How to manage scarce resources in the face of multiple needs. City Government programs.
At the beginning of last April, the Ministry of Culture of the City of Buenos Aires announced the selected projects of the 2023 call of the Cultural Participation Regime – Patronage, “the financing program for large-scale artistic and cultural projects, which allows companies to contribute to the development of the cultural scene.” In total, 4 billion pesos were distributed for 1,126 projects, from 14 cultural disciplines: Audiovisual arts and digital art: 273 projects; Visual arts: 101; Crafts and popular art: 14; Circus, murga, mime and similar: 27; Dance: 89; Design: 18; Infrastructure: 42; Literature: 57; Academic music: 60; Popular music: 103; New technologies: 29; Cultural heritage: 60; Publications, radio, television and internet sites with artistic and cultural content: 125 and Theatre: 128.
I am not the one to evaluate the benefits for society of the Cultural Patronage and much less to give an opinion on the merit of the selected projects, but it is clear that there are multiple purposes and of different importance. I wonder, if having a Cultural Patronage law eventually makes it impossible for a similar Educational Patronage law to exist, which favors children who have the least and need the most, aren’t resources being misallocated?
To develop this hypothesis, let’s look at a simple example provided by one of the greatest economists in contemporary history, Paul Samuelson, Nobel Prize winner 1970in his famous text, Economywhose first edition was published in 1948 and has been translated into more than 40 languages.
How can we not remember his illustration about the production of cannons or butter, which illustrates the need to define what is most important for a certain society at a certain time: allocate scarce existing resources to military production or food production, presenting the concept of opportunity cost in a very intuitive way. That is, what we must give up every time we make a decision.
It is clear that this concept is of daily application, since the need to decide how to invest the scarce resources that we have is faced every day by the choices of our lives and today, more than ever, it is relevant at the country level, in the face of the tremendous economic situation inherited by the government of Javier Milei.
Scarce resources facing multiple purposes of different importance. How can you not remember this phrase? The Government must decide what and how much to spend, based on the objectives of society, taking into account the existence of limited resources when doing so. The reality we live in today is the product of irresponsibly not having done so for many years.
Educational patronage?
Let us now return to the topic of our interest. Faced with the tremendous educational inequity suffered by those children who have the least and need the most, wouldn’t it be appropriate for there to exist instead of a Cultural Patronage Law one of law with similar characteristics but of Educational Patronage?
Of course, if both laws are feasible together, much better. But if the budget constraint allows the government of the City of Buenos Aires To lean towards only one of them, I am convinced that the wrong decision is being made.
Edgardo Zablotsky is Rector of the CEMA University and Member of the National Academy of Education
Source: Ambito
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