In Victorian times, the family’s problems were viewed by one influential British economist, Alfred Marshall, through the lens of public consternation with urban family impoverishment. Marshall provided a critical extension of the population studies of late eighteenth-century clergyman, T. Robert Malthus, for whom poverty occurred when family reproduction exceeded the capacity of agricultural production. On the one hand, Marshall argued that Malthus had not recognised how larger populations could be sustained by the productivity gains of industrialisation. On the other hand, Marshall extended Malthus’s criticisms of the Old Poor Laws to the New laws too, which were rejected for encouraging poor families to have more children than they could adequately sustain. Marshall also followed Malthus by rejecting calls by Annie Besant, Charles Bradlaugh, and others for working-class access to contraceptive knowledge and birth-control techniques. Describing and evaluating class-based behaviour in factory families, artisanal families, and families of the higher class, Marshall identified the effects on labour productivity and living standards of patterns of family formation, fertility, mortality, household–market labour division, educational investment, and aged care provision. However, his policies supported gendered divides, overlooking how male breadwinning did not convert into an adequate family income, and rejecting activist demands for women’s rights.

Economics of visual art defies many principles of economics while also relying on them. This makes economics of art a creative and political practice unto itself. The big question in the field is whether economics can explain art – encapsulated economic value – or whether it cannot but is still a useful tool for structurally supporting art. Under the Nothing But argument, all value, including artistic value, can be represented by price. Under the Hostile Worlds argument, art can never be fully described by markets and should be kept separate. We find that economics and art are highly related in systems of institutional and commercial value. Our starting point for the book is looking at artists who make things.