Cultural value vs culture's value

Abstract

The problem of culture’s value is assayed by David Throsby in his seminal book Economics and Culture when he puts forward the proposition “the economic impulse is individualistic, the cultural impulse is collective”. This proposition asserts, first, that there is behaviour which can be termed “economic” which reflects individual goals and which is portrayed in the standard model of an economy comprising self-interested individual consumers seeking to maximise their utility and self-interested producers seeking to maximise their profits […] secondly, that there is behaviour, distinguishable from economic behaviour […] which can be termed “cultural”; such behaviour reflects collective as distinct from individualistic goals, and derives from the nature of culture as expressing the beliefs, aspirations and identification of a group as defined above. Thus the cultural impulse can be seen as a desire for group experience or for collective production or consumption that cannot be fully factored out to the individuals comprising the group […] Whatever the artistic products produced and consumed, the processes of producing and consuming them can be seen not only as individual enterprise, but also as expressions of a collective will which transcends that of the individual participants involved.