I make 40k a year due to not growing up wealthy enough to attend college, I should be subsidizing people like you?
They're valuable if you don't want to live in the world depicted in Brazil (1985), or Neuromancer, or pretty much any cyberpunk dystopia.
For context, I give 8% of my humble income to charities that feed the hungry and care for the sick. Is my dollar better spent funding a play that few will ever wish to see?
As far as I'm aware, none of us are allowed to pick and choose what our taxes go to or else I probably would give more to the arts than, say, the military.
So, the crux of your argument is: because money is squandered in one area its fine to do so in another?
All I said was "hey maybe you're right there isn't a tangible value in terms of money in and money out but perhaps there are other, more-difficult-to-track reasons why the arts are important."
Any argument made by starting with calling someone rude or accusing them of having a superiority complex, can only be made better by instead empathizing with rather than dismissing opposing viewpoints.
What's even worse is patronizing a mis-characterization of someone's statement.
> I roughly divide human activities into jobs and hobbies.
This indeed is a rough characterization of life. At no point does shaftoe insinuate humanities and arts are 'hobby educations'. Rather it seems to me a simply capitalistic view that anything humans do well can be done for money, at which point we call it a job. Certainly that also includes artists and philosophers. Or another way to think about it, to be truly great at something you must spend the majority of your life doing it, at which point it probably also needs to pay the bills.
People should only be investing 5-figure sums of taxpayer's dollars to learn what they expect will be lifelong skills that will significantly increase their lifetime earning potential. In almost all cases, this is not Art History class.