Brewed Fresh Daily

The source of the much-repeated $1.3 billion figure is research done for (or by) the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture... the executive summary is on their website here. But note that the actual annual employment by nonprofit arts and culture groups in the seven-county region is given as 3,700, with an annual payroll of $105 million. Total direct spending by the groups is estimated at $242 million a year. The $1.3 billion claim is for their spending's "direct and indirect" economic impact, which suggests a mulitiplier effect of more than 500%! This kind of multiplier "impact" claim is always dubious, but 500% is pure superstition.

A little context: 3700 nonprofit arts jobs is about .5% of the total employment in the Cleveland CMSA, and $105 million is less than .3% of the region's payrolls. Sorry, but this is just not in a league with IT companies in the region, which employed more than 25,000 at last count. Or with polymers: "The Akron area alone employs over 30,000 people in about 500 different companies both large and small".

You can make a case for better community support of the arts in Cleveland -- as amenities, as drawing cards, or just as public goods. But the "high-impact economic sector" line does not withstand scrutiny.

Why are we assuming that public arts funding will ever be achieved, or should be? That strikes me as shortsighted bordering on downright arrogant in a town with a sky-high poverty rate. Don't get me wrong, like everyone, I'd love a handout too: but adults understand that unlike in the game of Monopoly, all money comes with strings, and public money more than any other. Can we for once have an adult conversation about this? Bill, Right you are. I have indeed gone through that giant report, line-for-line, and at places laughed aloud at its chutzpah (where's that yiddish dictionary when you need it?). The very fact that it gets into this absurd pseudo-science of guessing outlandish multiplier effects, which has a pretty disreputable reputation from the disgraceful way in which it's been used to sell (actually ram past the public) stadium projects and the like, is a sign that the arts crowd is desperate to tap the public trough, which I think is pretty tawdry. Why would these folks of all people, who presumably value truth a little more than the establishment elite who will say nearly anything to get the hoi-polloi to vote for their latest brainchild, get into the business of repeating nearly baseless propaganda (a $1.3 billion industry) until all but the most skeptical have accepted it as received wisdom? Tom Shorgl and company, like all political propagandists, are in the business of repeating slogans and doing what it takes to achieve victory at the polling booth. We all understand that. But don't our friends and colleagues in the arts community have a little higher threshold for truthfulness?