My most recent post, Sports vs. Culture, got quite a few reads. I will sum up some of the main questions/topics which could be heard in the discussion that followed.
1. Is Harpa included?
YES. The newly-built Icelandic Concert and Conference Center “Harpa” ss included in the numbers. The numbers (around 70 mill ISK) are taken form the state’s budget of 2010, at the time when the financing of the building was in limbo. The future numbers will include a 900 M ISK yearly donation from the State and the City of Reykavik. (See http://www.althingi.is/altext/139/s/1069.html)
2. Is the Icelandic Academy of Arts included?
NO. Iceland Academy of the Arts is a private Icelandic university, specialising in art subjects. Its subsidies is grouped under “Education” by the countries Statistical office. (see http://www.hagstofa.is/lisalib/getfile.aspx?itemid=8010) This is in accordance with the UN COFOG standard. Same applies for the sports faculties of Reykjavik University and University of Iceland. These expenditures are grouped as “Education” rather than “Sports”.
3. Isn’t including the swimming pools/libraries in the sports/culture categories a bit of a stretch? These are essentially community services.
The claim is not that they aren’t. The goal of the post was to compare all sports and culture expenditures, not just the elite ones. Libraries, museums and galleries are all counted as “Culture” by the state, the local governments and the UN COFOG standard. Sports halls and Swimming Pools are counted as “Recreational and sporting services” by COFOG and by as “Sports” by the local governments wherever there was a distinction between “Recreation” and “Sports”. Same convention was followed here.
4. So how much money does there go to (elite/organized) (culture/sports)?
That wasn’t looked into. There is of course even a greater problem problem of defining and quantifying those. For example: A swimming pool serves both amateur and pro swimmers. Dividing the expenditures into two groups might prove troublesome and open to discussion, as no official numbers of any such division exist. Same with art galleries, they both serve the artist as well as the visitors. Etc. etc…
5. We get good value for our investment in sports/culture.
No special claim was made that these were good or bad ways to spend public money. Or that too little or too much was being spent. There was simply an attempt to sum up all the expenditures in both categories.
6. What about the number of participants? Do not more actively participate in sports/culture? In which category do we spend more per participant?
I do not know if there is good enough data on this. Too much might depend on definitions like “Who is a swimmer?” “Who is a musician?” Who is a “spectator?”. And most of the scarce data available comes from the interest groups in question, making it rather unreliable. Of course there is also a question of which comes first. If we spend money on soccer, more kids will train soccer. If we spend money on music, more kids will learn how to play an instrument.
7. Pitching one group agains another one like that is stupid.
Perhaps that is true, but that was not the goal of the post. The goal was to try give some sort of a deeper background in a discussion that resurfaces frequently. And for one thing, next time you hear someone claim that “sports only gets a fraction of what arts do” (or in fact vice-versa) you should ask them where they got that from.