Economic historians have long placed culture at the centre of the rise of the West, but have lacked a measure of culture spanning the emergence of modern growth. Using 23,064 historical books, this column constructs an ‘innovation wedge’ that separates the values texts endorse from the social arrangements they merely depict. The wedge falls by 51% between 1000 and 1920. In a calibrated growth model, that decline accounts for about two-thirds of the first sustained acceleration in productivity growth between 1500 and 1700.



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