Tyler Cowen and Dan Drezner have documented some of the unexpected outcomes from this recession. According to NPR there is one more item they should consider:
Tough times can often be a springboard for creativity; when no one's job is safe, no one's house is secure and no one knows exactly what to do about it, artists get to work.I am looking forward to this development.
"That kind of stress often results [in] the need to scream, and art is a way of screaming," says Miles Orvell, an English and American studies professor at Temple University. "Difficult times like the one we are experiencing today can really bring out a kind of expressive culture in an interesting way."
Never mind Cowen or Drezner.
ReplyDeleteThis idea is brilliantly captured in Orson Welles speech in the great movie, the Third Man (1937?):
"in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."