France Gave Teenagers $350 for Culture. They’re Buying Comic Books
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Re: France Gave Teenagers $350 for Culture. They’re Buying Comic Books
#2I'm not sure why the NYT would find this surprising, it is le neuvième art.
Re: France Gave Teenagers $350 for Culture. They’re Buying Comic Books
#3Comic books are culture. Whether you like that or not is a matter of taste. Personally I absolutely love 'Gaston' and 'Asterix', but also like some other old school ones. The newer stuff I don't feel much connection with.
Re: France Gave Teenagers $350 for Culture. They’re Buying Comic Books
#4Nothing surprising. It seems odd and unrealistic to assume that people would spend windfall money on something they have no interest in or do not like.
Whatever cultural products people enjoy, it seems reasonable to expect that they would simply consume more of them if they had more money... Especially considering that the vast majority already has the purchasing power to consume whatever they want.
Re: France Gave Teenagers $350 for Culture. They’re Buying Comic Books
#5Re: France Gave Teenagers $350 for Culture. They’re Buying Comic Books
#6Maybe it's just the easiest to resell?
Re: France Gave Teenagers $350 for Culture. They’re Buying Comic Books
#7I feel like this behavior could have been predicted. I'm not going to say whether or not purchases of manga are bad, but to think students would consume high brow art and then to be disappointed is after the fact is pretty poor foresight.
Can we start to use the vast number of cultural experiments we've conducted to infer which will succeed in producing the desired outcomes? Can we start trying new experiments?
I'd like to see us give cash to students that do well in school or participate in sports, clubs, music, etc. (If the worry is that this primarily rewards students whose parents are wealthy, I'm not so sure. Wealthy kids might not be satisfied by the rewards.)
Re: France Gave Teenagers $350 for Culture. They’re Buying Comic Books
#8Why is this pass described like in a vacuum when the country we’re still in a middle of a pandemic ?
> They can purchase tickets to movie showings, plays, concerts or museum exhibits. And they can sign up for dance, painting or drawing classes.
Oh you mean they didn’t rush to the theaters, that also were only reopened a few weeks ago, with many closing again ?
And the pass has limitation on what can be bought, only part of it can be spent online, and content or production has to be french and approved by the gov., which really reduces the options.
All in all this is to me a weird take on the situation.
Re: France Gave Teenagers $350 for Culture. They’re Buying Comic Books
#9Comic books are definitely culture. It's art and story-telling. They're at least as worthy of the title as any other book they might buy.
Sure, broadening their culture horizons would be good, if it was easy to enforce spending it on something you don't currently embrace.
I wished, and still wish, I had money that I could justify spending to buy comic books and getting into that.
I'm really not a fan of that sensationalist headline, trying to drive up outrage on both sides, ven though it doesn't say whether buying comic books is good or bad in the headline. The article even gives examples of how it can be beneficial, like teenagers buying from comics local shops instead of going online, or buying records locally, but ignores the fact that there's a pandemic that makes it hard to enjoy certain forms of entertainment that are pushed by this program. Overall, I don't think this is great and honest journalism, even if the content itself is interesting.
Re: France Gave Teenagers $350 for Culture. They’re Buying Comic Books
#10> nationwide nearly 630,000 teenagers now use it.
Is France's teenage population around 4-5 million?