ABSTRACT

Max Weber claims in his well-known book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, that the emergence of capitalism had its roots in the Protestant work ethic. Becker and Woessmann’s seminal 2009 paper finds that the more likely relationship between Protestantism and economic prosperity runs via literacy. They claim that Protestants unintendedly acquired literacy skills that functioned as human capital in the economic sphere by adhering Luther’s call to learn to read the Bible on their own. In this paper, we investigate at individual level to what extent one by reading Holy scripts acquired functional literacy skills. By using unique individual-level data from nineteenth-century Protestant Norway, we are able to identify offsprings of families known to be intensive readers of religious texts. Our results indicate that the effect of religious reading on functional literacy was restricted: religious reading gave better skills to read easily understood texts, but did not give better skills to read more advanced texts. Our results give more nuances in our understanding of what role pre-modern Nordic religious reading played in economic progress in Lutheran Nordic countries.

摘要

马克斯·韦伯（Max Weber）在他着名的《新教伦理与资本主义精神》中宣称，资本主义的出现源于新教的工作伦理。贝克尔和沃斯曼在2009年的开创性论文发现，新教与经济繁荣之间更可能的关系来自读写能力。他们声称，新教徒通过遵守路德的号召，学习自己阅读圣经，无意中获得了读写技能，这些技能在经济领域起到了人力资本的作用。在本文中，我们在个人层面调查了通过阅读圣书获得的实用读写技能的程度。通过使用来自 19 世纪新教挪威的独特的个人层面数据，我们能够识别已知是宗教文本密集阅读者的家庭的后代。我们的结果表明宗教阅读对功能性读写能力的影响是有限的：宗教阅读提供了更好的阅读容易理解的文本的技能，但没有提供更好的阅读更高级文本的技能。我们的研究结果使我们对先驱北欧宗教阅读在路德北欧国家的经济发展中所起的作用有了更细微的了解。