https://ourworldindata.org/literacy
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/mean-years-of-schooling-long-run
Data on literacy going back to the beginning of the Renaissance tells a very important story.
Main points:
- The United Kingdom and the Netherlands were the first countries to see a mass adoption of literacy in from 1550-1650.
- The United States had a high level of literacy from our founding. This is due to being founded by protestant refugees from Europe.
- Sweden started with almost no literacy in 1500 and exceeded the United Kingdom by 1800.
- Most people in Latin America stayed illiterate until the 20th century. We are now seeing a massive increase in their mean years of schooling, leading to economic and social development unparalleled in history.
- Literacy is essential to developing a modern economy. Literacy and education come first, then development occurs.
- Democracy and literacy are highly correlated.
Literacy expanded first in Northern Europe because of Protestantism. The initial reason was so everyone could read the Bible, but that quickly expanded to the formation of the first stock market in the Netherlands, more people being involved in the sciences, and the Age of Enlightenment, which came as a response to the Protestant Reformation’s focus on increasing literacy rates.
Even into the 20th century, literacy rates were still low outside of Protestant Europe. Literacy rates remained low in Eastern Europe until communism. Universal education was one of the few things the Soviet Union did right, implementing similar reforms to what happened in Protestant Europe centuries earlier but without economic reform. That’s how you end up with a highly educated but middle-income Eastern Europe.
India remained mostly illiterate into the 1990s, hence the poverty that India is working to eliminate.
A simplistic explanation of the United States is rich because of colonialism and exploitation does not work in close examination. The extermination of natives and enslavement of Africans happened just as much and for a longer period of time in Brazil, but Brazil is significantly less wealthy than the United States. The United States is more economically similar to Western Europe than Latin America. Expanded outside of the United States to test the theory of enslavement = wealth shows other factors are likely at play. More so, the states in the United States which kept slavery to 1865 and then Jim Crow laws up until 1968 are the poorest and least educated in the country.
Exploitation leads to poverty.
Neither does it show that being a simply resource-extractive economy will necessarily lead to wealth. Oil rents and other resource-based economies tend to be undemocratic and with an insane level of income inequality way beyond that of the United States. The wealthiest countries are built not on the exploitation of people or resources but on ideas.
Weber was correct. Protestantism led to literacy, which led to wealth.