The Labor Market Returns of Being An Artist

The labor market penalty to choosing the arts seems to be rising:

Using individual-level data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) between 2006 and 2021, I study the labor market experiences of artists. First, I find a decline in the relative earnings of artists to non-artists from zero to a 15% disadvantage. After controlling for demographic differences, the decline is sharper, declining from a 15% earnings disadvantage to 30%. That the inclusion of demographic controls raises the earnings gap suggests there is positive selection into the arts. Second, these differences decline in magnitude to 4.4%, but remain statistically significant, after exploiting variation among artists and non-artists in the same industry-year and major occupation. Third, when restricting the set of individuals to those with at least a college degree, those with a fine arts degree also incur an earnings and employment penalty even if they work in the arts. These results highlight the increasing financial precariousness of artists over the past decade.

That is a new paper by Christos Makridis, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.  Overall this result makes sense to me.  Success in the arts requires extreme talent of some kind in most (not all) cases.  Those individuals can earn increasingly more in other endeavors.  But if the arts are trapped in a “Malthusian equilibrium,” with intense entry competing down returns because it is fun, artistic earnings may not keep pace.