The economy measures where humans allocate their efforts. We put more effort into the arts than we do into getting food out of the ground. It's not nonsense.
Of course, there's an implicit bias that the arts are trivial, but most people these days don't do real work, they do virtual work. If you're in finance, STEM, the Arts, law, or education, your job is to move information around. People who do real, useful work with tangible value generally don't make much money.
> The economy measures where humans allocate their efforts. We put more effort into the arts than we do into getting food out of the ground. It's not nonsense.
Or maybe it's more a measure of how automated large scale farming has become? It requires less human effort?
But allocating effort to something is not the same as contributing to the economy. In a way, agriculture contributes the entire GDP to the economy: Without it, everyone starves and there is no economy.
If you want to judge human efforts, I think you should also factor in the actual human cost (how many manhours are in there), as well as efficiency gains due to the work performed. And I guess that in this metric a large amount of the so called arts is highly overrated compared to the typical monetary evaluation (and if you say: people enjoy art, it's generating quality of life - the 20$ spent on streaming per year/capita could as well be invested into things which help people develop themselves (such as solidary funding of highschool music education...) and create social fabric. But this is obviously very bad from an individualistic view on gains, which actually creates a lot of not so individual consumption drones.
Of course, there's an implicit bias that the arts are trivial, but most people these days don't do real work, they do virtual work. If you're in finance, STEM, the Arts, law, or education, your job is to move information around. People who do real, useful work with tangible value generally don't make much money.