Art Is Essential
From the Ink & Ashes series on LinkedIn.
AT A GLANCE:
Britain’s creative industries generate around £146 billion each year and support approximately 2.4 million jobs—more people than live in Birmingham and Manchester combined. Across the Atlantic, America’s arts and cultural industries contribute more than $1 trillion annually to the economy. Together they power sectors from gaming and journalism to fashion, architecture, film and AI. Yet despite their extraordinary contribution, art and culture are still routinely described as “non-essential.” Why? Because industrial economies have become exceptionally good at measuring the value of what we produce, but far less comfortable measuring the value of what makes production worthwhile. Communities rebuilding after conflict rarely make that mistake. They don’t simply rebuild roads and schools. They rebuild identity, belonging and hope. This is the story of why creativity isn’t separate from prosperity. It is one of the reasons prosperity exists.
The Number That Doesn’t Add Up
£146 billion. That’s what Britain’s creative industries contribute to the economy every year. They support around 2.4 million jobs—roughly the combined population of Birmingham and Manchester.
Across the Atlantic, America’s arts and cultural industries generate more than a trillion dollars annually. These aren’t niche occupations. They include journalists reporting from conflict zones.
Game designers building virtual worlds.
Architects shaping the skylines of tomorrow.
Fashion designers turning ideas into global brands.
Film makers, musicians, publishers, software developers, advertisers and entrepreneurs whose work begins with the same raw material.
Human imagination.
Here’s the number that doesn’t add up. How can one of the most economically significant sectors in both the UK and the US still find itself described as “non-essential”? The question isn’t whether art creates value. The evidence suggests it already does. The real question is why we’ve become so comfortable treating that value as though it were somehow different from the rest of the economy.
An Economy Built for Counting
Industrial economies changed the world. Over the past two centuries they transformed almost every aspect of daily life. They helped lift billions of people out of poverty, increased life expectancy, expanded education and created opportunities that previous generations could scarcely imagine.
None of this happened by accident.
It happened because societies became remarkably good at measuring what they wanted to improve.
Output.
Employment.
Investment.
Productivity.
Over time, these measurements became the language of progress itself.
They still matter.
Without them, governments struggle to plan, businesses struggle to invest and communities struggle to prosper.
But they were never designed to answer another question.
What is prosperity for?
That isn’t an economic question.
It’s a human one.
Some of the most important things in our lives don’t become valuable because someone measured them.
They become valuable because we experience them.
Perhaps the real blind spot isn’t that industrial economies forgot art.
Perhaps they simply became so good at counting wealth that they stopped asking what wealth was ultimately meant to achieve.
The Value Hidden in Plain Sight
Imagine someone asked you to describe one of the most valuable moments of your life.
Very few people begin with a spreadsheet.
Instead, they remember a wedding.
A concert.
A family meal.
A favourite teacher.
A football match.
A story told by a grandparent.
The first drawing their child brought home from school.
Notice what these memories have in common.
They are rarely defined by what they cost.
They’re defined by how they made us feel.
They strengthened relationships.
Created belonging.
Marked identity.
Captured moments we wanted to hold onto.
Creativity quietly sits inside many of those experiences.
Not because art is separate from everyday life.
But because it has always been one of the ways people make everyday life meaningful.
Long before psychology explained belonging, communities sang together.
Long before branding, people expressed identity through craft.
Long before social media, stories connected generations across time.
Perhaps that’s why every civilisation, regardless of wealth or geography, has created music, art, stories and rituals.
Not because prosperity allowed them to.
Because being human required them to.
What Rebuilding Actually Looks Like
Walk into any community trying to find its footing again, and you won’t just find people waiting for help to arrive.
You’ll find people making things.
Songs. Stories. Games. Recordings.
Small, deliberate acts of creation that don’t appear in a single recovery report, yet somehow still get made.
That’s not sentimentality.
It’s instinct.
Long before anyone measures a community’s recovery in employment figures or growth forecasts, something else is already happening. People are telling each other who they are. What they’ve lived through. What they refuse to let disappear.
It was never separate from rebuilding.
It was the first part of rebuilding.
The Forms Keep Changing. The Need Doesn’t.
It would be easy to assume this instinct only shows up in the obvious places—the songs, the crafts, the things that look like “art” in the way museums display it.
It doesn’t stop there.
Ask a generation that grew up between disruption and Wi-Fi, and creativity shows up somewhere else entirely.
In gaming, young people build entire worlds with rules, geography and history of their own design. Nobody had to teach them why this mattered. They already knew. A world you build is a world where you decide what belongs and what doesn’t.
In podcasting, the format shifts again. A series like What Happens When the War Ends? doesn’t ask people to perform their experience for an audience. It asks them to narrate it, in their own voice, on their own terms. That’s a different kind of authorship than the one most people in difficult circumstances are usually offered, where someone else holds the microphone.
And in citizen journalism, a generation raised on documentation rather than declaration is doing something most economic models still struggle to register: turning lived experience into evidence. Not opinion. Not commentary from a safe distance.
Three different generations of tools.
One unchanged instinct.
A way of saying: this happened, and it mattered, and so do we.
That isn’t decoration on top of survival.
It’s how survival becomes something more than enduring.
Counting What We Can, Valuing What We Can’t
Here’s where the two halves of this story meet.
Britain’s creative industries generate £146 billion a year and support around 2.4 million jobs. America’s arts and cultural industries generate more than a trillion dollars annually. Those numbers are real, and they matter—proof that imagination scales into something economies can count, fund and grow.
But none of the people in this story were creating with a return on investment in mind.
The teenager building a virtual world isn’t doing it for a salary.
The person speaking into a microphone isn’t being paid for their story; they’re being given somewhere to put it.
The young reporter documenting their own community isn’t filing copy for a byline.
It doesn’t mean the £146 billion figure is wrong.
It means it’s incomplete—a measurement of where creativity ends up once it scales, not of what made it worth doing in the first place.
Communities rebuilding after disruption understand something industrial economies forgot to ask: prosperity was always meant to be in service of something. Identity. Belonging. The simple, stubborn fact of being heard.
The Number That Adds Up After All
This is the literacy A4R’s vocational training exists to build in young creators: not just the instinct to make, which every generation already has, but the discipline to turn that instinct into a craft, a platform, a livelihood—something that scales without losing the reason it was made in the first place.
That’s the gap between a generation that creates and a generation that’s equipped to be counted for it.
Vibers get vocational training. They get a Substack, a podcast feed, a game engine, a byline that’s actually theirs. We are the infrastructure between an instinct that’s always existed and an economy that’s only just learning how to measure it.
So maybe the question we started with deserves a second look.
How can one of the most economically significant sectors in both the UK and the US still be described as “non-essential”?
Perhaps it never was.
Perhaps “essential” was simply being measured by the wrong instrument—one built to count output, not to recognise what made the output worth producing.
£146 billion. $1 trillion. 2.4 million jobs.
Numbers like these tell us creativity scales.
The game-builder, the podcast guest finding their voice, the young reporter documenting their own story—they tell us why it was always going to.
Not because prosperity allowed it.
Because being human required it.
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This piece was produced as a guest contribution to the Arts4Refugees Media Hub, in collaboration with the BizGees community and the Gen Z Vibers co-creating it.
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