Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World's Cultures (review)

A common contemporary lament has it that globalization is a sort of dull, ambling leviathan that tramples cultural distinctiveness at every turn, and brings with it the destruction of nuance and identity, especially as manifested in a locality’s or nation’s cultural expression, whatever form the latter may take. Thus, for example, Hollywood and the Anglo-American pop music industry gain commercial dominion globally at the expense of national cinemas and local musical traditions the world over. Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures questions this view, finding in it unwarranted pessimism and a fundamentally misconceived view of culture’s genesis and development.

As an economist, Tyler Cowen brings a refreshing perspective to debates on the benefits and costs of globalization within the cultural sphere. Focusing specifically on “those creative products that stimulate and entertain us”—music, cinema, the visual arts, literature, and cuisine—he examines a series of related questions on how culture fares in a globalized market economy (4). How does the trade in cultural goods affect diversity and aesthetic quality in this sphere? Does trade lead inevitably to homogenization and “dumbing down”? How will increased economic freedom influence cultural production in the future?

Those familiar with the author’s In Praise of Commercial Culture (1998) will find here a revisiting of various issues taken up there and, in particular, a renewed consideration of the impact of commodification on the production, distribution, and consumption of cultural goods, though here in a global context. In the earlier work, Cowen identifies “market enterprise and productive wealth as allies of cultural production,” with capitalism providing an “underappreciated institutional framework” for the promotion of culture in the West over the course of the latter’s history (1). (Cowen’s examples of capitalism’s maieutic function include the patronage bestowed upon Renaissance artists by Florentine merchants, the rise of the book trade in England in the eighteenth century, and the establishment of the French art market in the mid-1700s and beyond and of the American art market in the early twentieth century.) Adapting Joseph Schumpeter’s often cited description of capitalism as an exercise in salutary, if often forced, change, Creative Destruction adduces a great deal of empirical evidence to demonstrate that culture is inherently dynamic and typically hybrid, with cultural genres and media in a state of constant alteration, with some growing and others falling into marginality and even oblivion.

For Cowen, the global trade in cultural goods has a number of intriguing features. First, cultural diversity is a highly complex phenomenon. The dissemination of cultural goods globally increases cultural diversity in individual societies, even as it (paradoxically) creates the same range of choices among societies. For example, given societies become more cross-cultural through exposure to the literature of other countries, though the resulting canon of “world literature” will probably look very similar from country to country. Second, homogenization and heterogenization are not alternatives but coexistent forces. Thus, in Cowen’s example, the proliferation of “big-box” bookstores would seem to breed homogenization, but, in fact, mass marketing and economies of scale permit such stores to carry the publications of small presses in addition to mass-circulation best-sellers. Finally, cross-cultural exchange, while often a threat to existing cultural forms, also serves as a catalyst for the creation of new synthetic cultural expression.

In building an empirical case for the salutary effects of economic globalization, Cowen examines four specific areas: the cultural benefits of increased wealth and technological advancement; case studies in cultural decline; the global dominance of Hollywood in the world’s film industry; and the charge that the commercialization of culture leads to the degradation of aesthetic standards and tastes. In example after example, Cowen demonstrates how culture has typically—though not always—benefited from cross-cultural contact in any of a variety of ways. Cultural forms as diverse as Persian carpetmaking, Navajo weaving, contemporary Zairean pop music, the Haitian school of naïve painting, the...