[LINK] "Religion and Economic Growth: Was Weber Right?"

I've recently come across a February 2001 cahier from the Département de sciences économiques of the Université de Montréal, Ulrich Blum and Leonard Dudley "Religion and Economic Growth: Was Weber Right?" (PDF format), which has an interesting new take on the thesis of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, actually examining patterns of population growth, income levels, and human capital investments across Europe.

Was Weber right? The great leap forward of northwestern Europe does not seem to be explained by the economic behavior of individual adherents to the new Protestant denominations: all other things being equal, urban economic growth seems to have been no more rapid in the north than in the south. However, other things were not equal. There is strong support for an interpretation of Weber’s hypothesis in terms of information networks. Protestant cities, but not Catholic cities, with direct access to the Atlantic were able to take advantage of advances in transportation technology that reduced the cost of ocean shipping. Protestant printing centers experienced high growth rates while heavily restricted Catholic printing centers stagnated. Above all, there emerged a hierarchy of specialization among Protestant cities based roughly on distance from London that had no equivalent in Catholic Europe. Generalized literacy along with a high propensity of Protestants to honor contracts with people they did not know personally seem to have provided the random links that converted regional economies with tenuous ties into a “small world” network.

This thesis isn't something I'm entirely unfamiliar with. The commercial success enjoyed by merchants who belonged the various nodes of the Sephardic/Marrano diaspora distributed across western and southern Europe rested substantially on the basis on shared faith, for instance, although the total population involved in these networks numbered in the tens of thousands and was united by ties of family and shared persecution in a way that's not exactly comparable to the Protestant nations of Europe. Can people with more knowledge of the early modern era judge whether or not the Blum-Dudley thesis rings true?

(As a passing note, the authors seem to identify a broad division within France, with the traditionally Francophone lands of northern France enjoying higher levels of literacy than the traditionally non-Francophone areas of France, including Brittany, the lands of the various Occitan dialects, and the Alpine zone where Franco-Provençal was spoken. There's a seed for a counterfactual scenario there, I'm sure.)

[LINK] "Alex, a Parrot Who Had a Way With Words, Dies"

From The New York Times:

He knew his colors and shapes, he learned more than 100 English words, and with his own brand of one-liners he established himself in TV shows, scientific reports, and news articles as perhaps the world’s most famous talking bird.

But last week Alex, an African Grey parrot, died, apparently of natural causes, said Dr. Irene Pepperberg, a comparative psychologist at Brandeis University and Harvard who studied and worked with the parrot for most of its life and published reports of his progress in scientific journals. The parrot was 31.

Scientists have long debated whether any other species can develop the ability to learn human language. Alex’s language facility was, in some ways, more surprising than the feats of primates that have been taught American Sign Language, like Koko the gorilla, trained by Penny Patterson at the Gorilla Foundation/Koko.org in Woodside, Calif., or Washoe the chimpanzee, studied by R. Allen and Beatrice Gardner at the University of Nevada in the 1960s and 1970s.

When, in 1977, Dr. Pepperberg, then a doctoral student in chemistry at Harvard, bought Alex from a pet store, scientists had little expectation that any bird could learn to communicate with humans. Most of the research had been done in pigeons, and was not promising.

Papperberg's research with Alex started off a whole series of investigations into the actual intelligence of birds. It turned out that birds were often quite smart, with African grey parrots like Alex being smartest of all. Alex was cited by Temple Grandin as proof of the extent to which humans underestimate the intelligence of animals. In the words of Christine Kenneally at The Huffington Post, "Alex's talents showed that the ability to understand categories like color and shape and number is not only not specific to humans, it's not special to apes, or even to mammals. Alex could use these categories to understand complicated labels, and in the larger meaning created by stringing some of these labels together, like "What color five?" His skill in comprehending and using these concepts was much greater than was once thought possible. Humans may have words for these concepts, but Alex showed that you don't have to have language as we do in order to understand them or to be able to act on that understanding." Though, as The New York Times article notes, scientists were critical of Alex's mastery of grammar and abstract concepts, his communicative abilities were clear.

Even up through last week, Alex was working with Dr. Pepperberg on compound words and hard-to-pronounce words. As she put him into his cage for the night last Thursday, Dr. Pepperberg said, Alex looked at her and said: “You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you.”

He was found dead in his cage the next morning, and was determined to have died late Thursday night.

Donations can be made to the Alex Foundation.