Becker & Woessmann (2009) — Was Weber Wrong?

Citation. Becker, Sascha O., and Ludger Woessmann. “Was Weber Wrong? A Human Capital Theory of Protestant Economic History.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 124(2), 2009: 531–596.

Summary

The most influential modern partial revival of the Weber thesis. Using county-level data from late-19th-century Prussia, Becker and Woessmann test whether Protestant counties had higher economic prosperity than Catholic ones, exploiting the initial concentric dispersion of the Reformation from Wittenberg as an instrumental variable for Protestantism (counties closer to Wittenberg are more Protestant for plausibly exogenous reasons related to the geography of Reformation diffusion). They find a substantial and statistically significant Protestant economic advantage in 1871 income per capita — Weber’s empirical correlation survives in this Prussian setting.

The decisive analytical move is what comes next. Becker and Woessmann show that the Protestant economic advantage is fully explained by literacy and education. Protestant insistence on personal Bible-reading produced higher literacy rates; higher literacy produced higher human capital; higher human capital produced higher prosperity. The mechanism is a human-capital channel, not the Weberian work-ethic disposition. The paper’s title — “Was Weber Wrong?” — answers itself: Weber was right about the empirical correlation between Protestantism and prosperity, and wrong about the mechanism.

The paper has been the most-cited modern engagement with the Weber thesis. Subsequent work by Edwards (2021, JAE) replicates and qualifies the findings; Cantoni (2015) provides a parallel empirical test on German city populations 1300–1900 with a null result on the basic Weber correlation, calling into question whether the Becker-Woessmann finding generalizes beyond 19th-century Prussia.

Key claims

• In 1871 Prussian counties, Protestant areas had higher per-capita income than Catholic areas, with the difference statistically significant after instrumental-variables identification.
• The Protestant economic advantage is fully accounted for by literacy and education levels — Protestants were more literate because of religious doctrine, more literate populations had higher human capital, and higher human capital drove the income difference.
• The Weberian work-ethic mechanism is not needed and is not supported by the data.
• The Weber correlation is therefore a human-capital phenomenon, integrated into the standard human-capital literature, rather than a distinctive cultural-psychological mechanism.
• This represents a partial empirical revival (Weber’s correlation survives) combined with a refutation of his proposed mechanism.