Is our economy hostile to the humanities?

Wouldn't you rather watch this than a movie?

Wouldn’t you rather watch this than a movie?

Probably you scoffed at the headline of this post. Obviously, our contemporary economy is hostile to the humanities insofar as they include theatre and dance and, I dunno, edifying lectures on the origin of species. But from another perspective, culture is perhaps the most robust sector of the American economy. Pace niche competition from Bollywood and Chinese movies about kicking people, our film and television is the world’s film and television. Our music is the world’s music. These sentences will be included in a themed collection of Combat! blog posts that made Mose angry, but for the most part the United States has the strongest culture economy on Earth. But is our culture anywhere for a humanist to make a living?

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