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The OP states specific percentages of GDP and number of jobs created. How about sticking to the facts? And it stuns me how many people read 'culture' as 'buying expensive things'. Yesterday someone played the same card, who is going to 'buy the art' and as I told that one, I spent my life in the arts, and never once did I have a 'product' that needed a single 'buyer'. Most of what I did was free to the audience. Lucrative for me. Free to them. Funny how that works. You should also understand that just as in the human body, the heart of a nation is not the largest part, just the driving element. Fashion is my least favorite of creative expressions, but the idea that cloths are simply 'to flaut wealth' flies in the face of necessity, we all wear clothes, rich or poor, and a designer could be form focused or function focused. That means, 'a warm coat that can be priced low' is a product of fashion design just as much or more than a Haute gown. School uniforms and work uniforms are also fashion, designed, and people have to live in that. What are they flaunting? But at the core of what I am saying is this: the article states facts and figures, to which you respond with opinions. Is the EU incorrect? Should they purge those millions of jobs? Here is a fact to chew on: one of the top five tourism draws to Ireland is James Joyce, a writer who has been dead for a very long time indeed. They know what they are talking about. Why do people go to Amsterdam? Many reasons, but one reason is VanGogh. People go there and spend like mad, just to see those paintings. No one buys them. They simply look at them. Your theories might hold in a dead world, where there is a real lack of trade and economy, a world where survival is the whole. Until people stop buying clothes, going places, learning things, being entertained, eating, dancing, culture is and will always be a large, and more than large, a key element in any thriving economy, an element that supports and feeds other elements of that economy.
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