题目：The Cultural Origins of the Industrial Revolution
主讲人：Joel Mokyr
Northwestern University
时间：2009年12月29日（周二）下午14:00-15:30
2:00-3:30 pm, Dec 29 (Tuesday), 2009
地点：经济学院614房间
Room 614, School of Economics
摘要：This paper tries to expand the concepts and ideas of the economics of culture, which have emerged in the past few years, to the area of long-term economic growth. Much of the research to date has concerned social behavior and beliefs about interpersonal relations, such as trust and cooperative behavior or about personal behavior such as time preference, leisure preference and investment in offspring’s human capital. In this paper I provide an operational definition of what we mean by“culture”and how to distinguish it from“institutions.”I then suggest how models from cultural evolution can be adapted to be used by economic historians and explain long-term economic development. I then make a historical argument how culture affects the accumulation of useful knowledge and through it the mainspring of long-term growth, technological progress. Culture affects useful knowledge through a number of related channels, above all by setting up new agendas for research and establishing the beliefs that scientific knowledge must serve pragmatic purposes and change material conditions. In this way the paper tries to explain the changes that occur in Western Europe between 1600 and 1800 (and before) to describe the cultural foundations of the Industrial Revolution and the onset of modern growth in Europe.
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