Jeremiah Dittmar and Ralf R Meisenzahl — Origins of growth: How state institutions forged during the Protestant Reformation drove development

Throughout history, most states have functioned as kleptocracies and not as providers of public goods. This column analyses the diffusion of legal institutions that established Europe’s first large-scale experiments in mass public education. These institutions originated in Germany during the Protestant Reformation due to popular political mobilisation, but only in around half of Protestant cities. Cities that formalised these institutions grew faster over the next 200 years, both by attracting and by producing more highly skilled residents.

Raising the general level of education raises the level of collective consciousness of a group, reducing insularity and increasing appreciation of universality. Education requires freedom of thought and expression. What is needed now is a new "protestant reformation" in economics to overthrow the "priesthood" and "priestcraft" of the currently dominant ideology that fetishizes "freedom" as independence from governmental intrusion in the economy other than to provide security and enforce law, especially property rights, assuming spontaneous natural order as a secular Deism.

Project Syndicate

Origins of growth: How state institutions forged during the Protestant Reformation drove development
Jeremiah Dittmar, Professor of Economics, London School of Economics, and Ralf R Meisenzahl, Senior Economist, Federal Reserve Board