The myth of the Protestant work ethic

Max Weber was wrong - the Protestant work ethic doesn't lead to economic success. That's the claim of this beautiful paper.
Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann show that Weber was correct in the sense that, at the time he was writing, Protestantism was associated with economic success. They show that in 1871 there was a strong correlation across 453 Prussian counties between prosperity and the proportion of the population who were Protestant.
However, this correlation is wholly attributable to the fact that Protestant counties had higher literacy rates - which was, in turn, the result of Martin Luther's demand that children be educated to read the Bible themselves.
Controlling for literacy, they found, removed any link between Protestantism and prosperity. There's just no work for the Protestant work ethic to do.
Protestants were richer than Catholics because they were better educated, not because they were harder working or more frugal.
This has (at least)  implications. First, it suggests the direct contribution of culture to economic success might be over-rated. What looks like a cultural effect might instead be a contribution of human capital, with culture affecting prosperity only via  human capital.
Secondly, it's evidence that religion, even in a quite dogmatic form, can have positive benefits.
Thirdly, now that even Catholics are universally educated, the presumption that Protestantism is economically superior might be wrong.
Another thing: here's a paper which shows how its emphasis upon education affected the history of Judaism.

Comments

[John]

I thought education levels had little influence on GDP?

[AntiCitizenOne]

Why not consider that enabling people to come to their own conclusions (about the bible) unleashed a wave of innovation and a different way of thinking about the world?

This attitude is more important than what passes for education today.

[Sunny]

Whoa

[Will Davies]

If this is what the paper argues (apologies, but I haven't read it), they've misunderstood Weber quite significantly. What Weber was seeking to understand is what would drive people to accumulate capital in the first place, a question Marx didn't address directly. Or to take the question a stage further - why would people ever choose to earn more money than they spent? To which his famous answer was: because of the asceticism of protestant religion, which preached work as a higher good than pleasure.

But there's no causality at work in this. Weber was not arguing that protestantism creates growth or anything as crude as that. The title of Weber's book is The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. What Weber was seeking was some tentative account of the psychology that might drive the capitalist, and where it had emerged from. His method is not a crude x leads to y, but a more speculative one, of seeking to understand the ideas and mentalities at work in the way the modern world is produced and governed.

[Shuggy]

I'd rather agree with Will's comment above. Weber was trying to establish whether and to what extent protestantism influenced the formation of the capitalist work ethic, the essence of (which for him) lay in the idea that work *per se* was a virtue. Because this was irrational from the point of individual utility, it was this that Weber thought required special explanation. It wasn't that the idea of work as an ascetic tool didn't exist prior to the Reformation - it was just that in Catholicism, the more the spirit of asceticism gripped an individual, the further it drove them into the cloister.

I did my honours dissertation on the PE thesis, which was a mistake. The key problem is a lack of evidence, at least for the period and country I was looking at. Will is right to say that Weber aimed to produce a psychological account of the influence of Calvinistic 'salvation panic' on economic behaviour and therein lies the problem. Entrepreneurs tend not to record their religious speculations.

[a very public sociologist]

Very, very interesting. I think I'll have to read the paper myself before I fully make my mind up but thought provoking nonetheless.