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Ideas, Technology, and Economic Change: The Impact of the Printing Press
Abstract
The movable type printing press was the signal innovation in early modern information technology, but economists have found no evidence of its impact in measures of aggregate productivity or income per person. This paper exam-ines the technology from a new perspective by exploiting city-level data on the establishment of printing presses in 15th century Europe. I find that between 1500 and 1600, cities where printing presses were established in the late 1400s grew at least 60 percent faster than similar cities which were not early adopters. Between 1500 and 1800, print cities grew at least 25 percent faster. I show that cities that adopted printing had no prior advantage and that the association between adoption and subsequent growth was not due to printers anticipat-ing city growth or choosing auspicious locations. My findings imply that the diffusion of printing accounted for between 20 and 80 percent of city growth 1500-1600 and between 5 and 45 percent of city growth 1500-1800. They are supported by analysis using OLS, propensity scoring methods, difference-in-difference estimators, and IV regressions that exploit distance from Mainz, the birth place of printing, as an instrument for early adoption. Historical evidence confirms that the printing press greatly reduced the costs of transmitting com-plex information between cities, but was associated with localized spillovers in human capital accumulation and technological change. for discussions. The errors are mine.
... The importance of the printing press for the contemporaneous British population is quantified by [12] using welfare estimations 1 . This estimation methodology uses the techniques of neoclassical microeconomics, therefore ignores all normative aspects. ...
... A detailed description of the methodology is presented by [12] that uses utility functions with relative risk aversion to studying the effect of price changes on the consumer's decision. He analyzes net consumer surplus from two aspects using price decomposition. ...
... The calculations based on the Hicksian decomposition can be approximated using two alternative methods [12,14].This article uses the calculations based on the price index of [15] and calculates only the equivalent variation estimation. ...
In this paper, the origin and the significant development of Massive Open Online Education (MOOC) is analyzed. The MOOC-type education has only a brief history, although today it can provide degrees both on bachelor's and master's levels. The opinion of some experts is that MOOC universities belong to the Christensen-type disruptive innovation. This article compares the welfare effects of MOOC universities with that of Gutenberg's book printing. Moreover , in connection with the provision of higher education presents the financing models of the existing MOOC platforms.
... A debate ensued investigating the determinants of economic growth in the pre-modern period. A number of hypotheses emerged, with scholars first highlighting a relevant role of structural factors, such as international trade and institutional change (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2005;Allen 2003) and, more recently, the role of 'human capital' and of access to information (De Pleijt and van Zanden 2016;Dittmar 2011;Van Zanden 2009). This paper contributes to this literature by focussing on the adoption of Hindu-Arabic numerals (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) in European commercial practices. ...
The studies presented here analyze the relationship between the knowledge economy and innovations, productivity, and economic growth in the premodern period (13th-18th centuries) by considering the following questions: how was “useful knowledge” transmitted between individuals, across space, and across generations? How could commercial and industrial productivity have been associated with the expansion of such knowledge? When and where was useful knowledge concentrated in such a way that a relatively large number of innovations and inventions could cause revolutionary breakthroughs in particular sectors of the economy?
... Changes take a certain amount of time to be devised and some more time to implement and yet some more time to be fully absorbed before functioning the way as intended. For instance, although there is scientific support that the printing press led to important economic change in the centuries after its introduction, it would take time, in some places hundreds of years, before it reached its full potential ( Daly, 2021;Dittmar, 2011;Ensor, 2003). This was due to the fact that literacy was not yet sufficiently widespread in order for the printed word to impact the common man to any wider extent. ...
Are pandemics the end of cities? Or, do they present an opportunity for us to reshape cities in ways making us even more innovative, successful and sustainable? Pandemics such as COVID-19 (and comparable disruptions) have caused intense debates over the future of cities.
Through a series of investigative studies, Designing Smart and Resilient Cities for a Post-Pandemic World: Metropandemic Revolution seeks to critically discuss and compare different cases, innovations and approaches as to how cities can utilise nascent and future digital technology and/or new strategies in order to build stronger resilience to better tackle comparable large-scale pandemics and/or disruptions in the future.
The authors identify ten separate societal areas where future digital technology can impact resilience. These are discussed in individual chapters. Each chapter concludes with a set of proposed "action points" based on the conclusions of each respective study. These serve as solid policy recommendations of what courses of action to take, to help increase the resilience in smart cities for each designated area. Securing resilience and cohesion between each area will bring about the metropandemic revolution.
This book features a foreword by Nobel laureate Peter C. Doherty and an afterword by Professor of Urban Technologies, Carlo Ratti. It provides fresh and unique insights on smart cities and futures studies in a pandemic context, offers profound reflections on contemporary societal functions and the needs to build resilience and combines lessons learned from historical pandemics with possibilities offered by future technology.
... Changes take a certain amount of time to be devised and some more time to implement and yet some more time to be fully absorbed before functioning the way as intended. For instance, although there is scientific support that the printing press led to important economic change in the centuries after its introduction, it would take time, in some places hundreds of years, before it reached its full potential ( Daly, 2021;Dittmar, 2011;Ensor, 2003). This was due to the fact that literacy was not yet sufficiently widespread in order for the printed word to impact the common man to any wider extent. ...
The aim of this chapter is to explore how smart cities can leverage the benefits of digitalisation to relieve pressure on extant services and resources following a pandemic such as the COVID-19 virus. The chapter discusses some of mankind’s main drivers behind developing digital technology and the philosophical underpinnings behind the different approaches towards the development of digital technology. The chapter proceeds to discuss the impact of the digital transformation in smart cities, the implementation of “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices, and how digitalisation of cities makes it possible to conduct simulation and predictive maintenance, which in turn makes it simpler to perform daily operations. The chapter continues to discuss how digitalisation can be used in times of pandemics, in order to collect and distribute data, how digital services have emerged and what services to expect in the future. Digital twin cities serve as virtual replicas of cities. The chapter concludes by discussing their uses and how they can be used as a formidable tool in crisis management in times of pandemics and/or other comparable disasters.
... Thus, J. Dittmar notes that cities with their own ports as well as printing presses showed the greatest rate of growth relative to other cities. And if a city did not have a port, but had a printing press, the rate of growth still remained impressive (Dittmar 2011). ...
In the context of the digitalization of various spheres of human life, the digitalization of civil legal contracts occupies a special place. The monograph researches the current state and the main problems of the implementation and application of digital contracts. The author, in addition to the theoretical justification of the existence in business practice of a new form of contract, also considers the actual application of such form in classical contractual constructions, as well as in an exclusively digital environment. Special attention is paid to the special type of digital contracts – smart-contracts, as well as the newest objects of civil turnover - cryptocurrencies.
Theoretical significance of the study lies in the substantiation of the legal essence of a separate digital form of contract, as well as in the development of basic approaches to the issues of civil law regulation of contracts concluded in digital form. The conclusions of the study contain a substantiation of the theoretical foundations of the institution of digital contract, certain types of digital contracts and their elements.
... In standard urbanization models, from the pioneering studies by Lewis (1954) on urban pull factors, 1 then passing on the great classics of the subject by de Vries (1984) and Bairoch (1988), who stressed rural push factors, cities have almost always been represented as a factor of economic development in the preindustrial world. Urbanization levels and city sizes have often been used as empirical proxies for the level of income per capita (De Long and Shleifer 1993;Acemoglu et al. 2002Acemoglu et al. , 2005Malanima 2005;Maddison 2008;Dittmar 2011). ...
This paper investigates the relationships between urbanization and long-term economic growth in the pre-industrial world. To this end, we compiled a novel dataset collecting all currently available data on urban and rural populations in an Italian pre-unification state, the Republic of Genoa. Data show the paradoxical coexistence of high urbanization levels with cyclical Malthusian stagnations. Putting together empirical results and historical evidence, we interpreted this puzzle, highlighting how a high degree of urbanization could be the consequence of widespread poverty, rather than a measure of rising standards of living. To describe this phenomenon, we coined the term “Malthusian urbanization”.
... The invention of a device capable of inexpensively mass producing and spreading knowledge on a variety of subjects in faster ways than ever experienced before, leading to profound effects on society and shaping the world as we know it today, is arguably an event of great relevance to the topics discussed in this chapter (Dittmar, 2011). In 1436, a German goldsmith, Johannes Gutenberg, invented a movable version of the printing press, an innovation that became the driving force of the renaissance and prompted a scientific revolution leading to the birth of a global news network 1 akin to contemporary mainstream media, doubling literacy rates in Europe in every subsequent century and triggering the transition of civic participation from merely sharing public opinion to launching popular revolutions that disrupted monarchies and governments (Schlossberg, 2011). ...
Parliaments play a pivotal role in governance, and yet little is known about how evidence is used for decision-making in these complex, political environments. Together with its practice companion volume, African Parliaments: Systems of evidence in practice, this volume explores the multiple roles legislatures play in governance, the varied mandates and allegiances of elected representatives, and what this means for evidence use. Given the tensions in Africa around the relationships between democracy and development, government and citizen agency, this volume considers the theories around parliamentary evidence use, and interrogates what they mean in the context of African governance.
... Örneğin yazının bulunmasından sonra ikinci bilgi devrimini -M.S. 1450'li yıllarda-başlatmış olan Guteneberg'in devinebilir karakterli baskı teknolojisi bilim, eğitim, toplumsal yaşam, ekonomi ve dinler üzerinde etkilere neden olmuştur (van Zanden, 2009). Guteneberg'in geliştirdiği teknoloji, örneğin sayısal düşünme becerisi, iş eğitimi, kitap basımı, muhasebe, ekonomi (Dittmar, 2011), bilgiye erişim (Mokyr & Aghion, 2005), kitap üretimi (Baten & van Zanden, 2008) ve birlikte yürütülen entelektüel etkinlikler (Eisenstein, 1980) gibi alanlardaki gelişmelerde kritik rol oynamıştır. Briggs ve Burke'e göre (2009), devinebilir karakterli baskı teknolojisi yeni okuma türlerinin oluşmasına neden olmuştur: eleştirel okuma, tehlikeli okuma, yaratıcı okuma, kapsamlı okuma ve özel okuma. ...
Teknolojinin hem insanın atalarının hem de insanın kendisinin tarihi üzerindeki etkileri göz önünde bulundurulduğunda, teknoloji sözünün anlamının tarihsel gelişimini ve bu tarihsel süreçte teknolojinin insanla olan ilişkisini incelemek teknolojiyle ilgili daha derin bir içgörü kazanılabilmesine yardımcı olacaktır.
... A nalog versions of information filters have existed for centuries (Dittmar, 2011); examples like print, mass media, and advertisement are social artifacts that filter information within societies, affecting the economic and political order. Additionally, humans naturally parse relevant information during their daily interactions, shaping the formation of new habits and reducing other cultural traits (Ross et al., 2011). ...
Digital markets depend on recommender systems that facilitate interactions among suppliers, distributors, and consumers, ultimately increasing sales volume and allegedly increasing user utility. Beyond this operational cornerstone, recommender systems also have a passive role in how these markets organize and behave (e.g., funneling consumers into few suppliers or promoting obscure products and services that can better satisfy consumer needs). The potential effect of recommendations appears to be larger on cultural or entertainment and media industries, where a product's uncertainty is usually high. As such, cultural diversity and market concentration on content platforms (e.g., YouTube, Spotify) are susceptible to the effect of recommendation system algorithms. The study of diversity has been a focal topic for individual recommendation optimizations, but little attention has been given to aggregated measures of diversity. Previous work on this area states that collaborative-based recommender systems have an impact on sales diversity. I expand on this, presenting an agent-based model to test the impacts of recommender systems on cultural markets. The model offers a framework to estimate the effects of state-of-the-art content-based and collaborative filtering algorithms on diversity. Early results confirm previous work. Next steps include the use of machine learning algorithms, social influence, and adaptive behavior of users. Current and future work will provide useful insights for marketing modeling, content platform policy, and the use of recommenders in market design.
This paper contributes to the debate on the evolution of living standards in preindustrial England. It emphasizes the need to depart from the approach of focusing only on the time paths of observables, like income per capita and population size, in order to assess the validity of Malthusian predictions. It first constructs a Malthusian model and then develops a robust algorithm for identifying the latent forces that have shaped aggregate outcomes in the preindustrial era. The analysis suggests the existence of two distinct Malthusian regimes in preindustrial England: a survival-driven regime, where mortality is the main latent force in economic-demographic interactions, and a later technology-driven regime that emerges after the mid-fifteenth century and is characterized by both population and productivity growth but stable mortality and long-run stagnation in per capita income. The paper discusses the role of various historical accidents (e.g., the Black Death, the discovery of the New World, the English Reformation) in triggering the emergence of the technology-driven regime, and it also highlights some mediating mechanisms through which subsequent productivity growth may have been sustained. The existence of long-run stagnation in income per capita in England through the mid-seventeenth century, despite the technological dynamism of the early modern period, is consistent with the predictions of Unified Growth Theory.
Unlabelled:
We explore the role of elites for development and the spread of industrialized dairying in Denmark in the 1880s. We demonstrate that the location of early proto-modern dairies, introduced by landowning elites from northern Germany in the eighteenth century, explains the location of industrialized dairying in 1890: an increase of one standard deviation in elite influence increases industrialized dairying by 56 percent of the mean exposure in one specification. We interpret this as evidence for a spread of ideas from the elites to the peasantry, which we capture through measures of specialization in dairying and demand for education and identify a causal relationship using an instrument based on distance to the influential first mover. Finally, we demonstrate that areas with cooperatives enjoyed greater wealth by the twentieth century, and that they are today associated with other Danish cultural attributes: a belief in democracy and individualism.
Supplementary information:
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10887-023-09226-8.
Using a new dataset on city populations in colonial India, we show that the railroad network increased city size in the period 1881 to 1931. Our baseline estimation approach includes fixed effects for city and year, and we construct instrumental variables for railroad proximity based on distance from a least cost path spanning cities that existed prior to the start of railroad construction. Cities that increased market access due to the railroad grew. The small and heterogeneous effects we find are driven largely by cities that were initially small and isolated.
Historical city directories are rich sources of micro-geographic data. They provide information on the location of households and firms and their occupations and industries, respectively. We develop a generic algorithmic work flow that converts scans of them into geo- and status-referenced household-level data sets. Applying the work flow to our case study, the Berlin 1880 directory, adds idiosyncratic challenges that should make automation less attractive. Yet, employing an administrative benchmark data set on household counts, incomes, and income distributions across more than 200 census tracts, we show that semi-automatic referencing yields results very similar to those from labour-intensive manual referencing. Finally, we discuss how to scale the work flow to other years and cities as well as potential applications in economic history and beyond.
We explore how cultural traits coherent with liberal institutions affect economic performance. The matching between cultural traits and institutions is what we refer to as cultural-institutional coherence. We study how cultural-institutional coherence influenced the paths followed by Spanish regions after Spain's liberal reforms in the 19th century. We argue that these liberal reforms brought important changes to Spain's institutions and contributed to inducing a major rearrangement in the distribution of economic development across the country's regions. This process favored regions with cultural traits that were more coherent with liberal institutions. We address endogeneity issues using the disparate political paths that the regions followed in their distant pasts. We characterize political paths in terms of Municipal autonomy in the Middle Ages, as well as Constraints on the executive in the early modern period which, we argue, are good instruments for these cultural traits.
Innovation is central to long-run economic growth. This chapter summarizes the state of the literature on the economics of innovation, highlighting open policy questions. We first articulate the key market failures in markets for innovation, and then discuss how both scientific norms and market-oriented policies help overcome those market failures. We close by discussing recent work on the diffusion of inventions as well as on the links between innovation and inequality.
In recent years economic complexity has grown into an active field of fundamental and applied research. Yet, despite important advances, the policy implications of economic complexity remain unclear. Here I organize the policy implications of economic complexity in a framework grounded on 4 Ws: "what" approaches, focused on identifying target activities and/or locations; "when" approaches, focused on when to time support for developing related and unrelated activities; "where" approaches, focused on the geographic diffusion of knowledge; and "who" approaches, focused on the role played by agents of structural change. The goal of this framework is to clarify the policy implications of recent work in economic complexity and to facilitate its continued use in regional and international development efforts.
This article reviews recent literature using insights from history to answer central questions in urban economics. This area of research has seenapid growth in the past decade, thanks to new technologies that have made available increasingly rich data stretching far back in time. The focus is to review innovative methods to exploit historical information and discuss applications of these data that provide new insights into (i) the long run growth of cities or regional economies and (ii) the spatial organization of economic activities within cities. The review also surveys the growing literature outside urban economics that uses the historical urbanization as a proxy for economic growth, discusses differences between how economic historians and urban economists think about the relationship between urbanization and growth, and considers how these views might be reconciled.
From 1580, the Jesuits introduced European sciences to China―an autarkic civilization whose intelligentsia was dominated by Confucian literati. Drawing upon prefectural distributions of the Jesuits and Chinese scientific works, this paper demonstrates that the Jesuits stimulated Confucian literati to study science. On average, the literati’s scientific works increased four times in prefectures with Jesuit scientists after 1580. But this effect shrank after the Jesuits were expelled by the emperor of China in 1723. Since China’s scholar-official system remained unchanged, the literati’s scientific research aimed to serve the needs of statecraft rather than translating into economic progress.
The spatial diffusion of epidemic disease follows distance decay law in geography and social physics, but the mathematical models of distance decay depend on concrete spatio-temporal conditions. This paper is devoted to modeling spatial diffusion patterns of COVID-19 stemming from Wuhan city to Hubei province, China. The modeling approach is to integrate analytical method and experimental method. The local gravity model is derived from allometric scaling and global gravity model, and then the parameters of the local gravity model are estimated by observational data and least squares calculation. The main results are as below. The local gravity model based on power law decay can effectively describe the diffusion patterns and process of COVID-19 in Hubei Province, and the goodness of fit of the gravity model based on negative exponential decay to the observational data is not satisfactory. Further, the goodness of fit of the model to data entirely became better and better over time, the size elasticity coefficient increases first and then decreases, and the distance attenuation exponent decreases first and then increases. Moreover, the significance of spatial autoregressive coefficient in the model is low, and the confidence level is less than 80%. The conclusions can be reached as follows. (1) The spatial diffusion of COVID-19 of Hubei bears long range effect, and the size of a city and the distance of the city to Wuhan affect the total number of confirmed cases. (2) Wuhan direct transmission is the main process in the spatial diffusion of COVID-19 in Hubei at the early stage, and the horizontal transmission between regions is not significant. (3) The effect of spatial lockdown and isolation measures taken by Chinese government against the transmission of COVID-19 is obvious. This study suggests that the role of urban gravity (size and distance) should be taken into account to prevent and control epidemic disease.
In this article, I investigate the long run relationship between education, industrialisation and growth. I evaluate the impact of primary schooling on the economic development of France between the 1830s and 1914. To do so, I rely on very precise data on education at the level of municipalities. I instrument educational achievements, namely enrolment rates and schooling years, by the proximity of municipalities to printing presses established before 1500. This method returns a positive impact of an early high educational achievement on growth during the nineteenth century. This indicates a positive effect of the acquisition of basic education and elementary skills on the development of French municipalities. Therefore, the accumulation of human capital within primary schools contributed positively to growth during the nineteenth century and up to World War I, the core period of modernisation and industrialisation in France.
The telegraph was introduced to China in the late 19th century, a time when China also saw the rise of modern banks. Based on this historical context, this paper documents the importance of information technology in banking development. We construct a data set on the distributions of telegraph stations and banks across 287 prefectures between 1881 and 1936. The results show that the telegraph significantly expanded banks’ branch networks in terms of both number and geographic scope. The effect of the telegraph remains robust when we instrument it using proximity to the early military telegraph trunk.
The French Revolution substantially impacted primary schools as it suppressed one of their major funding sources, taxes collected by the clergy. Nonetheless, the geographical distribution of schools and enrollment rates remained relatively stable until late into the nineteenth century. In this article, I show that understanding the reorganization of primary schooling after the Revolution is essential in accounting for these long-lasting variations. By using data at the level of schools and an IV strategy relying on the trade cost shock caused by the Napoleonic blockade, I first show that municipalities took over the control of instruction in richer and growing areas. Secondly, I demonstrate that, by subsidizing schools, municipal authorities contributed to lower schooling fees and to increase enrollment. Finally, I show that human capital accumulation was higher in the schools provided with public grants, which influenced positively the subsequent development of municipalities. Public investment in education is therefore a key determinant of knowledge accumulation in nineteenth-century France.
We draw on theories and empirical findings from urban economics to explore and explain patterns of city growth in the Middle Ages (c. 800–1500 CE). We discuss how agricultural development and physical geography determined the location and size of cities during the medieval period. We also consider the relative importance of economies of scale, agglomeration, and human capital spillovers in medieval cities and discuss how their growth was limited by disamenities and constraints on mobility. We discuss how medieval cities responded to shocks such as the Black Death and describe how institutions became increasingly important in determining their trajectories. Avenues for future research are also laid out.
To what extent did growth during the Industrial Revolution depend on coal? We answer the question using a panel of European city sizes between 1300 and 1900. Prior to 1750 there was no relationship between proximity to coalfields and growth; after 1750 cities closer to coalfields grew substantially faster than those further away. We instrument for coal proximity using proximity to Carboniferous-era rock strata.
Contemporary concerns that social media – and its hardware accomplice the smart phone – dumb down, socially isolate and cause addiction among users have historical precedents in earlier reactions to the Internet, television, radio, and even the printed word. Automated and interpretive analyses of thousands of comments on YouTube videos of products (Study 1) and television programs (Study 2) from the past suggest a link between concerns about the negative effects of smart phones and social media and autobiographical obsolescence, a sense that the lived past is psychologically disconnected from the present and irrelevant to the future. Ironically, having nostalgia experiences on social media may provide older consumers with a psychological remedy. Viewing and commenting on video material from the past helps them verify the reality of the lived past and establish its relevance to younger generations. Suspicion of the latest disruptive communication technology (DCT) may simply be part of this broader psychological restoration process.
This article examines the long-term consequences of a historical human capital intervention. The Jesuit order founded religious missions in 1609 among the Guaraní, in modern-day Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Before their expulsion in 1767, missionaries instructed indigenous inhabitants in reading, writing, and various crafts. Using archival records, as well as data at the individual and municipal level, I show that in areas of former Jesuit presence—within the Guaraní area—educational attainment was higher and remains so (by 10%–15%) 250 years later. These educational differences have also translated into incomes that are 10% higher today. The identification of the positive effect of the Guaraní Jesuit missions emerges after comparing them with abandoned Jesuit missions and neighboring Franciscan Guaraní missions. The enduring effects observed are consistent with transmission mechanisms of structural transformation, occupational specialization, and technology adoption in agriculture.
This article shows that the intensity of violence in Rwanda’s recent past can be traced back to the initial establishment of its pre-colonial state. Villages that were brought under centralized rule one century earlier experienced a doubling of violence during the state-organized 1994 genocide. Instrumental variable estimates exploiting differences in the proximity to Nyanza—an early capital—suggest that these effects are causal. Before the genocide, when the state faced rebel attacks, with longer state presence, violence is lower. Using data from several sources, including a lab-in-the-field experiment across an abandoned historical boundary, I show that the effect of the historical state is primarily sustained by culturally transmitted norms of obedience. The persistent effect of the pre-colonial state interacts with government policy: where the state developed earlier, there is more violence when the Rwandan government mobilized for mass killing and less violence when the government pursued peace.
Metasystem transitions are events representing the evolutionary emergence of a higher level of organization through the integration of subsystems into a higher ‘metasystem’ (A1 + A2 + A3 = B). Such events have occurred several times throughout the history of life (e.g. emergence of life, multicellular life, and sexual reproduction). The emergence of qualitatively new levels of organization has occurred within the human system three times, and has resulted in three broadly defined levels of higher control, producing three broadly defined levels of group selection (e.g. band/tribe, chiefdom/kingdom, and nation-state/international). These group selection levels define the self-organization of ‘Human Metasystem Transitions’ (HMST). Throughout these HMST several common system-level patterns have manifested that are fundamental to understanding the nature and evolution of the human system, as well as our potential future development. First, HMST have been built around the control of three mostly distinct primary energy sources (e.g. hunting, agriculture, and industry). Second, the control of new energy sources has always been achieved and stabilized by utilizing the evolutionary emergence of a more powerful information-processing medium (e.g. language, writing, and printing press). Third, new controls emerge with the capability of organizing energy flows over larger expanses of space in shorter durations of time: bands/tribes controlled regional space and stabilized for hundreds of thousands of years, chiefdoms/kingdoms controlled semi-continental expanses of space and stabilized for thousands of years, and nation-states control continental expanses of space and have stabilized for centuries. This space–time component of hierarchical metasystem emergence can be conceptualized as the active compression of space–time–energy–matter (STEM compression) enabled by higher informational and energetic properties within the human system, which allow for more complex organization (i.e. higher subsystem integration). In this framework, increased information–energy control and feedback, and the consequent metasystem compression of space-time, represent the theoretical pillars of HMST theory. Most importantly, HMST theory may have practical application in modelling the future of the human system and the nature of the next human metasystem.
This paper explores the long-run effect of agricultural policies on industrialization and economic development. I analyse the differential effect of the Battle for Grain, implemented by the Italian Fascist regime to achieve self-sufficiency in wheat, on the development path across areas of Italy. Employing cross-sectional variation in land suitability for the advanced wheat production technologies, along with time variation in their diffusion, I find that the policy had unintended positive effects on industrialization and economic prosperity which persisted until today. Furthermore, I find that the complementarity between human capital and agricultural technology was a critical mechanism.
China's civil examination system (keju), an incredibly long-lived institution, has a persistent impact on human capital outcomes today. Using the variation in the density of jinshi—the highest qualification—across 278 Chinese prefectures in the Ming-Qing period (c. 1368–1905) to proxy for this effect, we find that a doubling of jinshi per 10,000 population leads to an 8.5% increase in years of schooling in 2010. The persistent effect of keju can be attributed to a multitude of channels including cultural transmission, educational infrastructure, social capital, and to a lesser extent political elites.
Many empirical questions in economics and other social sciences depend on causal effects of programs or policies. In the last two decades, much research has been done on the econometric and statistical analysis of such causal effects. This recent theoretical literature has built on, and combined features of, earlier work in both the statistics and econometrics literatures. It has by now reached a level of maturity that makes it an important tool in many areas of empirical research in economics, including labor economics, public finance, development economics, industrial organization, and other areas of empirical microeconomics. In this review, we discuss some of the recent developments. We focus primarily on practical issues for empirical researchers, as well as provide a historical overview of the area and give references to more technical research.
It has become customary among economic historians to distinguish four different sources of economic growth (see, for example, Mokyr, 1990, for an exposition). Although these sources are interconnected in many ways and usually occur simultaneously, they are separable at least in the sense that conceivably we could observe one without the others. The four “horsemen of economic growth” are the gains from trade and specialization (also known as Smithian growth after Parker, 1984), technological change, capital accumulation, and efficiency growth due to changes in the internal allocation of resources.
Renaissance boys and girls attended a variety of different kinds of pre-university schools in England, France, Italy, and Spain. Renaissance Europe inherited from the Middle Ages a large educational establishment that was not a "school system" in a modern sense. Instead, there were different kinds of schools which complemented or overlapped each other. The many and confusing names for pre-university schools, such as song school, grammar school, and collège , further confuse matters.
Social Forces 79.4 (2001) 1526-1528
Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England. By David Zaret. Princeton University Press, 2000. 279 pp. Cloth, $45.00.
David Zaret's Origins of Democratic Culture is an elegant, lucid, impeccably researched monograph that presents a cogent analysis of how a vibrant public sphere contributes to democratic practice. The role that the public sphere and civil society play in the process of democratization owes its salience to Jurgen Habermas's (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Habermas argued that the public exchange of ideas and political debate in eighteenth-century Europe helped to forge a bourgeois public sphere and a democratic culture. Scholars who embraced Habermas's ideas continued to work at the level of theory that characterized his contribution. Eventually, a postmodern critique emerged that outlined the debasement of public discourse, and hence democracy, through either a lurid commercialism or totalitarian suppression.
Zaret argues that theoretical work without historical content does little to advance our understanding of how communication figures in the democratic process. His corrective is a theoretically informed history of the development of public opinion in early modern England that focuses on the form, content, and technology of political communication. England is the standard case to which students of democratic theory turn. Prior historical accounts equate democratic culture with the origins of market society and the development of printing. The English revolution of 1640 is the pivotal date. Zaret marshals a vast array of empirical evidence to convincingly argue that the mechanisms that permitted a democratic culture to develop were in place well before the Long Parliament.
Zaret's argument baldly put is as follows. Politics and political discourse in the premodern period were not public. Norms of secrecy and privilege governed political discussion that occurred principally at the Royal Court. Relatively primitive methods to disseminate political information served to enforce secrecy norms. The one exception to this tradition was the medieval practice of political petitioning. Petitioners were exempt from secrecy norms if they followed prescribed rules of political discourse. Petitions enabled citizens or subjects at the periphery of the kingdom to petition the courts for justice in various matters.
The practice of petitioning coupled with the advent of commercial print culture was pivotal for the evolution of democratic political culture. Previous modes of communication -- letters, gossip, ballads -- were essentially private ways of conveying news. The technology of printing and its reproducibility introduced the market and commerce to conveying news and information. Printing exploded in seventeenth-century England, and because the printers were in business, they produced for Parliament as well as political dissidents. The "unintended consequence" of the technological and commercial salience of printing created what Zaret calls a "dialogic" culture, that is, a culture where persons could respond in print to items that were printed the day before (one might argue the first footnote was born in 1642!).
Restricted to the realm of news, the dialogic culture perhaps would have not made a strong impact upon political practice. However, petitioners began to imitate the dialogic culture of print by invoking the content of previous political petitions in their current petitions. Public opinion and democratic culture were the unintended consequences of the tradition of petitioning wed unexpectedly to the "dialogic" culture of printed news. Zaret's conclusion is optimistic and relevant. Commerce can create unexpected pliancy in cultural forms and serves to enrich and expand, rather than debase and contract, democratic discourse and culture.
Using archival sources dating to the fourteenth century, Zaret drives home his points with an abundance of quotes from the tracts, letters, petitions, as well as reproductions of texts and a variety of amusing anecdotes. In chapter 2, Zaret argues that historical sociologists would do well to eschew a concentration on theorizing at the expense of getting their hands dusty in archives. Zaret has more than practiced what he has preached. My one wish is that Zaret's editors had requested a chronology at the beginning of the book. The reader unfamiliar with the details of modern British history might...
We examine the relationship between urban characteristics in 1960 and urban growth between 1960 and 1990. Income and population growth move together, and both types of growth are (1) positively related to initial schooling, (2) negatively related to initial unemployment, and (3) negatively related to the initial share of employment in manufacturing. Racial composition and segregation are uncorrelated with urban growth across all cities, but in cities with large nonwhite communities segregation is positively correlated with population growth. Government expenditures (except for sanitation) are uncorrelated with growth; government debt is positively correlated with later growth.
Europe became a land of cities during the last millennium. The story told in this book begins with North Sea and Mediterranean traders sailing away from Dorestad and Amalfi, and with warrior kings building castles to fortify their conquests. It tells of the dynamism of textile towns in Flanders and Ireland. While London and Hamburg flourished by reaching out to the world and once vibrant Spanish cities slid into somnlence, a Russian urban network slowly grew to rival that of the West. Later as the tide of industrialization swept over Europe, the most intense urban striving and then settled back into the merchant cities and baroque capitals of an earlier era.
By tracing the large-scale precesses of social, economic, and political change within cities, as well as the evolving relationships between town and country and between city and city, the authors present an original synthsis of European urbanization within a global context. They divide their study into three time periods, making the early modern era much more than a mere transition from preindustrial to industrial economies. Through both general analyzes and incisive case studies, Hohenberg and Lees show how cities originated and what conditioned their early development and later growth. How did urban activity respond to demographic and techological changes? Did the social consequences of urban life begin degradation or inspire integration and cultural renewal? New analytical tools suggested by a systems view of urban relations yield a vivid dual picture of cities both as elements in a regional and national heirarchy of central places and also as junctions in a transnational network for the exchange of goods, information, and influence.
A lucid text is supplemented by numerous maps, illustrations, figures, and tables, and by substantial bibliography. Both a general and a scholarly audience will find this book engrossing reading.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Urdanization in Perspective
PART I: The Preindustrial Age: eleventh to Fourteenth Centuries
1. Structure and Functions of Medieval Towns
2. Systems of Early Cities
3. The Demography of Preindustrial Cities
PART II: The Industrial Age: Fourteenth to Eighteenth Centuries
4. Cities in the Early Modern European Economy
5. Beyond Baroque Urbanism
PART III: The Industrial Age: Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries
6. Industrial and the Cities
7. Urban Growth and Urban Systems
8. The Human Consequences of Industrial Urbanization
9. The Evolution and Control of Urban Space
10. Europe's Cities in the Twentieth Century
Appendix A: A Cyclical Model of an Economy
Appendix B: Size Distributions and the Ranks-Size Rule
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Reviews of this book:
A readable and ambitious introduction to the long history of European urbanization.
--Economic History Review
Reviews of this book:
A trailblazing history of the transformation of Europe.
--John Barkham Reviews
Reviews of this book:
A marvelously compendious account of a millennium of urban development, which accomplishes that most difficult of assignments, to design a work that will safely introduce the newcomer to the subject and at the same time stimulate professional colleagues to review positions.
--Urban Studies
Recently there has been a surge in econometric work focusing on estimating average treatment effects under various sets of assumptions. One strand of this literature has developed methods for estimating average treatment effects for a binary treatment under assumptions variously described as exogeneity, unconfoundedness, or selection on observables. The implication of these assumptions is that systematic (for example, average or distributional) differences in outcomes between treated and control units with the same values for the covariates are attributable to the treatment. Recent analysis has considered estimation and inference for average treatment effects under weaker assumptions than typical of the earlier literature by avoiding distributional and functional-form assumptions. Various methods of semiparametric estimation have been proposed, including estimating the unknown regression functions, matching, methods using the propensity score such as weighting and blocking, and combinations of these approaches. In this paper I review the state of this literature and discuss some of its unanswered questions, focusing in particular on the practical implementation of these methods, the plausibility of this exogeneity assumption in economic applications, the relative performance of the various semiparametric estimators when the key assumptions (unconfoundedness and overlap) are satisfied, alternative estimands such as quantile treatment effects, and alternate methods such as Bayesian inference. Copyright (c) 2004 President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Historians and demographers have long debated the existence, causes, and consequences of historical differences between urban and rural mortality levels. In Europe it has been usual to observe excess mortality in cities compared to the countryside, but in East Asia, by contrast, it has been found that urban areas had relatively favorable mortality environments. The debate continues because a number of pertinent questions remain to be resolved. For example, the way in which mortality is measured may influence the apparent extent of the differential, as may the way in which"urban" and"rural" are defined. Cultural factors need to be taken into account, including the practices of childrearing and the conventions surrounding baptism. Examples drawn from Japan, China, England, and France illustrate the issues involved in comparative analysis, while the urban-rural mortality continuum is examined for nineteenth-century England and Wales using log-normal distributions. Copyright 2003 by The Population Council, Inc..
The intellectual origins of the Industrial Revolution are traced back to the Baconian program of the seventeenth century, which aimed at expanding the set of useful knowledge and applying natural philosophy to solve technological problems and bring about economic growth. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment in the West carried out this program through a series of institutional developments that both increased the amount of knowledge and its accessibility to those who could make best use of it. Without the Enlightenment, therefore, an Industrial Revolution could not have transformed itself into the sustained economic growth starting in the early nineteenth century.
Die Buchdrucker des 16. und 17
- C Reske
Reske, C. (2007), Die Buchdrucker des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts im deutschen Sprachgebiet, Weisbaden; Harrassowitz Verlag.
Reading Luca Pacioli’s Summa in Catalonia
- J Docampo
Docampo, J. (2006), “Reading Luca Pacioli’s Summa in Catalonia,” Historia Mathematica, No. 33, pp. 43-62.