Cowen Gives Kudos to Commercial Culture

Insight on the News, Feb 8, 1999 by Eli Lehrer

Economist and self-proclaimed cultural optimist Tyler Cowen says markets, wealth and capitalism are integral components to the nurturing and development of our vibrant culture.

Working from a cluttered office decorated with art from Haiti and Trinidad, George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen has emerged as one of the leading defenders of modern American culture. In his 1998 book In Praise of Commercial Culture, Cowen argues that market-driven culture almost always proves superior to its alternatives.

Cowen, who graduated from George Mason and earned his doctorate at Harvard, began his career as an economist with a sometimes-bewildering variety of publications on topics ranging from the Scottish banking system to the economics of altruism. He feels, however, that he's found his life's work in writing about the economics of culture. "In the economic area, very few people defend socialism; nobody wants to be like the former Soviet Union or even Sweden when it comes to the economy," he tells Insight. "Why would people want to have cultural-funding systems that aren't capitalist?"

Insight: What got you interested in exploring the question of commercial culture?

Tyler Cowen: It's closest to who I really am. Most of what you call my spare time -- what you now might call my work time -- relates to commercial culture. I have incredibly diverse tastes. I had never done anything with culture professionally but I thought writing the book was a gamble worth taking because there was very little on the economics of the arts. I always had thought the way the book argues and I woke up one morning and decided to write it. It ended up being a pretty large project but it was so much fun that I kept on doing it. Now I have two sequels in the works.

Insight: What are the sequels about?

TC: In Praise of Commercial Culture is part of a trilogy. The next one is on fame -- the working title is Faustian Bargains: Modern Culture and the Economics of Fame and it's been referenced currently. The next one after that will be called Three Cheers for Globalization, and it defends the world of globalized culture, saying that international trade gives rise to diversity, creativity and the cultural foundation of the classical liberal order. It's about time that people spoke up more for markets and wealth and capitalism in the cultural area.

Insight: A significant portion of your book distinguishes between what you call cultural optimism and cultural pessimism. What's the difference?

TC: Cultural pessimists are people who believe that the modern age is one of cultural decline, that there was a time in the past where culture was flourishing and that things now are falling apart. It's a view that's very popular on the fight wing with people like Robert Bork and it's very popular on the left wing and with Marxists and others who want to show the corrosive effects of capitalism.

Cultural optimism is the opposite viewpoint. It holds that, on the whole, culture has become more diverse and that, on the whole, our time is one of incredible cultural productivity.

Insight: You argue in favor of cultural optimism. Why should we be cultural optimists?

TC: There are natural tendencies to see the decline of what is already there, what people love. Old cultural trends and styles do decline as newer ones replace them. We tend only to remember the best things from the past -- never mind that when the past was the present, people also produced a lot of junk. In my book, I offer a lot of evidence that artists have supported their creative impulses by distributing their products to consumers within the marketplace in order to earn a living. Ours is an age where we see an incredible diversity of new things being produced whether you look at jazz or modern cinema or, actually, just about any area of artistic endeavor. That's the viewpoint of cultural optimism, and that's basically my shtick.

Insight: A lot of your arguments seem to say that the quantity of cultural production is the most important thing. Can we establish qualitative standards that are absolute or close to it? Does an appreciation for commercial culture require us to be cultural relativists?

TC: I think we never know for sure the masterpieces of the current age, but I think we have every reason to believe that many of the works of the current age will go down as masterpieces. Even today some people are able to come up with their own lists of masterpieces. That, to me, suggests that there's no knockdown argument that says Hitchcock's Vertigo is a masterpiece but there are certainly massive numbers of people who will say that it is. Some will say that it isn't. That's the great thing about commercial culture: It economizes on the subjective by producing so much diversity.

Many centralized or state systems, if you look at them, did a good job in one or two respects. I don't think you can argue with the idea that the former Soviet Union did a fine job of producing romantic pianists. What you can say, however, is that in terms of diversity, in terms of producing a broad panoply of creations, the former Soviet Union was tremendously impoverished culturally compared to the free markets of the West.