modernity

One Sure Thing About Globalization – The American Motion Pictures Industry World Hegemony Part 4

Jacques Delacroix Economics, Liberty , , , , ,

[Editor’s note: this lecture was delivered to the Leavey Institute of Santa Clara University in 2003. You can find it reproduced in whole here]

Just another National Specialization

The massive asymmetry in films exports between the US and the rest of the world may be the result of any number of factors. The fact that foreign movies occasionally do well in the US market ( in recent years, “Life is Beautiful”, from Italy, “Amélie”, from France. The first, 1999, Pokemon cartoon from Japan grossed US$85.7 , million, according to WSJ 7/19/02:w11, and, as forecasted by same – “Read my Lips”, also from France, will do well) suggests that public preference, and possibly language barriers, are more likely to be issues than American distribution superiority, for example. Yet, language barriers may be less significant than one would guess. Luc Besson’s “Jeanne d’Arc” (“The Messenger”) released in 1999, purportedly produced in English to make it accessible to the polyglot EU markets and to the US market, registered 3.07 million admissions in the European Union in that year, against, 40 million for American-made “ Star Wars Episode 1”, 23 million for “Tarzan”, almost 21 million for “The Matrix” , and 7.4 million for “American Pie”. Even the obscure, American-made “Patch Adams” did better ( EAO 2001: 100). “The Messenger” flopped so badly in the American market that admissions and revenue figures are hard to find. For 1999 also, only one British production and two UK-US co-productions, all in English of course, figure among the top worldwide 50 admission getters. In Belgium where practically the whole population understands French , French-made movies obtain usually less than 10% market share, against an 80% share for American-made movies. (EAO 2001: 96). Finally, the foreign successes of Indian movies, almost all in languages understood hardly anywhere outside India and not everywhere in India, suggest again that language may be a small constraint. Continue reading →

One Sure Thing About Globalization – The American Motion Pictures Industry World Hegemony Part 2

Jacques Delacroix Economics , , , , ,

[Editor’s note: this lecture was delivered to the Leavey Institute of Santa Clara University in 2003. You can find it reproduced in whole here]

Poverty, some International Trends

Now, let’s look for objectionable new facts in the worldwide distribution of income. (It’s too difficult to get international data on wealth.) In the nineteen-fifties, the total of the national incomes of all other countries in the world barely equaled the national income of the US alone (Delacroix, 1974). Today, the US GNP constitutes less than one third of the sum of all countries’ GNPs (World Bank, 2002:4.2), although the US has experienced healthy economic growth since the fifties. It’s true that a number of countries are mired in deep poverty and that some are even regressing. (See below.) It seems to me those are all countries with exceptionally corrupt or tyrannical governments, such as Haiti on the one hand and North Korea, on the other, or stand-alone plutocratically-run former colonies such as the so-called “Democratic Republic of the Congo” (formerly Zaire), or Sierra Leone (where, incidentally, the bulk of the population was almost certainly better off under European colonialism), or that they have especially poor access to current information (because of high illiteracy and other reasons, including government censorship or even deeply entrenched cultural facts [4]), such as Afghanistan (but no hard data are available). By far the worst economic performers in the past ten years are the European countries that have been trying to recover from their cruel experiment in state socialism (“communism”), not the Third World countries.

In spite of loose talk of “globalization” somehow deepening the poverty of the Third World (5), the following countries experienced higher average Gross Domestic Product rates of annual growth than the US (and higher than any Western European country, except one; see below) between 1990 and 2000: Continue reading →

One Sure Thing About Globalization – The American Motion Pictures Industry World Hegemony Part 1

Jacques Delacroix Economics , , , , ,

[Editor’s note: this lecture was delivered to the Leavey Institute of Santa Clara University in 2003. You can find it reproduced in whole here.]

The word “globalization” is often used as shorthand to suggest that the world as recently shrunk for many purposes (Friedman, 1999). At first blush, this would seem to be good news, facilitating the spread of literacy, the diffusion of useful technologies, and socioeconomic progress, in general. However, a large segment of public opinion, in this country and, apparently, a larger segment in Europe and certain other countries (such as India), takes a jaundiced view of this shrinkage. This view is propagated by numerous websites as well as by professional intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky (who is often heard on National Public Radio). It contains a large anti-American component (Menand, 2002). It is widespread – at various levels of sophistication – in American universities. (1) In recent years, it has been dramatically acted out by rioters in Seattle, Quebec and Genoa, among other places. For left-wing opinion, “globalization” seems to imply that there is something radically new under the sun that is also economically nefarious for the poor and for the weak. For the same left-wing opinion, the word often suggests a sinister plot implicating in turn, “big corporations”, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and other organizations little understood by the general public. (For a broad, business-oriented and mildly liberal classification of the many sins the word “globalization” covers, see Eden and Lenway, 2001.) That new something entails a clandestine hegemony, or hegemonies, of some sort, dedicated to the further “exploitation” of the already poor and weak by the already rich and powerful. In this presentation, I develop the idea that there is little that is both radically new and nefarious,
and that what is new is likely to have largely beneficial effects. I rest my argumentation on readily available, public evidence.

Note: If you don’t think such a perspective on globalization exists, or you believe it’s inconsequential, you may want to stop reading. It is very difficult to find anywhere assertions about globalization displaying at once the following features: Continue reading →