ABSTRACT
We live in a country that produces virtually nothing anybody else wants to buy, apart from culture. The United States now mostly sells feelings, ideas, money, health, movies, laws, games, religion, and risk-niche forms of collective identity, otherwise known as culture. In 2000, U.S. services exported US$295 billion, and 86 million private-sector service jobs generated an US$80 billion surplus in balance of payments (Office of the US Trade Representative, 2001). The significance of this for the nation’s image elsewhere is of course immense, whereas the domestic correlatives are important in terms of wealth, job creation, and ideology.
