Michael Rushton
speaker
30 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Michael Rushton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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.
So disputes, that's the word I was looking for.
For more country lawyer, for farmers disputes. This is great.
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.
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.
I'm going to guess the average household income is going to be over $100,000. Yeah, it's over $250,000. Okay.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a piece about Pelé that I have been writing recently.
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
Yes. I promise you that is literally my belief system.
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.
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.
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.
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