Culture vulture

Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures

Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures

By Deepak Gopinath
November 2002
Institutional Investor Magazine

The French government spends about $3 billion a year and employs upwards of 12,000 bureaucrats to protect and promote the national culture. The French are especially zealous on this front, but they’re not alone in their anxiety that globalization -- some would translate that as U.S. cultural imperialism -- threatens what they think of as their unique heritage.

Though it is not always apparent, the debate about globalization ought to be as much about culture as it is about economics. As ideas and information, driven by market forces, flow more freely across traditional boundaries, critics and proponents of globalization alike agree that modern society is becoming more homogeneous between cultures but more heterogeneous within them.

Whether that is a good thing is a matter of heated disagreement. In Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures, Tyler Cowen, an economist at Virginia’s George Mason University, takes the side of the globalists.

Cowen seeks to debunk the view that globalization leads to a loss of cultural diversity and what some have called the dumbing-down of world culture. He poses a version of the age-old question: Are art and commerce allies or enemies? Specifically, he asks whether culture, or “those creative products that define and stimulate us . . . music, literature, cinema, cuisine and the visual arts,” benefit from globalization, which he defines as “commercialization . . . the trade in cultural products across geographic space”? His answer is a qualified yes.

Hewing to a libertarian approach, Cowen values individual choice above all else. To determine the effects of globalization on cultural creativity, the author applies a basic gains-from-trade economic model (he posits that individuals who engage in cross-cultural trade expect those transactions to improve their lives and increase their range of choices). He argues that as long as globalization increases choice and diversity within cultures -- by allowing individuals in Rio de Janeiro, say, to eat at French restaurants, read American newspapers and watch Hollywood movies -- it doesn’t really matter if Brazil and the U.S. and France begin to resemble one another more and more. “Just as trade typically makes countries richer in material terms, it tends to make them culturally richer as well,” writes Cowen.

To be sure, he concedes that globalization often leads to the demise of local cultures. “Some regions, in return for receiving access to the world’s cultural treasures and the ability to market their products abroad, will lose their distinctiveness,” he writes matter-of-factly. “The onset of a diverse menu of choice . . . accounts for many of the tragic cultural losses in the world today.”

But he insists that the trade-off is worthwhile. Before indigenous cultures are assim- ilated, he says, they enjoy a brief flowering as they benefit from Western technology and patronage. During this blooming, Cowen argues, products of these indigenous cultures are distributed in the West, thereby increasing the quality and range of cultural choice available to individuals everywhere.

Many of Cowen’s assertions are true: Trade has broadened the menu of cultural goods available for consumption, and how many “pure” cultures exist today? Nearly all are synthetic creations and should be no more closed-off from outside influences today than before.

But Cowen vastly overstates the benefits of Western influence on non-Western cultures while simultaneously minimizing the significance of cultural losses. Most glaringly, he doesn’t mention the destruction colonialism wrought on many of the world’s cultures.

Although Cowen says that he does not mean to suggest that third-world nations “owe it all to the West,” his examples of exchange all feature a Western culture helping a non-Western culture to flourish. Cowen notes that the steel drums used by Trinidad’s popular musicians were originally oil drums discarded by multinational oil companies. But he implies that Trinidad would not have developed any other type of popular music if there hadn’t been any oil drums conveniently on hand.

Equally unpersuasive is Cowen’s contention that the loss of cultural diversity in local societies in return for access to the global market is worth the price. He minimizes the loss by arguing that many of those societies might not be worth preserving in the first place. “Many renowned third-world and indigenous creations are rooted in cultures that scorn and limit diversity,” Cowen writes. “The underlying ethoses in these societies are often based on illiberal religions and social practices.”

Tell that to the French.

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