Consumer spending on the arts, culture, and heritage by age
Demographic part 2: Follow up to my article on spending by income in 2023
Today I’ll analyze household spending by age on the arts, culture, and heritage in Canada in 2023, as well as some other spending items for context. This follows my recent article on spending by income. Next week, I’ll examine spending by urban and rural residents.
As was the case with the income analysis, I’ll compare spending by households in different age ranges with benchmark averages from a previous article: $531 per household on artworks and arts participation items, representing 0.7% of household spending (after taxes, pension contributions, and gifts are excluded), as well as $1,623 per household on cultural goods and services, representing 2.1% of household spending.
For context, I’ll also analyze overall household spending and spending on cars.
Once again, I’ll provide two sets of indicators in this article: dollars spent per household and percentage of household spending. The advantage of the percentage estimates is that they place the spending levels in the context of how much money each group of Canadians has to spend.
The age information represents the age of the person in the household who responded to the survey, not the ages of all members of the household. The age ranges were provided by Statistics Canada.
My category of “artworks and arts participation” includes six items: 1) works of art, carvings, and other decorative ware; 2) books; 3) tickets to live performances; 4) movie tickets; 5) admissions to museums, zoos, and other heritage sites; and 6) art and craft materials. The 19 cultural goods and services include these six items, plus 13 others, all of which are listed at the end of this article. Spending details for individual items that are included in arts spending and cultural spending are not provided in today’s article, due to space and time limitations.
Given the limitations of Statistics Canada’s Survey of Household Spending, I would consider the analysis to be a limited but reasonable approximation of consumer spending on the arts. I would consider the broader estimate of spending on culture (including the arts, culture, and heritage) to be a less-limited approximation, but still imperfect. My categories only include those spending items that are available in the dataset, not everything that one might want to include in arts spending or cultural spending. More details on the survey’s methods and limitations are in the notes at the end of the article.
Context: differences in overall consumption and spending on cars by age group
The first graph shows average spending per household on everything. Average consumer spending is triangular: highest for people between the ages of 40 and 54 (nearly $100,000) and lowest for those under 30 ($68,400) and those 65 and over ($53,200).
As I did two weeks ago, I’ll examine spending differences on cars. (The age old question: Are cars elitist?) The following graph shows that, like total spending, average spending on vehicles is triangular: highest for people between the ages of 40 and 54 ($5,410) and lowest for people 65 and over ($2,810).
The final context graph shows that, as a percentage of total household spending, vehicle purchases are highest among Canadians under 30 years of age, followed by those between 40 and 54 years of age.
Spending on the arts, culture, and heritage by age group
Overall cultural spending in dollar terms
Average consumer spending on the arts, culture, and heritage is highest for people between the ages of 40 and 54 ($1,900) and lowest for those under 30 ($1,350). Like previous graphs, the following one is triangular.
