ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book engages with public policy toward the arts by developing ideas about funding in particular. It suggests that funders could do a better job if they knew more about the history of ideas informing modern social science (including some ideas that have fallen out of fashion but might be worth reviving), and more about the heavily politicized processes of negotiation that brought modern funding systems into being. The book also unpacks the word “funding” to reveal its many different meanings, and its tendency to mean different things to different people at one and the same time. It then looks at non-use value and indirect benefit concepts, suggesting once again that government decisions to fund high-cultural arts production through levies on taxpayers in general are inherently, unavoidably political. The book approaches cultural economics from an unusual angle.
