Really Creative Destruction

Economist Tyler Cowen argues for the cultural benefits of globalization

Nick Gillespie from the August/September 2003 issue

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Cowen: I think a lot of it is pride. People want to take pride in either a country, an ethnic background, or a place of origin. In order to construct an identity, a story, a sense of pride, you need tales about how your group, your region, your nationality -- your whatever -- is somehow special, different, apart, and imbued with a particular kind of meaning.

I think these stories are actually quite useful. Such beliefs motivate people; they give people comfort. I don't wish to strip them away from people. But if we take those stories too literally and start basing policy on them and forget about this other truth, then we're in deep trouble. We'll start thinking that the nation or the group is special and that you need to protect the group.

reason: Even as you celebrate the benefits of trade and mixing, you write about the "tragedy of cultural loss." What do you mean by that?

Cowen: The day of very small cultures -- of groups of 10,000 or 20,000 people that have their own language and formerly had little contact with "civilization" -- is coming to an end. I'm thinking of groups such as the Pygmies and certain indigenous groups in Mexico. The end won't come tomorrow, or in 10 years, but groups like that are finding it harder to maintain their isolation. Instead, we have very creative regions or polities, but they tend to be like India, Brazil, or the United States: They're large and complex and varied, but no single part of it lives much in isolation. That is not a less creative outcome. In many ways, it's more creative, and the isolated people now have access to the treasures of the world.

As the world becomes more integrated, we lose a lot of dysentery and diarrhea and malaria and women dying in childbirth who don't have to. There's a whole list of benefits that we're all familiar with, and those to me are most important. But in terms of culture, there is a loss. For instance, it's absolutely true that a lot of languages are dying. There's a gain because you bring people into a broader language network where they can write for others and they can read things by others. I don't have a problem with that trade-off, but I don't want to deny that something is lost. These vanishing languages are rich, and they're interesting. There's a net gain, but you can't just paint a picture of an advance along all fronts. It's not the reality.

reason: One of the problems with arguments about cultural loss is that they are often advanced for protectionist reasons. So, for instance, we have the French decrying U.S. cultural imperialism and insisting on domestic-content rules and the like. What are the effects of trying to hold back cultural creative destruction?

Cowen: The good news is that it cannot easily be held back. Maybe you can if you go to extremes, like Xhosa did in Albania. But short of that, it doesn't work. Look at the French. For all the noise they make, Paris is remarkably open to African and Middle Eastern cultures -- and to Hollywood movies, for that matter. They have these quotas, but they don't enforce them. If you want to see a movie in Paris, you're in great shape, no matter what kind of movie you want to see.

In that way I'm quite optimistic. I don't feel we're in any great danger of this mixing being overturned by a few tariffs or by a few intellectuals who hate capitalism. I think the forces in favor of trading cultural ideas are so strong you simply can't hold them back short of extremes that few countries today are even thinking about.

As a whole, the world has been moving towards freer trade for quite a while. Since the 1930s or so, the picture looks pretty good. It's far from perfect, but it's pretty good.

reason: Creative Destruction generated a lot of reviews, including two by a couple of intellectual heavyweights: the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (in The New Republic) and the political scientist Benjamin Barber (in the Los Angeles Times). Geertz criticized you for not making personal aesthetic judgments about good and bad art. What do you think of that?

Cowen: You know, the book itself states very clearly that my purpose is not to say: "Here are the tastes of Tyler Cowen; you have to agree with them. Judge the world by these standards!"

The book makes an argument that people's ability to develop "good" taste -- which I may or may not agree with -- is far greater now than it ever has been in the past. People who pursue hobbies, who are well-informed, they know the difference between, say, good Zairian music and bad Zairian music. The key thing that markets do is economize on the need for agreement.

I think Geertz is still operating in a framework where you're supposed to put down your list, like the literary critic Harold Bloom did in The Western Canon, which really should have been titled Harold Bloom's Canon. Geertz thinks you should lay everything on the line with your aesthetic judgment. But you're never going to get people to agree with those judgments, even if they're objective in some ultimate sense. I'm more interested in a broader argument: that markets and exchange will offer people of many different tastes many different things. I think global culture does that. It economizes on the need for agreement.

reason: Isn't this one of the things about markets -- whether in culture or more conventional goods -- that has always bothered intellectuals? By economizing on the need for agreement, you're economizing on the need for consensus and the need for gatekeepers and tastemakers, roles intellectuals have traditionally filled. They don't occupy the same position as they might in a more centralized, hierarchical system.

Cowen: That's right. You hear people say, "Oh, in the old Soviet Union or Czechoslovakia, intellectuals and artists were so important." Often they were. People would sort of hang onto the next work from a critic or a poet. But when you have a freer, wealthier, more stable society, they're not important in the same way. You know, maybe something is lost there, but in net terms I have no doubt it's for the better.