The Arts are the traditional economy, stupid (leave the budget allocation alone)

Slashing Arts budgets is the first thing every government in economic trouble does, which is a bit bass-ackwards because the economies of the future will be driven by a convergence of digital technology and traditional economy (maths, science).  Digital? What’s that got to do with arts?  It’s simple: there isn’t anything that you do online that isn’t highly graphical or that doesn’t require a great deal of planning by someone with a background in arts. Digital technology is communication.

I’m making the rounds to the party conferences for the ’21 Hours Experiment.’  Today I found myself at a NESTA fringe event at the Labour Party Conference entitled, ‘Britain: Creative Highway or Dead End?’

One of the panelists was Ian Livingstone, one of the godfathers of Britain’s digital games industry.  He made a simple but important point:

When parents think about their children’s education, from which school to enroll them in, to enrolling them in extra curricular courses, they often won’t make the investment (either in financial allocation or time) in arts pursuits because they don’t realize that skills like planning and designing digital games are transferable.  Livingstone said it’s much the same with governments in that they fail to realize just how much potential the digital games industry has to earn real revenue for HM Treasury now that games have gone from simply products to being services as well.  He cited Farmville and Second Life, as having thriving online economies in digital goods-- something that no one would have thought of several years ago.

[As a quick aside, I had a date last year with a guy who listed organizational and management skills he picked up organizing collective activity in the online game World of War Craft on the application for the job he currently had. And yes, he was asked to give an example in the interview.]

The funny thing about economies in general right now is that the underlying discipline itself is going through its own period of creative destruction.  One of the areas of particular success, I believe, in understanding the flow of resources (money, goods, services, all of them) is experimental economics.  You can do a lot of experimenting online, and utilizing existing social networks, you can get a hyper-specific experimental group.  

What does experimental economics have to do with gaming skills?  Experimental economics draws heavily on game theory (no, I don’t mean digital gaming, hang in there another paragraph)-- something that inherently requires consideration of human relational behaviour. Planning a digital game surely has relevant aspects-- game designers have to think about how players will react to obstacles the same way that economic social scientists create tasks or introduce rules to their experiments in experimental economics.

Since the financial crisis most economists have been scratching their heads, wondering where the discipline is going.  Now that we know that a lot of our theories about human behaviour ‘in the market’ are wrong, experimental economists are learning a lot about actual behaviour that challenges theoretical assumptions from the past.  I believe that from macro to micro economics, experimental economics will play a large part in whatever emerges as the next big school of thought in the discipline. Digital technology, gaming, and thus the arts will play a large role in wherever we are going.  Let’s hope one of two things happens: either the coalition government reconsiders cuts to the arts portion of the budget (not likely), or Labour comes back to power pretty quick (with the caveat that they sort that whole Digital Economy Act non-sense, of course).  Louise Jury, arts reporter for the Evening Standard, was also on the panel and said that she thought that Labour failed to recognise the success it had in promoting arts in the UK.