[farnsworth]

These topics are incredibly important, and yet it's extremely difficult to make a living studying them, and people are routinely mocked for attempting to do so. One day we will realize that an entire society made up of engineers and managers is not a healthy one. How can we fix this when "stuff that people will pay for" is pretty much the only meaningful measure of value?

[zdragnar]

People get paid for engaging in them- i.e. doing them. Studying the arts will not, however, make you an artist.

It will make you, at best, a keen observer. Some people can make a living writing books about their observations and assertions formed from them. Most, however, will not.

How much extra value does one more person writing about Locke or Rawles really give society? It depends entirely on how many we already have.

[UncleMeat]

The arts and the humanities are not identical.

The people doing history, for example, are the grad students and faculty who dig into archives and write books. They, largely, are shit on by society and are working in a field that pays virtually all of them like crap.

And they don't repeat themselves. The Nth person to write a book on Topic X isn't just saying what has already been said. They are in dialog with all of the other authors. They reinterpret and recast the history. They view it through different methods or they create new methods that others will use in the future.

[willsher]

There is a value that transcends money. Value to society as a whole. Sure people need to live and have basic needs met, but to transcend finance is perhaps a necessity. One can make do with a lot less when the soul is enriched, when we take solace from the learning of humanity.

[farnsworth]

And how much do you think artists get paid?

[zdragnar]

For independent artists, everywhere from "not at all" to "obscene amounts", with most on the lower end of the scale or nothing.

For commercial artists- designers and such for companies- it is usually a good living.

[ellen364]

It’s weird that we don’t throw more money at the social sciences, in particular. People often laugh at the social sciences because of things like the reproducibility crisis. But if we’re finding it difficult to research fundamental questions about humans, why don’t we throw billions of dollars at the challenge, like we did with the Large Hadron Collider?