Weber Revisited: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Nationalism
CEPR Discussion Paper No. DP14963
48 Pages Posted: 23 Jul 2020 Last revised: 16 Aug 2020
There are 2 versions of this paper
Weber Revisited: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Nationalism
Date Written: June 2020
Abstract
We revisit Max Weber's hypothesis on the role of Protestantism for economic development. We show that nationalism is crucial to both, the interpretation of Weber's Protestant Ethic and empirical tests thereof. For late nineteenth-century Prussia we reject Weber's suggestion that Protestantism mattered due to an "ascetic compulsion to save". Moreover, we find that income levels, savings, and literacy rates differed between Germans and Poles, not between Protestants and Catholics, using pooled OLS and IV regressions. We suggest that this result is due to anti-Polish discrimination.
Keywords: Max Weber, Nationalism, Protestantism
JEL Classification: N13, N33, O16, Z12
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation