Boston’s Arts & Global Wealth Inequality
Datablast, 21 January, 2016
Funding (or lack thereof) for the Arts
A new report commissioned by The Boston Foundation and written by TDC finds that Boston’s various institutions — defined as foundations, corporations, and goverment agencies — does not fund the arts nearly as well as other US cities. The report compares Boston’s art funding to ten metropolitan areas (including New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Seattle) and finds that, despite Boston’s vibrant non-profit sector, the City on a Hill ranks last in government funding for the arts. Quoted in the Boston Globe, the President of The Boston Foundation put Boston’s situation into perspective: “The good news is that this confirms that we’re punching way above our weight in terms of the health, vitality, and size of the cultural sector in this city. The bad news is, compared to other cities, certain kinds of financial support that other cities have put in place are not in place here, and that’s a particularly difficult thing for the small- and medium-size organizations.”
Global Numbers on Wealth Inequality
Rather than rehash what others have already stated so well, we’ll just quote the New York Times, which clearly and succinctly described shocking statistics found in Oxfam’s latest report on global wealth inequality: “The richest 1 percent are likely to control more than half of the globe’s total wealth by next year…The 80 wealthiest people in the world altogether own $1.9 trillion, the report found, nearly the same amount shared by the 3.5 billion people who occupy the bottom half of the world’s income scale. (Last year, it took 85 billionaires to equal that figure.)”
More troubling still is that wealth inequality is, in fact, widening. According to the report, “Between 2002 and 2010 the total wealth of the poorest half of the world in current U.S. dollars had been increasing more or less at the same rate as that of billionaires. However since 2010, it has been decreasing over that time.”
