Doug Irwin: evaluation

Transcript context

…The cultural exception to free trade, a common argument at UNESCO. If you go back some number of years, South Korea has significant quotas keeping out a lot of Hollywood movies. South Korean moviemaking then, according to some accounts, appears to blossom. You have wonderful South Korean movies like Mother. South Korea becomes a moviemaking power. Years later, South Korea is still a leading movie and otherwise entertainment and cultural exporter to the rest of Asia. Therefore for cultural reasons, it’s often a good thing to allow more tariffs and quotas on, say, movies, television programs, linguistically designated products, possibly national heritage items that a lot of our free trade agreements allow. What’s your view? That’s not just an argument there. Canada, too, has cultural exceptions built into the US-Canada Free Trade Agreement and NAFTA and things of that sort. Actually, I’m surprised you’re asking me that because you’ve written about the cultural diversity that you get with openness in free trade and that if you limit the ability of domestic consumers to watch foreign movies, and taste foreign food, and import foreign art, you’re losing something as a result of that. So I’m not sure many countries could become this sort of net exporter of cultural products the way South Korea has. A fairly new argument against one kind of free trade, and that is the claim that in some parts of the world, there’s too much tourism. If you live in Venice, on one hand, tourists probably account for the living you’re able to make, but arguably Venice as we know it is not sustainable. There are too many tourists. Works get damaged. Everything becomes “chained” in Venice. Venetian culture now, for the most part, seems to be gone. There’s barely a Venice left. It’s like being in a large airport surrounded by a lot of monuments. The population of Iceland, I think it’s about 400,000. So many tourists are coming, Iceland is wondering if its own culture isn’t being overwhelmed by tourists. They fear the Icelandic language will go away and that somehow the natural heritage of Iceland, or even some of the cultural aspects, are being ruined. In your view, can there be too much tourism? And is there an appropriate policy response?…

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