Criticism
See also: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism#CriticismsThe economist Joseph Schumpeter argues that capitalism began in Italy in the 14th century, not in the Protestant areas of Europe. Other factors that further developed the European market economy included the strengthening of property rights and lowering of transaction costs with the decline and monetization of feudalism, and the increase in real wages following the epidemics of bubonic plague.
Becker and Wossmann at the University of Munich have written a discussion paper describing an alternate theory. The abstract to this states that the literacy gap between Protestants (as a result of the Reformation) and Catholics sufficiently explains the economic gaps, and that the: "Results hold when we exploit the initial concentric dispersion of the Reformation to use distance to Wittenberg as an instrument for Protestantism". However, they also note that, between Luther (1500) and 1871 Prussia, the limited data available has meant that the period in question is regarded as a "black box" and that only "some cursory discussion and analysis" is possible.
Read more about this topic: Protestant Work Ethic
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“A tailor can adapt to any medium, be it poetry, be it criticism. As a poet, he can mend, and with the scissors of criticism he can divide.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
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“A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”
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