Michael Rushton
Appearances
Freakonomics Radio
631. Will "3 Summers of Lincoln" Make It to Broadway?
I'm trying to find a thing he would, what would he be doing? Who would he be working with in the office? He'd be settling lawsuits with farmers, right? You know, like he's a country lawyer. Collection law was a collection lawyer who handled promissory notes, which were common in frontier Illinois.
Freakonomics Radio
631. Will "3 Summers of Lincoln" Make It to Broadway?
So disputes, that's the word I was looking for.
Freakonomics Radio
631. Will "3 Summers of Lincoln" Make It to Broadway?
For more country lawyer, for farmers disputes. This is great.
Freakonomics Radio
631. Will "3 Summers of Lincoln" Make It to Broadway?
If you read cultural commentators in the 1920s, they talk about the death of theater because of the invention of cinema and the radio. It didn't really happen. It may be that there is going to be a natural downsizing in theater. Industries ebb and flow.
Freakonomics Radio
631. Will "3 Summers of Lincoln" Make It to Broadway?
And the fact that some theaters are closing and some theaters are finding we can't do as many plays per year as we used to does not mean that theater is dying.
Freakonomics Radio
631. Will "3 Summers of Lincoln" Make It to Broadway?
I'm going to guess the average household income is going to be over $100,000. Yeah, it's over $250,000. Okay.
Freakonomics Radio
631. Will "3 Summers of Lincoln" Make It to Broadway?
I'm not sure I would call live performance a luxury good because it's Not necessarily that expensive relative to other things that people spend money on. So, yes, a night out at live theater is going to cost one a lot, but people do spend lots of money to go on trips or go to amusement parks or go to live sporting events. So I think that live theater needs to be thinking about that.
Freakonomics Radio
631. Will "3 Summers of Lincoln" Make It to Broadway?
How do we turn this into something people really want to do? Our biggest selling point is that there are live, breathing individuals on a stage right in front of you.
Freakonomics Radio
631. Will "3 Summers of Lincoln" Make It to Broadway?
I'm not sure whether we can say that high culture necessarily leads to economic riches, but it can lead to riches in other ways in terms of greater understanding, greater insight, greater appreciation of beauty, those intrinsic goods that make our lives better.
Freakonomics Radio
631. Will "3 Summers of Lincoln" Make It to Broadway?
One would hope so. And one would think that our greatest playwrights have given us insights into social dynamics and the family. If you think of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams and all of our great authors and poets and composers, they have helped us understand ourselves somewhat. And I think that has made our lives richer.
Freakonomics Radio
631. Will "3 Summers of Lincoln" Make It to Broadway?
The justification for public funding for the arts, even though the audiences tend to skew towards the well-off, is that you want to preserve the very best of our culture for future generations. You want to preserve it for current generations who may not have discovered it, but who might find real meaning in it. So just keeping that opportunity alive.
Freakonomics Radio
631. Will "3 Summers of Lincoln" Make It to Broadway?
and not letting those opportunities die out so that all we have is whatever commercial culture finds it can make a dollar out of is important.
Freakonomics Radio
631. Will "3 Summers of Lincoln" Make It to Broadway?
Last live performance I went to was a very, very low-budget outdoor performance of Henry IV Part I, and it was wonderful. Where was this and who were the performers? This was in Bloomington and it was just a local amateur theater company. The audience was very diverse and sitting in lawn chairs or just on the grass.
Freakonomics Radio
631. Will "3 Summers of Lincoln" Make It to Broadway?
The costumes were really makeshift, but the actors and the audience alike were just so involved in the performance and all the action and the sword fights. There were no star performers at all. It's not Shakespeare's best known play. And yet it was just a terrific night out and something that I will not forget.
Freakonomics Radio
631. Will "3 Summers of Lincoln" Make It to Broadway?
There's a piece about Pelé that I have been writing recently.
Freakonomics Radio
631. Will "3 Summers of Lincoln" Make It to Broadway?
that started what i thought was just a piece about him and his story which is fascinating is that for you to perform in as well yes i ended up going to brazil during the last world cup and ultimately ended up being at pele's bedside watching the world cup final with him 11 days before he passed away you're kidding i'm not kidding how did that happen see now that's a whole other podcast
Freakonomics Radio
631. Will "3 Summers of Lincoln" Make It to Broadway?
Yes. I promise you that is literally my belief system.
Freakonomics Radio
630. On Broadway, Nobody Knows Nothing
I'm Michael Rushton. I'm a professor in the O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, and I teach in our arts administration program. How would you describe the major areas of your research and interest? I'm one of that small group of people known as cultural economists who apply economic methods to looking at the arts and different issues in the arts.
Freakonomics Radio
630. On Broadway, Nobody Knows Nothing
What I have found is that many of the cultural economists began their careers like I did, being an ordinary mainstream muggle economist studying public finance and labor economics and so on. And then you discover, oh, there's a group that does this. And actually, the questions are really interesting around the film industry, performing arts and paintings and auctions.
Freakonomics Radio
630. On Broadway, Nobody Knows Nothing
This has been an active field, I would say, since the 1960s, when William Bommel and William Bowen first came up with their theory of cost disease.
Freakonomics Radio
630. On Broadway, Nobody Knows Nothing
Their insight was regarding technical change, and in particular, in what sectors can you have labor-saving technological change, and in what sectors is that going to be very difficult to achieve? When they looked at the live performing arts, they said, well, here is an area where labor-saving technological change is going to be really rare. You can't reduce the number of players in your orchestra.
Freakonomics Radio
630. On Broadway, Nobody Knows Nothing
You can't reduce the number of casts you need to put on a performance of Macbeth. And wages have to rise with the rest of the economy, which means constantly your costs are going to be rising. And in theaters right now, we see that. If you speak to any theater producer who is saying, well, we're struggling to get by, one of the first things they say is, our costs keep going up.
Freakonomics Radio
630. On Broadway, Nobody Knows Nothing
And the main cost that they face is labor. You have to pay your performers. You've got to pay your crew. You've got to pay your back office staff. And it's just really hard to save on those kinds of numbers.
Freakonomics Radio
630. On Broadway, Nobody Knows Nothing
10 out of 10. We see the pressures of cost disease in all of the sectors that Bommel and Bowen mentioned where you can't really save on labor. Education would be one example. A teacher can only handle so many students at a time and teachers' wages have to rise with the rest of the economy or nobody's going to want to be a teacher anymore.
Freakonomics Radio
630. On Broadway, Nobody Knows Nothing
Healthcare is another example, and it's an interesting one because we think, well, there's been lots of technological change in healthcare. We have all these machines now. We have all these new pharmaceuticals. That's very, very true. But a large part of your healthcare costs are labor, paying nurses, paying technicians.
Freakonomics Radio
630. On Broadway, Nobody Knows Nothing
You can't just say, well, one nurse can handle 200 patients at once now because of technological change.
Freakonomics Radio
630. On Broadway, Nobody Knows Nothing
I think there is a communication issue. The first thing is actually calling it cost disease. What is it resulting from? It's resulting from our getting richer. You only have cost disease because the economy as a whole is becoming more productive and real incomes are rising. So that seems like an odd disease where you say, yes, we're all getting richer.
Freakonomics Radio
630. On Broadway, Nobody Knows Nothing
What cost disease is referring to is that productivity changes are going to be different across sectors. Over time, manufactured goods have become far, far cheaper. Raw food production has become cheaper. Transportation has become cheaper. Other things that involve personal services are going to get more expensive. Haircuts. Teaching, massages, live theater.
Freakonomics Radio
630. On Broadway, Nobody Knows Nothing
Agatha Christie famously remarked that when she was young, she never thought she would be so rich as to be able to own her own motor car and so poor that she wouldn't be able to have servants.
Freakonomics Radio
630. On Broadway, Nobody Knows Nothing
Yes, we are getting richer and we have more income to be able to spend on education, health care, personal services and the arts because other things in our economy have become so much cheaper.