, this was not in any
sense a treasure ship; she was an ordinary passenger liner.
She had had little enough warning—her communications officer
had sent out only a part of his first distress call when the blanketing
interference jammed his channels. The pirate—a first-class
superdreadnought—flashed up and a visual beam drove in.
“Go inert,” came the terse command. “We’re coming aboard.”
“Are you completely crazy?” The liner’s captain was surprised
and disgusted, rather than alarmed. “If not, you’ve got the wrong
ship. Everything aboard—including any ransom you could get for our
passenger list—wouldn’t pay your expenses.”
“You wouldn’t know, of course, that you’re carrying a package of
Lonabarian jewelry, or would you?” The question was elaborately
skeptical.
“I know damned well I’m not.”
 “We’ll take the package you haven’t got, then!” the pirate
snapped. “Go inert and open up, or I’ll do it for you—like this.” A
needle-beam lashed out and expired. “That was through one of your
holds. The next one will be through your control room.”
Resistance being out of the question, the liner went inert. While
the intrinsic velocities of the two vessels were being matched, the
pirate issued further instructions.
“All officers now in the control room, stay there. All other officers,
round up all passengers and herd them into the main saloon.
Anybody that acts up or doesn’t do exactly what he’s told will be
blasted.”
The pirates boarded. One squad went to the control room. Its
leader, seeing that the communications officer was still trying to drive
a call through the blanket of interference, beamed him down without
a word. At this murder the captain and four or five other officers went
for their guns and there was a brief but bloody battle. There were too
many pirates.
A larger group invaded the main saloon. Most of them went
through, only half a dozen or so posting themselves to guard the
passengers. One of the guards, a hook-nosed individual wearing
consciously an aura of authority, spoke.
“Take it easy, folks, and nobody’ll get hurt. If any of you’ve got
guns, don’t go for ’em. That’s a specialty that. . . .”
One of his DeLameters flamed briefly. Cloud’s right arm, almost
to the shoulder, vanished. The man behind him dropped—in two
different places.
“Take it easy, I said,” the pirate chief went calmly on. “You can tie
that arm up, fella, if you want to. It was in line with that guy who was
trying to pull a gun. You nurse over there—take him to sick-bay and
fix up his wing. If anybody stops you tell ’em Number One said to.
Now, the rest of you, watch your step. I’ll cut down every damn one
of you that so much as looks like he wanted to start something.”
They obeyed.
In a few minutes the looting parties returned to the saloon.
“Did you get it, Six?”
“Yeah. In the mail, like you said.”
“The safe?”