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Human Capital and Religion in Historical Perspective

Paper Session

Friday, Jan. 3, 2025 12:30 PM - 2:15 PM (PST)

Hilton San Francisco Union Square, Union Square 6
Hosted By: Cliometric Society
  • Chair: Jared Rubin, Chapman University

The Counter-Reformation, Science, and Long-Term Growth: A Black Legend?

Matias Cabello
,
Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg

Abstract

Is it true that the Catholic reaction to Protestantism—the Counter-Reformation—led to scientific and economic decline for hundreds of years? Introducing biography-based evidence, I show that Catholic and Protestant European cities long shared comparable trends of scientists per capita. But after imposing intellectual control in response to the Reformation, Catholics experienced a dramatic scientific collapse coinciding with the Counter-Reformation 's different timing and intensity across cities. Reassuringly, science began to recover after the Counter-Reformation was dismantled, but the recovery stagnated when Counter-Reformation-rooted institutions were revived centuries later against new ideological threats. Although it has largely vanished by now, the gap in science that emerged during the Counter-Reformation was enormous, lasted centuries, and helps explaining Europe 's unequal modern economic growth. Protestants also tried to impose their own bigotry but lacked sufficient coordination and authority. Had they been more effective, modern science and sustained economic growth might have never taken off.

Religiosity and the Effects of Secularization Policy: Evidence from a Quasi-Natural Experiment in Nineteenth Century France

Joanna Williams
,
University of California-Irvine

Abstract

This project examines how religiosity affects a community 's response to education secularization policies. I utilize a quasi-natural experiment from France, where the Jules Ferry laws of 1881-1882 required public schooling to be secular (deviating from an earlier system where religious schools were partly funded by the state). I estimate how the pre-existing size of clergy (a measure of religiosity) differentially affected school provision outcomes in French departments after 1882. I construct a data set with measures of education and religiosity by department. Education data comes from the annual statistics of France and includes measures of the number of schools, number of teachers, enrollment, literacy rates, local versus central funding, and teacher certification. Data on religion comes from the annual statistics of France as well as archival data I collected and am digitizing from the national archives of France. This includes measures of clergy employment, the number of teachers and students in seminaries, and number of ordinations. I employ a continuous difference-in-differences approach using data from 1850 to 1899. Results will capture departmental variation in the relationship between an area 's religiosity and compliance to national secularization policy, which can tell us how cultural values influence state capacity in terms of the state 's ability to implement potentially unpopular laws. Additionally, the analysis will indicate substitution effects from public to private education, changes in public funding structure, and local religious preferences in the early part of the French Third Republic.

“For The Benefit of the Church and the State”. School Supply and Demand in an Early Modern Proto-Industrial Area in Switzerland

Gabriela Wuethrich
,
University of Zurich

Abstract

Along with enlightenment debates, elementary education became a major concern in the proto-industrializing areas in Switzerland already after 1750. One of the key topics was agricultural reform, especially after a 1770/71 hunger crisis had revealed the deficiencies of local production in the increasingly proto-industrial economy. In this context, the Natural Sciences Society inquired into the state of agricultural production on the countryside, while the Zurich church authorities carried out a survey among their parsons to evaluate «the state of education» at the same time. Soon after, a revised school ordinance expanded school time and demanded stricter attendance.
The effects of these efforts to implement mass education as a means to improve productivity can be quantified 30 years later, when the short-lived Helvetic Republic again surveyed education and land-use. By 1799, both school time and attendance had indeed increased, as had the probability that schools offered maths in the standard curriculum. Interestingly, the communes where schooling had intensified more had also significantly changed their agricultural structure. The setting of an early-modern proto-industrial economy thus provides an interesting example for the effects of education on structural change (or vice versa).
JEL Classifications
  • N1 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Industrial Structure; Growth; Fluctuations
  • N3 - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy