Cultural Arbitrage

Arbitrage is, in economics, the practice of taking advantage of a difference in prices in two or more markets. It essentially allows you to near-instantly buy low in one market and sell high in another.

Cultural Arbitrage is the related idea of using the cultural norms of one culture to create an advantage in a different culture. While the term has a fraught history as a marketing strategy in globalizationSee The Forgotten Strategy and remains one of the boogie men of the “Cultural Appropriation” outrage-clickbait-machine in the macro sense, in the personal sense, it is simply using your comfort with a different cultural norm to your own advantage. Raymond Chen relates a story about a food-related sucker bet that allowed him to profit from cultural arbitrage. It is in that spirit that I employ the term.

Cultural arbitrage is unique because the cultural “raw materials” underpinning it possess a combination of unique qualities that make them abundant, malleable, pronounced, and enduring.See Exploring Cultural Abritrage: A Multilevel Phenomenon

An Example

With an American view of commuting, distance to basic services, and social solitude quite different from those attitudes in Spain, the potential housing stock for me is (literally) miles bigger than for a local-born person. My house is a 20 minute drive to the downtown parking garage of the capital of Asturias, 15 minutes to multiple large grocery stores, 10 minutes to a bar and a restaurant, and a 10 minute walk to hourly bus service. For the average Spaniard, I might as well live on the moon.