Matt Yglesias

I am not at all clear on how people are going about calculating these things. There are obviously a lot of secondary “productivity” benefits to the printing press and the Internet.

In other words, you can’t just count the number of books produced or jobs created to make more books. You have to look at how having books, as in organized and condensed information, helped other industries increase productivity.

There must also be an issue of externalities.

The internet helps Intel and IBM and HP and such, because it adds value to having a computer. It also helps those companies because it allows them to improve internal communication and increases their access to information, making them more profitable. And so on.

I think we are talking about an econometric problem here.

It’s not that printing had either no or minimal economic impact. It’s possible that it didn’t, but I would seriously tend to doubt it. Instead, it must have had a profound long term effect on literacy and general education levels, spread out over centuries, and that in turn must have had a profound effect on economic activity.

It’s just that economists are inclined sometimes to crude, kneejerk positivism, and easily get used to thinking that the readings drawn from the few convenient orifices that exist for inserting thermometers into the body economic constitute the full measure of what is economically real or significant.

The fact that there is not a nice measurable line on monthly spreadsheets labeled, “stuff the internet caused this month” or “increase in targets due to stuff the internet caused”, allowing the world to separate out and survey the economic impacts of internet usage by time period, by company and by department, does not mean that these effects did not occur.

Doing your banking over the Internet instead of having to wait in line at the bank is economically significant. Especially if the line is really long.

I agree.

Thomas Malthus was an economist, and was writing at the end of the 1700′s.

I don’t think he is saying that mechanical looms created more productivity growth, but there was no direct evidence that books created a productivity boom because of how productivity is measured.

How about some of the obvious things: Amazon and other web-based companies, not to mention all of the web-based sales and marketing that more traditional companies now employ; not to mention the expansions in global trade catalyzed by internet connections.

Of course, there have been some serious dislocations from all this too. When I was younger, any time someone wanted to go any place they had to calla “travel agent.”.

It makes perfect sense to me. Until the last couple of centuries, the average person probably did not use–or even see–a book every day, let alone use one in their work or get educated by one. But the sewing machine took a large swath of the population and made them fantastically more efficient.

The printing press, it seems to me, was a prerequisite invention whose full effects weren’t felt for centuries after its appearance. The sewing machine, on the other hand, didn’t much affect anything but sewing; but it did that really well, really quickly.

I think I would like to agree that the productivity enhancements of many things doesn’t show up in a nice accountable first order kind of way so that we can properly attribute it.

On another note the sextant could be argued as the single most important invention on that list. Or at least as a major improvement over the previous angle taking items that allowed navigation by the sun and stars. The European continent was built on the sustained trade made possible by the navigation techniques that the sextant eventually perfected. The trade probably increased human welfare more than just about any single other invention.

I think I would like to agree that the productivity enhancements of many things doesn’t show up in a nice accountable first order kind of way so that we can properly attribute it.

On another note the sextant could be argued as the single most important invention on that list. Or at least as a major improvement over the previous angle taking items that allowed navigation by the sun and stars. The European continent was built on the sustained trade made possible by the navigation techniques that the sextant eventually perfected. The trade probably increased human welfare more than just about any single other invention.

To both of you, I guess then it depends on the time period. Are you looking at the time of invention to the present or some shorter period immediately after the invention?

Again, confusing to me.

To both of you, I guess then it depends on the time period. Are you looking at the time of invention to the present or some shorter period immediately after the invention?

Again, confusing to me.

a printing press would actually initially probably decrease employment. less need for scribes.

I don’t want to go back to the copyright discussion, but an article I linked in that thread has the argument that the greater technical knowledge sharing through books let Germany eclipse England during the Industrial revolution. The printing press made the sharing of knowledge easier and thus created a more literate and knowledgable working class. The paper specifically shows how the lack of copyright help drive down printing costs and made technical books one of the marginal benefits of that process.

Seems like some pretty strong marginal effects.

Article: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,710976,00.html

Well, I think that if you’re looking for evidence in the data, you have to look at a fairly short period of time after the invention–I mean, if movable type is invented, there’s no surge in economic activity, then the cotton gin is invented and there is a huge surge in economic activity, you’re probably looking at a cotton gin surge, not a book surge. the further out from the invention you go, the noisier the data will be.

I think the point here, really, is the the economic impact of knowledge or advancement depends on how far-reaching it is and the social structure at the time (as well as how we measure economic impact). If Isaac Newton mastered alchemy, wrote down its secrets in code, then lost the papers after his death, that enormous achievement wouldn’t change a damned thing. Right now, if the ol’ Large Hadron Collider validates the Standard Model, that’ll be a huge, huge breakthrough in our understanding of the universe that may not have any impact at all on the average person’s life for a long, long time.

I don’t think that’s fair, this is fairly simple. The printing press was invented, world GDP, living standards, mortality, and basically every other metric of well-being was stagnant for 250 years. Sewing machine is invented, all of these things explode.

We see the same thing here: Internet invented, growth in developed countries falls to the lowest level in 200 years. This is pretty robust to which measure of well-being you use.

It seems like, like the printing press, it’s going to take time for the internet to actually facilitate growth.

I don’t think that’s fair, this is fairly simple. The printing press was invented, world GDP, living standards, mortality, and basically every other metric of well-being was stagnant for 250 years. Sewing machine is invented, all of these things explode.

We see the same thing here: Internet invented, growth in developed countries falls to the lowest level in 200 years. This is pretty robust to which measure of well-being you use.

It seems like, like the printing press, it’s going to take time for the internet to actually facilitate growth.

Hm. Thanks. Need to think about it more later.

These are all nice stories. But real GDP per capita has risen by about 1% a year since 1991. I think we seriously underestimate how efficient things were pre-internet.

But how much has productivity risen? And how much of the benefit of the internet may be in human welfare that’s impossible to capture in GDP? I mean, if I use Netflix to watch movies instead of buying DVDs and spend rather less money on it, GDP goes down, but the number of films I get to watch goes up.

Sure, that’s the standard argument. But I think the extent to which this changes utility is over-stated. Hulu is better then watching TV, but in terms of the hedonic treadmill, I doubt it’s by very much for the median person. For people on the tails, the gains have been larger.

I do think Facebook and Skype will probably have larger effects on utility. If it leads to lower friction, it might eventually have a big effect on output too.

This is a question of historic scale: in the immediate aftermath of the invention of the Gutenberg press, the economic impact was certainly not huge. Obviously, if you widen your perspective to a couple centuries, you can attribute more economic impact to that particular invention.

Of course, it is worth noting that the invention of the printing press coincided with increasing urbanization, which phenomenon certainly had a significant economic impact in Europe. It is also worth noting that the printing press played a fairly critical role in the Reformation, which also seriously impacted the economy.

Generally, I think that focusing on the consumer good of “books” may be misplaced, or at least less than maximally useful. What about the economic impact of pamphlets, or, more grandly, ideas?

This is why government financed R&D is so important. Inventions can be profound in the long run that can’t possible show economic returns in the short run. Capital gains are not the only measure by which we should live. Whether or not the internet boosts economic growth according to standard measures, it’s a wonderful tool. For one thing, though it’s common to hear complaints about the quality of reading and writing on the internet, it’s not like most of the people on the web were going to buy a book anyway. I’d wager there are a lot more people reading and writing daily than there would be otherwise. Whether or not it is a tool for successful social change remains to be seen—I think it certainly contributes to polarization— but it certainly has the potential to be a tool for advancement. For personal enrichment, it’s certainly valuable. Nice to see the general public benefiting from publicly financed projects.

…or how much the internet, despite its efficiency, has also dampened productivity. After all, look at me: I’m posting here instead of doing billable work! An economic impact!

Obviously the printing press had a huge impact on human life, but as many have pointed out here the economic impact took centuries to acumulate and probably that economic impact is so interwoven within the whole economic system that it could never be accurately separated out.

But the thing is, you can never predict what impact any invention is going to have. The invention of anti-biotics lead to a huge upserge in world life expenctancy and economic development, biut it was an invention that was based on all kinds of basic science that took place over the previous 75 to 100 years.

So even if it was possible to identify and focus on inventions that lead to instant bloom in economic productivity, to do that would risk ignoring inventions that in some unknow future time-frame would be even more significant.

I’d like to second this. It’s shameful how expensive and difficult it is to get access to technical books and journals.

Re: The printing press was invented, world GDP, living standards, mortality, and basically every other metric of well-being was stagnant for 250 years.

Living standards in that era depended crucially on population size, and by the late 1400s populations were recovering from the Black Death, meaning that more people were depending or more or less the same resources– so yes, living standards sank.
However look at the other changes the printing press brought. Without it there would (arguably) have been no Reformation, the Renaissance would have been restricted to a small cadre of scholars and churchmen (as previous renaissances had been), and modern science would have languished.

Re: The printing press was invented, world GDP, living standards, mortality, and basically every other metric of well-being was stagnant for 250 years.

Living standards in that era depended crucially on population size, and by the late 1400s populations were recovering from the Black Death, meaning that more people were depending or more or less the same resources– so yes, living standards sank.
However look at the other changes the printing press brought. Without it there would (arguably) have been no Reformation, the Renaissance would have been restricted to a small cadre of scholars and churchmen (as previous renaissances had been), and modern science would have languished.

The internet has facilitated shit-canning record stores, bookstore chains, and brick-n-mortar video rental/sales. So it will likely go for bank branches, and just about any other product/service that can be digitized.

From a retail level, that seems relatively significant. The problem with Gutenberg is that his distribution channel didn’t scale, and most people couldn’t read.

The internet has facilitated shit-canning record stores, bookstore chains, and brick-n-mortar video rental/sales. So it will likely go for bank branches, and just about any other product/service that can be digitized.

From a retail level, that seems relatively significant. The problem with Gutenberg is that his distribution channel didn’t scale, and most people couldn’t read.

Yeah. I was thinking that the internet did shift a lot of spending and economic activity, which may even have somewhat of a negative impact economically in some sense.

No mass production of books, no widespread reading skills. Without the need to make reading a wide-spread skill, I doubt mass education would have ever gotten off the ground. Without most people knowing more than simple addition and subtraction…

Protestants in Amsterdam would not say that well-being was “stagnant” after the invention of the printing press. They’d say that their economic well being was drastically increased by the ability to have the only meaningful good they wanted. They would have gladly traded a bazillion shirts for one Gideon bible.

It’s incredibly bizarre to measure “well-being” by life-expectancy, mortality, or whatever the hell else you’re using. “Well-being” in economic terms is utility. If your measure doesn’t include “knowing what’s in the bible,” your measure is literally irrelevant to any European living in between 1500 and 1800..

Ug’s first word was “aggregate,” I hear.

I wonder — is the Really Smart Human Population on some kind of bell-shaped curve, time-versus-intelligence? Since these days language is used so forcefully (see, Texas School Board) to destroy wisdom and burn and bury critical thought?

How quaint. You believe in progress?

How quaint. You believe in progress?

A lot of the immediate consequences of the printing press were for improved education. Before the printing press a student wouldn’t be able to learn from books. They were too expensive. This is the whole reason that universities have the lecture system set up the way it is to this day. With the advent of the printing press, students could study from books as well as lecturers. Ultimately, it probably decreased the cost of education and efficacy of education. But that filters into macroeconomic measures very slowly. Moreover, so few people were even literate at the time,. much less receiving a university education, that it really was a niche market at first.

check out what the bicycle did for liberating poor people, women, villagers…

There is a Malthusian case to be made here. One can argue that technological improvement before the industrial revolution increased the sustainable population by an environment, but improvements in per capita productivity and standards of living were eaten up by the quickly growing population.

It took a perfect storm of extremely rapid technological growth to break us out of that Malthusian cycle. If better machines for making clothes were separated from all the other stuff that was going on at the time, it probably wouldn’t have improved per capita income either. It would just have meant more people.

> Doing your banking over the Internet instead of having
> to wait in line at the bank is economically significant.
> Especially if the line is really long.

Does that really compensate for all the work that organizations used to do for you for a modest fee which you are now expected to do yourself, over the internet, and be charged medium to large fees for the privilege?

Cranky

The primary reason why Clark’s argument doesn’t make sense is because it is wrong. Most economic research on the printing press used “national” (in scare quotes because there weren’t as many nation-states when the press was invented) or regional data to determine the effect of the printing press. But within each of those nations or regions there were cities which adopted Gutenberg’s press early and cities which did not. There is a relatively recent bit of research from Jeremiah Dittmar at American University titled “Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of the Printing Press” (forthcoming in the QJE but if you google for the title you can get a working paper). In that paper Dittmar looks at city level data and creates a sample of cities who were early adopters of the printing press versus those which were not. He finds that cities which adopted the press early experienced higher wage and population growth than those which were not early adopters. There is a large section of the paper devoted to showing that this effect is not due to selection pressure (Gutenberg choosing “winners”), but the basic thesis is relatively easy to understand.

One of the ancillary arguments in Dittmar’s paper explores the actual use of the press–rather than our image of the printing press as being used for bibles or scholarly texts he finds that a huge use of the printing press was for marginalia. Traders printed price schedules or ledgers, government officials printed tax bills, etc. People could create a bit of time sensitive information and re-print it with relative ease and this provided a strong impetus for commerce. He makes an argument for the press as a source of technological spillovers as well through this same mechanism.

Matter of fact, Dittmar is from your neck of the woods. You could probably just go over and talk to him.

Well, both the printing press and Internet did much to promote the availability of cheap porn and increased the quality of life for millions.
Poor Shakespeare and the academicians were left in the dust.

So it seems to me that the glass is half full here.

With what it’s probably best not to say.

There are books and academic journals to consult but I believe the English agricultural innovations of the period significantly reduced the prospect of the periodic famines that had occurred there and in western Europe (even if famines with political causes would continue for a long time to come).

I think it’s also the case that the old medieval economy unraveled slowly and the new merchant class – made up of old aristocrats who inherited land or didn’t inherit land because they weren’t the first born or had lost lands through various conflicts (like the War of the Roses) or bad investments or something else completely and middle class and poor people who gained access to capital – took several centuries to materialize and there was by then a good amount of pent up demand.

aw gawd I’m getting old. Old enough to remember when you didn’t get a paycheck, you got a pay envelope with cash in it. Slightly more of a PITA than a paycheck because it was actual cash including coins. Thanks… I need to go into the bank once or twice a year usually to deposit a check. Life is much easier with direct deposit, ATM cards and electronic bill pay. I still deal with a vendor who wants to be paid by check. Have to write the thing out, have to correctly transcribe my account number on to it. Have to find a stamp. Have to go to the post office. …. electronic banking is a wonderful thing.
… Cranky if your bank is charging you for electronic transactions.. find another bank.

Wait, you can go *into* a bank? Is it somewhere behind the ATM?

The way you phrase it above, you’re just incorrectly inferring causation from correlation. When the printing press was invented there wasn’t a lot of other stuff going on, when the sewing machine was invented hundreds of other things were being invented at the same time.

To say that the sewing machine had all these consequences requires either (1) attributing all of the benefits of the industrial revolution to the sewing machine or (2) separating the contribution of the sewing machine to GDP from everything else.

And this brings us back to econometrics.

If we’re looking at the internet, a lot of industries(particularly knowledge industries) have shown an increase in productivity growth lately. I’d be willing to attribute a lot of that productivity growth to advances in information technology. But, again, separating the component due to internet is a tricky econometric problem.

That is an excellent point.

The internet has had a humongous impact on political progress (or regress, depending on how you look at it). But you are absolutely right here, what we need is technological innovation in food and energy production. Allowing small communities to produce food and energy locally would be a big step, as opposed to the immense suffering that is currently caused by corporate control of these commodities.

Most people couldn’t read. I also seriously doubt that they were as cartoonishly religious as you think.

> I mean, if movable type is invented, there’s no
> surge in economic activity, then the cotton gin is
> invented and there is a huge surge in
> economic activity, you’re probably looking
> at a cotton gin surge, not a
> book surge. the further out from the invention
> you go, the noisier the data will be.

The problem there is that the cotton gin was only of large-scale benefit when the dark satanic mills were built to process its output. The mills could not have been built without the beginnings of the codification of engineering. Which codification could not have happened without the printing press to create large quantities of scientific papers, proceedings, textbooks, etc, as well as a substantial number of people who could read and do enough math to become engineers (or the engineers’ assistants). So the chain is not quite so clear.

Cranky

> I mean, if movable type is invented, there’s no
> surge in economic activity, then the cotton gin is
> invented and there is a huge surge in
> economic activity, you’re probably looking
> at a cotton gin surge, not a
> book surge. the further out from the invention
> you go, the noisier the data will be.

The problem there is that the cotton gin was only of large-scale benefit when the dark satanic mills were built to process its output. The mills could not have been built without the beginnings of the codification of engineering. Which codification could not have happened without the printing press to create large quantities of scientific papers, proceedings, textbooks, etc, as well as a substantial number of people who could read and do enough math to become engineers (or the engineers’ assistants). So the chain is not quite so clear.

Cranky

Test

It’s sorta like you have this huge boulder sitting near the base of a mountain. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors generally avoid/ignore the boulder. Then, a couple thousand years ago, the age of the great minds begins, and brilliant men seek to move the boulder — move that damn boulder to and up the mountain! But from the time of Archimedes of Syracuse to the time of Sir Isaac Newton of Woolsthorpe, the best these talented thinkers can do is to give the boulder a little nudge from time to time.

You also have to consider that for development in technology there are long lead times before much economic development comes out of it. Consider Franklin playing with kites in thunderstorms and Ampere noting compass needles moving near wires. These were big discoveries, not inventions true, but big deals to the scientific world at the time. But it was still close to a century before this could be turned into the mass production of electrical current which has been a big gain for technology and the economy.

For more of an invention, consider that Maxwell and Hertz in the late 1800′s were showing that radio signals could be used to send information from place to place via “wireless” communication. Yet we only really started to gain large economic benefits from it (outside of advertising) close to a century later.

Much the same could be said for the telephone.

This is really pretty fouled up and not really accurate regarding econometrics. The reason econometrics exists as a body of statistical procedures, tricks and kludges is that there are few convenient orifices for measuring economic impacts of interest. If those orifices were sufficient, or were regarded as sufficient by economists, “mere” statistics would be sufficient, and there’d be no need to develop the whole econometrics edifice. The role of econometrics is to try to suss out estimates of “stuff the internet caused this month” and such. (Indeed, the whole Freakonomics thing is an outgrowth of Steve Leavitt’s unusual skill at finding nifty instruments and such for getting inside of tough or uncooperative data sets.)

This background for what econometrics actually is about and where it actually came from is the context for statements like Robert Solow’s “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”

Changes in the distribution of spending and retail activity happen all the time. Economic impacts are about changing the size of the pie, not changing the slicing of the pie. Of course changes in the slicing matter a great deal for those involved in a shrinking or growing slice, but that’s not really the point here.

My understanding is that the English cribbed most of those agricultural innovations from the Dutch, but more power to ‘em, both nations were better fed than the rest of Europe from the 17th Century on. Whereas the French stuck to wheat over mixed grains and veg and kept on having famines right up through the Revolution.

I recall one of the joys of reading Swiss Family Robinson as a kid was all the wonderful things they built using the books and papers left over from the shipwreck, including boats that literally came with instructions: “insert peg A into hole B of plank C,” etc. That novel was from the 18th Century, but the principle of books of technical data, technical knowledge, and instruction started coming off the printing presses way back in the 16th Century. It wasn’t just scholars who were exchanging knowledge all over Europe, it was also engineers, craftsman, and manufacturers. Knowledge written down can be shared and knowledge written down can be studied, critiqued . . . and stolen. By anyone who can read.

Cheap books also drove up literacy rates. Even employees with little or no formal training benefit from literacy, but that effect wouldbn’t kick in until employers had a fairly reliable pool of literate employees.

Under Calvinism, being able to read the Bible and interpret it for yourself was considered essential to a person’s salvation. Calvinist countries — Holland, Scotland, Switzerland — had state- (or community) supported schools.

“The Reformation principle of sola scriptura, that the Bible contained all things necessary for salvation and could be properly interpreted by any conscientious believer, lived on and heavily influenced American culture. New England’s township-based system of primary schools was the daughter not of the Enlightenment, but of the Reformation; it had been created in colonial times to comply with the precept that all good Christians should be able to read the Bible for themselves.” –Howe, What Hath God Wrought: the Transformation of America 1815-48 (Oxford, 2009) p. 447. Literacy meant better communication and promoted better (or more rational and more stable) business practices, sanitation, etc.

Progress and regress. Two words, like north and south, that have meaning only in relation to something else.

Something was lost, in the way of depth of engagement with the text, with printing as well:
As Anthony Grafton has written:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/dec/23/jumping-through-computer-screen/
“Modern textbooks sometimes describe the monastic culture that took shape in the Latin West in the fifth century and after as a kind of mosaic-making operation, a desperate effort to preserve the fragments of a larger heritage. Monks, on this account, built a vast network of institutions simply to save and copy some of the classics, the Bible, and the works of the Fathers of the Church.
This textbook story has an element of truth. Benedictine monasteries did emphasize a distinctive approach to texts, one that might be called “slow writing and reading”—and that contrasts as sharply with contemporary practices in reading and writing as Slow Food does with McDonald’s.

The Benedictine rule allowed each monk to borrow one book a year from his monastery’s collection. This he was to read and meditate on, slowly and with concentration, in his few free hours. Public readings from the Bible and other central Christian texts, held at mealtimes, reinforced the instruction drawn from the carefully chosen Christian classics in individual cells. So, even more powerfully, did a central Benedictine task: that of copying the canon of sacred texts and their Christian commentators, precisely and accurately, on sheets of skin that would last for centuries, when bound into codices, and serve generations of Benedictine readers in their turn.

The Renaissance Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius argued, in a famous screed against the printing press, that this Benedictine way of engaging with texts was uniquely valuable because it eliminated all the slippages that can come between books and readers. Those who adopted this regime would be transformed by what they read:

‘He who copies accepted and holy texts will not be burdened by vain and pernicious thoughts, will speak no idle words, and is not bothered by wild rumors…. And as he is copying the approved texts he is gradually initiated into the divine mysteries and miraculously enlightened. Every word we write is imprinted more forcefully on our minds since we have to take our time while writing and reading. The repeated reading of Scripture will inflame the mind of the writer and carry him happily to total surrender to God.’”

More from Anthony Grafton:
“Hugh Trevor-Roper, Charles Webster, and others showed long ago that much of the scientific activity of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was actually motivated by utopian aspirations. The hope of changing the human condition for the better inspired Francis Bacon and René Descartes, as well as a host of Central European and British innovators, some of whom wound up playing major roles in the Royal Society. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the language of the Republic changed from Latin to French and its citizens began to write for a larger lay readership, the Republic remained the habitat of Bayle and Montesquieu, Beccaria and Voltaire—seekers of justice who did their best to combat social injustice and religious persecution. For all their human fallibility, no citizens of the Republic illustrate this point better than the North American ones who created the republic that we still hope we inhabit: Adams and Hamilton, Franklin and Jefferson, avid note takers and letter writers to a man.

The career of Francis Daniel Pastorius neatly reveals the complex character of the Republic of Letters: its strange, fertile combination of traditionalism and innovation, erudition and engagement. His learning did not make him a detached observer. Rather, it reinforced his belief that a scholar must judge, and try to improve, the world. In 1688 he and three Quaker friends submitted to the Burlington Yearly Meeting a document that became famous in the 1840s, as Abolitionism spread: a protest against the slave trade. Pastorius and his friends compared the slavery imposed on Africans to the religious persecution Quakers had undergone, and still underwent, in Europe. If the latter was wrong, so was the former…”

More from Anthony Grafton:
“Hugh Trevor-Roper, Charles Webster, and others showed long ago that much of the scientific activity of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was actually motivated by utopian aspirations. The hope of changing the human condition for the better inspired Francis Bacon and René Descartes, as well as a host of Central European and British innovators, some of whom wound up playing major roles in the Royal Society. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the language of the Republic changed from Latin to French and its citizens began to write for a larger lay readership, the Republic remained the habitat of Bayle and Montesquieu, Beccaria and Voltaire—seekers of justice who did their best to combat social injustice and religious persecution. For all their human fallibility, no citizens of the Republic illustrate this point better than the North American ones who created the republic that we still hope we inhabit: Adams and Hamilton, Franklin and Jefferson, avid note takers and letter writers to a man.

The career of Francis Daniel Pastorius neatly reveals the complex character of the Republic of Letters: its strange, fertile combination of traditionalism and innovation, erudition and engagement. His learning did not make him a detached observer. Rather, it reinforced his belief that a scholar must judge, and try to improve, the world. In 1688 he and three Quaker friends submitted to the Burlington Yearly Meeting a document that became famous in the 1840s, as Abolitionism spread: a protest against the slave trade. Pastorius and his friends compared the slavery imposed on Africans to the religious persecution Quakers had undergone, and still underwent, in Europe. If the latter was wrong, so was the former…”

Another critical seventeenth century invention was that of springs for carriages, which made it possible to travel by coach instead of slow and bumpy wagons and likewise made it desirable to build more roads to connect different parts of the nation state.

Another Calvinist country, Switzerland, became prosperous through banking. Rousseau remarked how well off Swiss farmers seemed while those across the border in France were starving.

Scotland, although an intellectual powerhouse, seems to have suffered economically from a lack of arable land, not to mention adverse taxation and tarriffs imposed by the English government.

Here’s a recent Krugman post on productivity issues — not really sure what the basis for your last paragraph might be. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/the-wal-mart-decade/

Scotland could have been a prosperous small country from the Reformation onward, but they screwed the pooch in the 1690s by letting their financial sector dominate the government. The bankers invested the larger part of the kingdom’s hard currency in a colonization bubble called the Darien Project. That blew up and, along with several bad harvests (that “arable land” thing), Scotland went bankrupt and it became ondon’s lackey under the 1707 Act of Union. To their credit, the lowland Scots buckled down and rebuilt themselves as an intellectual and industrial powerhouse within a century.