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Professor Sir Alan Peacock has worked in cultural economics for over 35 years and he pioneered much of what is now the core subject matter of the field. This paper traces the development of his theoretical work on the economics of the arts, heritage and broadcasting, and shows how it interacted with his role as adviser to and chairman of several prestigious committees in the cultural sector. 'Subsidising the Arts involves the same kind of issues as subsidising particular industries or services in the economy, however distasteful this may seem to those who are conditioned to think in terms of a moral ordering of consumption expenditure ... Apart from any predisposition of the author to oppose paternalism, the assertion of any imposed value judgements is too easy a way of deriving support for public intervention designed to give the public not what it wants but what it ought to have!' (Peacock, 1969, p. 323). For a minor field of economics, cultural economics - the economics of the arts, heritage and cultural industries - has been blest with the attention of some major players: besides Keynes, Robbins and Baumol, whose contributions are sketched below, Ashenfelter, Boulding, Caves, Feldstein, Galbraith, Rosen, Scherer, Scitovsky and Shubik have all actively engaged in it, and Coase may also be included on account of his work on broadcasting. Some topics in cultural economics, such as museum entry charges, the finance of public service broadcasting and the size of the subsidy to opera, seem to be perennially controversial and the growing interest in cultural industries and the role of copyright look set to experience a similar future. As with other areas of applied economics, such as the economics of education, of the environment and of health, the analytical basis of cultural economics is welfare economics. It is no surprise, therefore, to find Peacock with his combined interest in welfare economics and cultural policy in this august company. Indeed, he may rightly be called primus inter pares, for he has arguably contributed to more areas of cultural economics than any of the others. Alan Peacock has had a long career as an economist, university teacher, university administrator, government adviser and arts administrator. He also has been an active composer and musician. He has continuously worked in cultural economics since the mid-1960s, having a seminal influence on its development, particularly, but by no means only, in the UK; he was in at the start of the subject and is still contributing to it. He has written his autobiography as a cultural economist, Paying the Piper (Peacock, 1993), in which he lays out his lifelong commitment to applying economics to understanding the arts, drawing on his * This paper was originally written for the Luce conference on 'Economists' case for government support of the Arts' organised in 2002 by Neil De Marchi and Crauford Goodwin of Duke University. I am grateful to Alan Peacock for his factual corrections to this article; also to William Baumol, Mark Blaug and Muriel Nissel for their helpful comments on an earlier draft and to three referees for theirs.

Illustration of a methodological flow in the paper of the same name by Mosley, et al, and discusses the limitation of their approach.