Cultural economics

The Last Straw: There was an ad in The Irish Times Magazine one Saturday a while back - for men's clothes, I think - and instead of the usual male model, it featured a certain Michael Kypriotakis, described as a "cultural economist in Athens".

Ever since, I've been wondering: what exactly is a cultural economist? And does Ireland have one? The answer to the second question must be no, because surely the first subject he/she would have tackled is this country's chronic overproduction of poets. For decades, Ireland has been turning out poets at a rate that makes a mockery of supply and demand laws, with a predictably depressing effect on poetry prices. A cultural economist would at least have produced a report on the problem, no doubt highlighting the key role of educationalists in identifying potential poets early, and giving them free paintbrushes or something.

Insofar as there is work available for poets here, most of it goes to a few big names. No fault of Seamus Heaney, who most recently won the State contract to supply verse at the EU enlargement ceremonies, but his dominant position in the Irish poetry sector is hardly healthy. A cultural economist would probably recommend that he be broken up into three or four independent operations, to introduce competition and give the consumer more choice.

Predicting artistic growth must be another area of the cultural economist's work. And despite the enormous international success of Irish culture, there are grounds for concern under this heading. Take the Corrs. Yes, they're beautiful and they sell millions of records. But their failure to expand artistically is a worry. In fact, after years of zero growth rates, their latest single suggests that - if anything - negative growth has set in. It can't be that the Corrs lack the raw material for darker, more challenging music. They come from Dundalk, for God's sake! A work of tortured genius is surely within them; and a cultural economist might be able to recommend ways to find it (short of actual torture). Or maybe not.

There's a thin line, of course. In Irish literature, too much importance is attached to genius. We're all delighted at the success of the James Joyce industry, now one of Dublin's biggest employers. And similar investment in Yeats could boost the culturally disadvantaged BMW region. But it's not all about literary giants. On behalf of ISME, the organisation representing Irish Small to Medium-sized Essayists, I think it's time there was more recognition of the role we play in creating employment (if only for ourselves).

Another useful purpose a cultural economist could serve would be to inject a note of pessimism into the whole pop-culture area. Non-cultural economists are notoriously pessimistic: studies show that they repeatedly underestimate economic growth. But their pessimism serves a purpose, because humans in general are absurdly optimistic, and repeatedly underestimate the potential downsides of all decisions. The only reason economists are tolerated, surely, is the knowledge that they provide balance.

We could do with such professional pessimists in popular culture, where there is a constant urge among commentators to predict the "next big thing". Those of us who can't keep up with developments ourselves depend on these commentators' recommendations, and often invest our hard-earned credibility in them: dropping the names of certain bands at parties, and so on, as if we know what we're talking about.

Music is the worst case. Not a year goes by without some Irish band being declared "the next U2". Many of us had our fingers burnt during the Cranberries boom in the mid-1990s. And who now cares to remember the grim 1980s, and the South Sea bubble that was Cactus World News? A cultural economist could issue quarterly bulletins highlighting the statistical unlikelihood of any Irish band being the next U2. The fourth-quarter bulletin for 1993 might have warned of underlying weaknesses in the Cranberries' lyrics division, for example. It might have predicted that, while the naïve charm of rhyming couplets like "You got me wrapped around your finger/do you have to let it linger?" could bring initial success, this approach could not be sustained in the longer term. And that any attempt to rhyme "silence" with "violence" on the follow-up album, even with the help of a strong Limerick accent, could adversely affect consumer confidence.

Then again, perhaps not even a cultural economist could make such predictions. After all, a decade ago, if you'd asked Michael Kypriotakis what he understood by the term "broadband technology", he'd have been forgiven for suggesting it was a specially reinforced stage-floor for Demis Roussos and his backing singers. Of course I may be completely misrepresenting the work that he and his fellow CEs actually do. No doubt my Greek readers will write and let me know.