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Arjo Klamer
Within the field of Cultural Economics, the Dutch Arjo Klamer, 2004, ‘Social, cultural and
economist Arjo Klamer may have been the first to economic values of cultural goods’, in Cultural
recognise that economists were unlikely to solve and Public Action, edited by V Rao and M
the problem of valuation in the arts and culture on Walton, Stanford University Press.
their own (Klamer, ed. 1996). Klamer realised that
several different disciplines value arts and culture
for different reasons, so that even if economists
solved the problem of valuation from an economic perspective, this would not
answer the questions that scholars in other academic fields were asking about the
value of culture. Rather than one single problem in need of a solution, there is a
range of interrelated questions and concerns that need to be addressed (Klamer
2003).
Klamer explains his approach to the valuation of culture in relation to David
Throsby’s framework in his 2004 article ‘Social, Cultural and Economic Values
of Cultural Goods’. 2 In Klamer’s view, cultural goods differ from other goods
‘because people may consider it a symbol of something — a nation, a community,
a tradition, a religion, a cultural episode — and endow it with various meanings
over and above its usefulness’. Whereas Throsby only distinguishes between
economic and cultural value (the latter consisting of several components), Klamer
principally considers economic, social and cultural value as distinct forms of value
that can be derived from cultural goods, and he suggests that other types of value,
such as environmental value, also exist. As in Throsby’s framework, Klamer’s three
forms of value may influence each other and may be correlated in many instances;
however, they are fundamentally distinct and incommensurable. There is thus no
overlap between these three forms of value. ‘Cultural values’, for Klamer, ‘are those
that evoke qualities above and beyond the economic and the social’. One might
therefore consider cultural value to be the residual that remains after subtracting
the economic and social values from the total value of a good. Such mental arithmetic
can clarify the relationship between the types of value in theory; however,
since these values cannot be expressed on the same scales of measurement, there
is no practical application for such an equation.
While Klamer recognises three forms of value where Throsby only distinguishes
two, a more radical difference between the two scholars’ approaches lies in their
respective opinions on the nature of cultural value. Klamer points out that having
2 There is no pagination in the version of this chapter that is published on Klamer’s
website, so that specific page numbers cannot be cited.
Framing the Conversation 39
UNDERSTANDING the value and impacts of cultural experiences