Posted on 12/11/2014 4:20:39 PM PST by Enza Ferreri
Why is the West richer than other parts of the world? What creates wealth?
The scientific journal Science Nordic reports that a new PhD thesis tries to find an answer to these questions, very topical in times of bailouts and double-dip recessions and very challenging for economists, in Medieval history.
And it discovers that it was the Roman Catholic order of Cistercian Monks that left a long-lasting legacy of cultivation of the virtues which made the West prosperous.
...One of the clues the thesis follows begins in France in 1098, when a breakaway group of monks formed a new monastic order. We’ll get back to that, but first we need to delve a little deeper into the underlying factors of wealth and growth.Here, the economic literature points to three factors: institutions, culture and geography.
The idea is that some countries have established institutions that form a good breeding ground for education, savings and technological progress – or they have simply been blessed with a culture or a geography that has formed a productive environment.
“We’re still no wiser as to exactly which dimensions of culture, institutions, geography and climate are of importance here,” says Jeanet Sinding Bentzen, of the Department of Economics at the University of Copenhagen, who has just defended her PhD thesis Why are some countries richer than others?
“In my thesis, I look at some of these deep explanatory factors to see if they can help explain the differences in income.”
Economic success may be due to diligence and moderation
The German economist and sociologist Max Weber, widely considered as one of the founders of social science, highlights what he calls ‘The Protestant Ethic’ as being particularly beneficial to capitalist prosperity.
'The Protestant ethic' is basically about working hard, saving money and reinvesting the profits.
In the article "Religious Orders and Growth through Cultural Change in Pre-Industrial England", which forms part of Bentzen’s thesis, she and her research colleagues seek to examine to which degree societies with a culture of diligence and moderation were actually enjoying more economic success even before the Industrial Revolution.
Big differences in the world
Before the Industrial Revolution there were only very small differences in countries' prosperity.
But the revolution brought with it a shift to mechanised production, which resulted in great increases in productivity and efficiency.
With this revolution, it was mainly European countries that saw massive increases in their production output. Today these countries are way ahead of certain other countries in the world.
This difference in the timing of the Industrial Revolution can explain much of the difference between rich and poor countries today, the researchers believe. It is therefore interesting to study factors affecting the timing of the Industrial Revolution.
Population density is an indicator of a society's wealth
To measure a country's economic success today, economists often use the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita – the country's total production performance.
There is, however, no reliable GDP data per capita dating back to before the Industrial Revolution. For that reason, economists often use population density as a measure of a society’s prosperity.
This is because virtually all societies back then lived with an absolute minimum of economic security and survival, which meant that any additional income resulted in more survivors – which resulted in an increased population – while lower income led to fewer survivors.
“So we wanted to study to which degree countries that valued diligence and moderation also had a greater population growth,” she says.
So how do we measure such diligence and moderation?
“The proportion of Protestants in a society might be an indicator of these values, but the problem here is that it wasn’t a coincidence that some countries converted to Protestantism. It could well be that a society which for instance had higher levels of education had a greater tendency to convert to Protestantism, while at the same time achieving greater economic success, despite Protestantism.”
Cistercian monks highlighted as a good example
This prompted the researchers to go as far back as to the point that has previously been identified as a possible origin of The Protestant Ethic: when the Roman Catholic order of Cistercians was founded in France in 1098.
The order was formed by a breakaway group of Benedictines which advocated a stricter obedience to the Rule of Saint Benedict.
To allow as much time as possible for prayer, the Cistercians streamlined their work and minimised their consumption.
“Cistercians were known to be extremely diligent and frugal – the exact virtues that Weber ascribed to Protestantism,” says Bentzen. “Weber himself highlighted the Cistercians as early forerunners of the Protestant Ethic.”
The monks left fundamental values in society
Having looked at statistics covering 40 counties in England, the researchers concluded that regions with many Cistercian monasteries experienced a higher population growth in the period 1377-1801.
What’s even more striking is that the influence that monasteries had on population density was the same before and after 1600.
The fact that all monasteries were closed down during the Reformation in the year 1500 also shows that the monasteries had an influence on society several centuries after being closed down.
So it appears that it wasn’t only the monks’ excellent abilities to e.g. use watermills that have been passed on to posterity. Rather, it was something more inherent and fundamental.
“We are cementing that the monks passed on their cultural values by showing – based on the European Values Study – that European regions with several Cistercian monasteries still to this day value diligence and moderation more than other regions,” says Bentzen.
“Our study of monks shows that societies that had a culture where diligence and moderation were highly valued had an advantage when the Industrial Revolution started. All else being equal, countries with high levels of work ethic will, historically speaking, achieve greater prosperity.”
Cool.
Knowledge, pursuit of knowledge, hard work, thrift and reinvestment, long term objectives and inexpensive CARBON BASED FUELS!
Then why are all the Catholic nations in the west universally so poor?
A group of Brazillians I was with when I was there in the ‘90’s (used to spend a lot of time there, was fluent in their Portuguese) noted that nations colonized by the Catholic nations were universally poor with high levels of crime and low ethical standards whereas nations colonized by the Protestant nations were universally prosperous with markedly higher ethical standards. BTW, many of those I was with were educators, some with PhD’s. at Brazil’s 2nd largest university.
This surfaced as I was considering doing business in Brazil and the nationals were going into great detail of what I should expect as far as entering into contracts with Brazillians. One Brazillian businessman told me, “In the USA, when you enter into a contract with another party, you fully expect the other party to honor all the details of the contract. Here, you expect the other party to attempt to break every detail of the contract.” Not my words. Those of a Brazillian with very high ethical standards.
Interesting read, thanks. One would think diligence, moderation and re-investing would be self-evident. But I guess everything has to be learned and reinforced by actual practice and feedback, one step at a time.
I agree with Ian Fleming who once said that he thought a nations wealth was directly related to how hard and well they worked or words to that effect.
Catholic ping.
South American countries have endured rather a lot of fairly brutal UN, multinational and CIA tampering for a very long time. You have to take that into account in assessing their resultant cultures.
BTW, look into Chile for business.
Because there is really no such thing as a Catholic nation or a Protestant nation. We are living in the post-Christian era.
I don’t know what to make of any of it. I really don’t.
It probaby has more to do with Spanish corruption, intransgience and racism against indigenous peoples than Catholicism per se. Spain (and to a lesser degree Portugal) treated Central and South America as a limitless source of resources (mostly gold and silver) and bled it dry, and not putting a lot back in exchange. The degree to which the church aided and abetted this Is fair game, though.
CC
SO true........
Portugal decimated the native Indians in Brazil enslaving them to become walking dead in coffee plantations. They almost wiped out the natives completely.
They then began importing slaves from Africa.....Portugal then imported to Brazil, and then decimated 5 TIMES AS MANY BLACKS as the US imported! But a majority died under the brutality of the Portuguese - much worse than what the Spaniards did.
Do you know why Brazillians are a different people racially than all the others in South America? Uncovered this in an old book on the History of Brazil about 1990 in our local library: The king of Portugal and the Pope were so disturbed by the decimation of the natives of Brazil and the African slaves that they began discussing how to stop it.
They came up with a brilliant plan - that worked. And resulted in the mixed race people of Brazil that we know today. Portugal and the Catholic Church would give a huge sum of money to inter-racial marriages - Europeans, indians, blacks.....something like $100,000 today. The people of Brazil jumped on it, and intermarried. Something like 95% of all Brazillians are mixed European, black and native......unlike any other South American country.
Strangely, I have yet to meet a Brazillian who knows this historical detail. And I have a lot of Brazillian friends. They know they are mixed race, but they do not know the origins of why.
Most Brazillians are mulatto, and mixed race - and in 95% of Brazillian life there is no racism at all! But when you get to the top 5% of culture, whether it is business, government, whatever - the racism is 10 times worse than it is anywhere here.....until recently. It has lessened somewhat in the last decade or so, but is still there.
Today, in public schools in many cities, these values are considered “acting white” and discouraged.
The people doing this are not shamed by society and media.
Progress.
In 1551, Spain founded in Lima, Peru, the first University in America. Spain established public education in America 300 years before the English did it in its territories.
Culturally speaking, Spain gave the very best to America. “The Spanish record of some twenty three colleges and universities in America, graduating 150,000 (including the poor, mestizos, and some Negroes) makes, for example, the Dutch in the East Indies at a later and supposedly more enlightened times, look obscurantism indeed. The Portuguese did not establish a single university in colonial Brazil nor in any other overseas possessions. The total of universities established by Belgium, England, Germany, France and Italy during later Afro-Asian colonial periods assuredly suffers by any fair comparison with the pioneering record of Spain.” (“The Tree of Hate” Philip W. Powell, American historian and professor Emeritus of the University of California in Santa Barbara”)
"The Spanish roots of the Austrian School of Economics can be found in the Spanish Scholastics of the 16th century at the University of the City of Salamanca where economics were taught together with morals and theology, the Austrian School is a truly Spanish school. There, Jesuit father Juan de Mariana had an important role on the development of political and economic thought.”
https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=2T4NDKB_enUS0538US0540&q=fray+thomas+torquemada+by+william+thomas+walsh#q=the+austrian+school+of+economics+recognizes+that+it+has+its+roots+from+the+Spanish+Scholastics+of+the+University+os+Salamanca+on+the+XVI+century
Spanish Dominican Friar Francisco de Vitoria, great theologian, philosopher and jurist of the Sixteenth Century, founder of the tradition in philosophy known as the School of Salamanca, noted especially for his contributions to the theory of just war and international law. He has in the past been described by some scholars as the "father of modern international law". Father de Vitoria taught at universities in Paris, Valladolid and Salamanca.
http://www.ufvinternational.com/en/ufv-about-us/who-was-francisco-de-vitoria/
I once supervised a Filipino who graduated from a college in the Philippines. He told me it was founded by Portuguese before the Philippines were officially discovered by the Spanish.
According to world famous German Protestant, historian and humanist, Von Humboldt,“the parts of the New World where the slaves were best treated were precisely those under Spanish's sway. Humboldt bears constant witness to this. His figures show the huge con consumption of slaves in the French and English colonies, although they were by far the smallest in territory. Of the 70,000 slaves supplied yearly by the trade, 38,800 went to the British colonies and 20,000 to the French, leaving 11,200 for the much larger Spanish and Portuguese lands. Humboldt points out that all the Spanish colonies, not excluding the Isles of Cuba and Puerto Rico, have between them, over a surface bigger than the whole Europe, a smaller number of Black slaves than the single State of Virginia.”
According to Humboldt: “Nowhere in the world, wherever slavery is found, is manumission (liberation) as common an occurrence as in the island of Cuba because Spanish Legislation, in sharp contrast with French and English laws, is quite favorable to freedom and neither hinders it nor makes it onerous.”
Spain vaccinates the natives of America and of Philippines against the smallpox.
As American historian Dr. Philip W.Powell points out, as soon as it was available, “an enlightened Spanish government sponsored very early use of vaccination against smallpox, precisely because the disease was so dangerous to the Indian population.” Along with the gospel, the Spaniards brought the western medical knowledge to America. There was never any attempt of genocide of the Indians on behalf of the Crown, to the contrary. As historian Salvador de Madariaga indicates, “the Spanish Crown constantly reiterated its paramount interest in the natives, this has been a constant feature of the regime, even in its worst days and in the worst governed parts.”
Although discovered by Ferdinand Magellan in 1521, the Portuguese did not established a settlement In Phillipine
Spanish colonization and settlement began with the arrival of Miguel López de Legazpi’s expedition on February 13, 1565 who established the first permanent settlement of San Miguel on the island of Cebu. The expedition continued northward reaching the bay of Manila on the island of Luzon on June 24, 1571, where they established a new town and thus began an era of Spanish colonization that lasted for more than three centuries.
Yes I know the Spanish were supposedly the original European colonizers of the Philippines.
Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany and Switzerland aren’t poo. For the latter two there are more catholic Christians than non catholic Christians
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