How Government Grants Corrupt Academia and the Arts
OUR FUNDING SCHEME IS A MASSIVE WASTE OF TIME: Applying for government grants and writing periodic reports to granting agencies is a massive waste of time. Many of my friends who work in creative fields that rely upon grant money (e.g., professors, artists, musicians, etc.) spend months out of every year applying for new grants and/or servicing the grants they already have. This often means, in practice, that they have very little time and energy left over to actually do the work. What a colossal waste of our society’s limited creative resources!
After all of the requisite schooling, training, and apprenticeship is out of the way, how long is the productive life of, say, an artist, a musician, a writer, or a really great thinker? Twenty years? Thirty years? Whatever it is, it’s finite. Why, then, are we forcing these people to devote such a huge percentage of their limited productive life to pointless bullshit?
OUR FUNDING SCHEME INCREASES INEQUALITY: For all of the most obvious reasons, this stupid system ends up giving most of the money to those who least need it. Although this has been an open secret in the music industry for years, many of us are just now realizing it via the scandal surrounding the $90,000 Grimes was recently awarded.
Truth is, this has always been the case. Super successful artists who no longer live in Canada, and really don’t need the money, soak up most of the money. Just as those who can afford high-priced accountants profit most from the loopholes in tax law, those who can afford to pay others to apply for grants and fill out stupid reports profit most from government grants.
OUR FUNDING SCHEME MAKES EVERYTHING UGLY: Just as standardized testing forces educators to teach to the test, the idiotic way in which we fund academia and the arts forces cultural creatives to cater to the bizarre tastes of granting committees. Since what the granting committee wants is rarely what the rest of us want, artists who get stuck on this hamster wheel end up writing books nobody reads, producing music nobody listens to, and working on problems nobody cares about.
OUR FUNDING SCHEME SHOULD BE SCRAPPED: As it stands, small cliques of pied pipers with atypical tastes call the tune. They decide whether or not you’ve created something of value. Refuse to conform and they’ll render you penniless; let them call the tune and they’ll render you irrelevant. And if you’re irrelevant to a wider audience of potentially paying customers, you’re permanently dependent on them. It really is the worst of all possible worlds for creative types.
If everything King Midas touches turns to gold, everything King Grant touches turns to shit. We need to scrap this funding structure altogether, replace it with some version of Universal Basic Income, and free our fellow citizens from the need to beg on the streets, on Patreon, or on grant applications. Then let the market decide whether or not they’ve created something of value.
