E.L. Kirchner, Acrobatic Dance. NGA, open access

Over the past three weeks, WNYC has been running a series called Making It in NYC. It’s about how artists manage to cobble together a living while creating art in New York City, and how the rest of us who live here manage to pay what it costs to experience the art they create. Or don’t manage to, in either case. It’s an age-old problem, not unique to New York, but particularly acute here and now. “New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling, …. the poor and creative” says Patti Smith at a 2010 event exerpted in in the series. Her advice: “find a new city.”

Does anyone think it’s good for New York, or even reasonably tolerable, that artists can’t afford to live and work here, and residents can’t afford tickets to a concert or a play? The first piece in the WNYC series is an interview with Ford Foundation President, Darren Walker, whose role in the piece, in large part, is to explain why having art and artists around really matters. It’s a fine question to open the series, and Walker answers it capably. In particular, I appreciated his point (beginning around 12:00) that the social value of art can’t be reduced to its measurable economic impact. My feeling, though, is that, in some basic way, most of us already understand that we would be lost without our artists. It’s not as if we planned to run them all out of town.

All we did was get richer and richer as a society, without deciding what all our riches are for. Instead of deciding, we’ve inadvertently used our wealth to maim our culture. In this case we’ve done it through competition that has driven prices—for housing and studio space, for tickets and entrance fees—impossibly high. It’s not too late, though, to decide what’s important and act accordingly.

Specific, feasible remedies abound. We could give artists a tax break on real estate rentals up to a certain level. (I happen to be on the board of an arts organization housed at Artspace’s PS109, which is discussed in another piece in the WNYC series. Artspace provides subsidized housing for artists. When it was preparing to open PS109, it received 53,000 applications for 89 apartments.) We could give tax breaks on income earned as an artist up to a certain income level. We could make the price of tickets to performances or exhibitions tax deductible. Just to name a few. Off the top of my head. None of these tax breaks would require us to increase taxes in general or borrow money, because we could compensate by raising taxes on things that are harmful. Peruse the blog for ideas on that, or think up some of your own.

What we don’t know yet is which remedies we should apply, and how aggressively. Darren Walker is right that econometrics can’t tell us the value of the arts. But in that case, what can? How do we know what the arts are worth compared to everything else? In a democracy, the only answer is that they’re worth what we decide they’re worth, when we decide together. We’re working to make that decision possible at Democratism.

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Last week brought a grim new report about our psychological well-being. From 1999 to 2014, the age-adjusted suicide rate rose by 24% in the United States. It rose among girls and boys, men and women, in every age group under 75, and in almost every racial and ethnic category and subcategory.  (It fell 8% among black men but rose 24% among black women; it held close to steady for non-Hispanic Asians and Pacific Islanders.) 42,773 lives ended in suicide in 2014 in the U.S., about a third more than in motor vehicle crashes on our roadways.

We’re a society in anguish, and suicide is just the tip of it. For every suicide there are dozens of attempts and hundreds of people who think think about it. Increasing numbers of us eventually do kill ourselves but in ways that don’t quite qualify as suicide. The rate of death from alcohol, excluding homicides, driving, and other accidents, is rising at a rate similar to that of literal suicide, while the rate of death from drug overdose grew by 137% between 2000 and 2014. And while death keeps the best records, the signs of a broader suffering are all around us, too: economic insecurity, social isolation, fear for the future of our children and the planet.

Meanwhile, we haven’t stopped getting richer and richer. The rising GDP on that chart above is one measure of the growing value of all the work we all do each year, along with everything else we make money from. It’s a lot. But what’s the purpose of all that work, and all the wealth we generate, if we’re just increasing both our own present misery and our insecurity about the future? If we set our priorities together, democratically, we would create a society in which human beings would thrive. We shouldn’t wait.

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(data sources for chart: suicide growth based on CDC age-adjusted rates, links above; GDP growth based on BEA measure of GDP, chained dollars (2009) and USCB annual population estimates)