My youngest daughter is the curator of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington in Seattle. I came up for the ceremony where she is getting her masters degree in Museology. The field is thirty years old and the Burke Museum has been a leading institution in the field since the beginning.
My favorite discussion concerned the death of President Reagan. I have sided with the Milton Friedman people who consider Reagan to be the marker in a major change of direction for America. America, since Reagan, has been moving towards a celebration of commerce and away from the previous direction that viewed the world as a zero sum game and tried to reallocate existing resources into a moralistic traditional value system.
I think that more people in America are approaching my views about the triumph of commerce and modernity. More people are doing so at the same time they are dropping the lingering small town moralism that Reagan carried with him.
I've also found discussions about my simple living values and the nature of commerce to be invigorating. Commerce has no particular bias toward consumption of goods (as anyone who has invested in and made money in the world of private colleges knows). Consumption of services, art and communication are just as favored by commerce as is consumption of realia.