An article in the Boston Globe asks an economist + cultural observer for his take on Globalization.    His views resonate well with mine  ;-)

It's no cliche to observe that the 40-year-old Cowen - author of 1998's ''In Praise of Commercial Culture'' and director of George Mason University's Mercatus Center - is what he eats. Cowen's guide opens with the proclamation, ''Restaurants manifest the spirit of capitalist multiculturalism.'' On a similar note, his books celebrate the dynamism and creativity that market forces introduce into the arts and culture. Cowen champions such detested entities as Hollywood, megastores, and Brit pop while sharply criticizing snobs, purists, and government subsidies to arts organizations...

Cowen's new book, ''Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World's Cultures'' (Princeton), once again salutes the marriage of fine arts and free markets. Globalization, he argues, may indeed make one culture more like another; but it also makes the world as a whole more beautiful. It increases the degree of choice that individuals can enjoy within any given culture - and we should all be grateful for that.

Just added a new book to my Amazon shopping cart  ;-)

Cowen contends that much of the widely acclaimed "cultural decline" of the US mass market is simply a guise for ivory tower intellectuals to simply find a new way to distinguish themselves from the progressively more culturally affluent masses:

In fact, Cowen claimed, just like other sectors, the arts benefit greatly from technological advances. New technologies not only promote the dissemination and preservation of art (e.g., DVDs), they also inspire innovation by creating new possibilities (e.g., the electric guitar, or the recording studio). Cowen also pointed out that classical music and opera are alive and well in the United States: from 1965 to 1990, for example, the number of symphony orchestras increased from 58 to 300.

There is a beneficial marriage between mass markets and culture that people are far too quick to bemoan.   Culture is a fundamentally emergent property that isn't "preserved" across generations but is rather continually redefined within new generations.   For example, Bollywood cinema is unabashedly an indigenous experience but also an unabashedly new one.

Another example is the "club car" culture captured in the movie the Fast and the Furious (BTW, it was a pretty fun movie;  don't expect to come out enlightened though).  The 'burbs of Metro LA are about as classically vapid as most cultural observers can identify and yet the richness and intricacy of the car culture depicted in the movie was quite impressive.