The complacent class and its dangers -- Why Americans have stopped moving, or is your hometown really so special? -- The reemergence of segregation -- Why Americans stopped creating -- The respite of the well-ordered match: love, music, and even your dog -- Why Americans stopped rioting and...

I consider technology as a partial explanation of the historical shift towards big government. The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw a fundamental change in the production technology for large government, and for large institutions more generally. Large institutional...

Frontmatter -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Introduction -- 1 The Arts in a Market Economy -- 2 The Market for the Written Word -- 3 The Wealthy City as a Center for Western Art -- 4 From Bach to the Beatles: The Developing Market for Music -- 5 Why Cultural Pessimism? -- Notes -- Index

A Frenchman rents a Hollywood movie. A Thai schoolgirl mimics Madonna. Saddam Hussein chooses Frank Sinatra's "My Way" as the theme song for his fifty-fourth birthday. It is a commonplace that globalization is subverting local culture. But is it helping as much as it hurts? In this strikingly...

Americans agree about government arts funding in the way the women in the old joke agree about the food at the wedding: it's terrible--and such small portions! Americans typically either want to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts, or they believe that public arts funding should be...