Some Links
The Fab Four’s story is a groundbreaking example of the enduring benefits of cultural globalization and the tremendous reach of today’s truly global music market.
Watching the restored footage of four working-class young men from Liverpool, England—who cut their musical teeth playing in the port city of Hamburg, Germany—navigating screaming airport crowds and sold-out stadiums across continents, one is struck by just how revolutionary their global reach was, especially given the technological limitations at the time. When 73 million Americans tuned in to watch the Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, they were witnessing something genuinely new: a British band achieving instantaneous cultural dominance in the world’s largest consumer market that had, until then, largely shunned foreign music. The Anthology captures these moments and many similar ones with remarkable intimacy, demonstrating how Beatlemania quickly transcended national borders.
The Beatles both benefited from and helped shape cultural globalization. Thanks to the penetration of American music into British radio markets, the band drew from American rock and roll, blues, and rhythm and blues—genres created largely by black musicians who had fused musical elements from the Americas, Europe, and Africa. John, Paul, George, and Ringo also absorbed French existentialism. After a long stay in 1968 in Rishikesh in Northern India to study at the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, meanwhile, they began incorporating Indian instrumentation and spiritual practices into their work. They brought Western attention to Eastern spirituality while channeling American musical traditions through a distinctly British sensibility.
Perhaps more importantly, the Beatles established the template that global artists follow to this day. When Taylor Swift crashed Ticketmaster France’s website with overwhelming demand in 2023, she was walking a path laid out six decades earlier. The infrastructure of global stardom—international touring, coordinated album releases, a worldwide fan base united by shared devotion—was pioneered by the lads from Liverpool.
The timing of this restoration feels particularly apt. In an era when protectionist sentiment has grown louder, with politicians around the world questioning the value of international exchange, the Beatles’ story offers a powerful counter-narrative. Cultural globalization has long since escaped the bottle, and music demonstrates why that’s worth celebrating.
Consider what streaming platforms have done to accelerate musical globalization since the original Anthology aired three decades ago. Latin American artists now routinely top global charts. K‑pop acts sell out American stadiums. A teenager in Tokyo and another in Toronto can discover the same emerging artist simultaneously. Music has become more accessible and more diverse than at any point in human history, with services like Spotify (a Swedish company) exposing listeners to styles and sounds they might never have encountered in an earlier era.
The direct tax burden that President Trump’s unilateral tariffs have placed on American companies is undoubtedly significant. The tariffs’ regulatory costs are arguably even worse.
IOW, an administration that likes to champion the notion of deregulation actually imposes one of the most complex regulatory schemes in history!
“What this episode truly reveals is that Donald Trump believes political rhetoric to be as real as professional wrestling, a work of kayfabe,” wrote Jeffrey Blehar in a sensible take at National Review. There’s some truth there, given the president’s knack for theatrics. But take a look at the president’s meeting with Vladimir Zelensky, where he tried to humiliate him. The president continues to blame the Ukrainian president for having the audacity to have gotten his country invaded.
I want to be generous and give the benefit of the doubt to some of the signatories of this proposal who have, for example, endorsed the economic agenda of the Chavez regime in Venezuela. But even setting those credibility concerns aside, the proposal itself suffers from several analytical flaws that make its conclusions difficult to take seriously.
First, inequality measures (Gini coefficients, top income and wealth shares, and similar metrics) are welfare-incomplete and highly sensitive to measurement choices and to missing non-income dimensions of well-being. For the poorest in society, income growth is the dominant driver of living standards. As a result, who is “better off” depends much more on overall development than on modest differences in inequality. Cross-country differences in living standards are best explained by institutions, property rights, the rule of law, levels of corruption, and broader economic freedom.
Second, it is important to recognize that global income inequality trends have been moving in a positive direction for decades. Global income inequality is now at a 50-year low, while global wealth inequality is at an all-time low. Yes, you read that correctly — but you might not hear this inconvenient truth from the advocates of this proposal.
Henry Olsen rightly criticizes the bigotry that is increasingly infecting the Heritage Foundation. A slice:
Yet Heritage’s problems are hardly limited to its handling of Fuentes. The think tank’s recent decision to hire Scott Yenor, a family-policy scholar, to lead the Foundation’s B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies poses serious questions about the institution’s beliefs concerning the equality of women in the workplace and perhaps even as citizens.
Yenor’s views are, to say the least, controversial. In a 2021 speech at the National Conservatism Conference, he labeled professional women “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.” He has echoed the online right’s use of the term AWFLs (for “affluent white female liberals”) in his writing, and had to step down from an appointment as the chair of the University of West Florida’s board of trustees when it became clear that the Republican-controlled state Senate would not confirm him.
Yenor has also criticized prominent figures on the right, such as Megyn Kelly, the former Fox personality who now hosts a popular podcast. She argued that it was wrong for conservative men, when looking for a spouse, to prefer women who don’t work full-time. Yenor responded that that’s precisely what conservative men should do, contending that “the heroic feminine prioritizes motherhood and wifeliness and celebrates the men who make it possible.”
His rhetorical pugnacity, though, is merely a symptom of the challenge that he presents to the beleaguered Heritage Foundation. It’s his ideas, not just his words, that are the problem.
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