> Cosmopolitanism has not failed. It has barely been tried.
In order to avoid the same fallacy as the people who insist that socialism hasn't been tried, we should make the point that cosmopolitanism gives parts of its benefits even when tried only partially.
(Just like more capitalism is more good. You don't need to subscribe to exactly the whole package to start getting any benefit.)
Can we make that argument for cosmopolitanism?
(What I suggest is not necessary, merely sufficient, to escape the same self-bullshitting rhetoric the fans of socialism pull on themselves.)
I remember someone - a Jewish comedian or literary critics - complaining that globalism has made the whole world worse. He had some punchy phrase that I cannot quite remember, something to the effect of "anything you could hate about Atlantic City Tel Aviv now has in spades."
Correction: "Early this month" is not August 2024 but July, 8 years (!) ago. While recycling fine econlib posts is well and fine, I wished Prof Caplan would not just copy-paste his work but take the effort to update them with a sentence or two. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/07/the_cosmopolita.html
> Cosmopolitanism has not failed. It has barely been tried.
In order to avoid the same fallacy as the people who insist that socialism hasn't been tried, we should make the point that cosmopolitanism gives parts of its benefits even when tried only partially.
(Just like more capitalism is more good. You don't need to subscribe to exactly the whole package to start getting any benefit.)
Can we make that argument for cosmopolitanism?
(What I suggest is not necessary, merely sufficient, to escape the same self-bullshitting rhetoric the fans of socialism pull on themselves.)
I remember someone - a Jewish comedian or literary critics - complaining that globalism has made the whole world worse. He had some punchy phrase that I cannot quite remember, something to the effect of "anything you could hate about Atlantic City Tel Aviv now has in spades."
Correction: "Early this month" is not August 2024 but July, 8 years (!) ago. While recycling fine econlib posts is well and fine, I wished Prof Caplan would not just copy-paste his work but take the effort to update them with a sentence or two. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/07/the_cosmopolita.html
On this subject, I really like the O. Henry short story, "A Cosmopolite in a Café,", https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/131/the-four-million/2389/a-cosmopolite-in-a-cafe/