Economic Judgment: The Regional Culture Agency and the Governance of Culture Budgets

Economic judgment is the professional skill of reconciling the interests of various stakeholders and institutions when determining a price for a commodity, service, or any other resource lending itself to economization. The determining of a price essentially includes two procedures, the valuation of the resource, that is, the determining of its social and economic value, and the commensuration of the resource, that is, the assessment of how a certain resource should be valued in relationship to other resources. In many cases, these two procedures are intimately connected, as economic worth is by and large determined by the alternative costs for buying, say, a specific commodity. If I buy an apple because I like apples, I also use the money I have to not buy a pear, and while my preference for an apple is higher than for a pear (testifying to my higher “apple utility,” an economist could have said), I may be more or less aware of the possible alternative uses of the money. In everyday consumption, the valuation and commensuration of commodities and services is an everyday, mundane practice, routinely executed, for example, when shopping for groceries, but many valuation and commensuration procedures are complex analytical and political procedures demanding much investigation, negotiation, and regulatory control.