an excerpt from Free Trade Under Fire

I'm now reading Free Trade Under Fire by Douglas Irwin for my trade theory class. One of the chapters describing the gains from trade went into the non-economic gains, which Montesquieu and Mill described as the "intellectual and moral" benefits. I quote:

"[A] study of the effects of McDonald's on Asian culture noted that rest rooms in Hong Kong previsouly had the reputation for being unspeakably filthy. When McDonald's opened in the mid-1970s, it redefined standards , setting a new, higher benchmark for cleanliness that other restaurants were forced to emulate. . . . When McDonald's first opened in Moscow, a young woman with a bullhorn stood outside its doors to explain to the crowd that the servers smiled not because they were laughing at customers but because they were happy to serve them."

If clean restrooms and smiling service are absolutely better, regardless of cultural differences, than dirty restrooms and unsmiling service, it makes you wonder why some Hong Kong restaurant didn't use clean restrooms to get an edge over its competitors before the advent of McDonald's. (I have no questions as to why Russian customer service people's didn't smile pre-McDonalds; smiling just isn't as much of a universal good across cultures as cleanliness is, and Russian customer service was still weighted down from the baggage of communism and the lack of a profit motive.)

Mill said, "[T]here is no nation that does not need to borrow from others, not merely particular arts or practices, but essential points of character in which its own type is inferior." It's hard to know whether to agree or disagree given the strength of the Hong Kong example (a pro-Mill point) and my native, liberal instinct to say that cultures aren't "inferior" from each other, they're just different.