8 - When the Endogenous Becomes Exogenous

Summary

The rising price of literature after the Black Death incentivized the invention of movable-type printing. An example of technological overshooting, the printing press turned an acute shortage of literature, and of human capital, into a sudden abundance. Cheaper literature encouraged wider literacy; new grammar schools and universities further multiplied human capital. That expansion sorely threatened the earlier Latinate elite, both clerical and secular, and led directly to the Reformation. Southern Catholic Europe invoked censorship; northern Protestant Europe censored only lightly. European publishing migrated northward. The divergent responses to printing are explained by: (a) the growth of Atlantic commerce and (b) the rise in Northern Europe of absolutist states. Both commerce and state-building required, and depended on, newly abundant human capital. In northern, Protestant Europe, rapidly multiplying human capital led to prosperity and technical progress; in southern, Catholic Europe, censorship constricted human capital and imposed persistent backwardness.