measure of economic development is growth of city size which has been
widely used as a proxy for income growth. The study finds that there were no
positive effects of Protestantism on city growth between 1300 and 1800
(Cantoni, 2010). A second study finds that there was a positive correlation
between both average per capita income tax payments and the share of the
labour force employed in manufacturing and services, and the share of
Protestants in the total population across some 420–450 counties in late nine-
teenth-century Germany (Becker and Woessman, 2009).
Openness to new ideas and innovation
It has long been argued that the set piece ‘event’ or process in Europe that
opened minds to new ideas was the Enlightenment. This was the time between
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when superstition, ignorance and reli-
gious-inspired fatalism were supposedly replaced in the minds of Europeans
by scientific attitudes,learning, and rational contemplation (see Introduction
and Chapter 7).
The impact of the Enlightenment was not uniform across Europe and in part
was a product of spreading literacy. The founder of Protestantism (Martin
Luther) favoured universal schooling and the translation of the Bible into local
languages (from Latin) to enable all Christians to read and interpret the Bible
for themselves. Countries that had remained Catholic tended to respond to the
challenge of this free(er) and more democratic thinking with repression. Spain,
for example,imposed the death penalty in 1558 for importing foreign books
without permission and banned students from foreign study except in safe
Catholic universities. In 1900 3 per cent of the population of Britain was illit-
erate,compared with 48 per cent in Italy, 50 per cent in Spain and 78 per cent
in Portugal. Religious persecution and intellectual closure was ‘a kind of orig-
inal sin, the effects of which only wore off by the twentieth century’ (Landes,
1998).
There is strong evidence that the spread of Protestantism had a causal effect
on the spread of literacy. The spread of literacy is more closely related to the
distance from Wittenburg (the home of Martin Luther and centre of
Protestantism) than it is to measures of economic and educational develop-
ment before 1517, including the placement of schools, universities, monaster-
ies, and urbanization. This is strong evidence that Protestantism was driving
literacy rather than more prosperous/educated (hence more literate) areas
being more likely to adopt the Protestant religion (Becker and Woessman,
2009).
Value of inequality versus incentives
Culture can influence political beliefs. One angle often discussed by cultural
commentators is whether people prefer a dynamic unequal society or one
where governments intervene to control inequalities even at the cost of some
Culture 257