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How Does Scientific Progress Affect Cultural Changes? A Digital Text Analysis

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  • Michela Giorcelli
  • Nicola Lacetera
  • Astrid Marinoni

Abstract

We study the effects of scientific changes on broader cultural discourse, two phenomena that the economics literature identifies as key drivers of long-term growth, focusing on a unique episode in the history of science: the elaboration of the theory of evolution by Charles Darwin. We measure cultural discourse through the digitized text analysis of a corpus of hundreds of thousands of books as well as of Congressional and Parliamentary records for the US and the UK. We find that some concepts in Darwin’s theory, such as Evolution, Survival, Natural Selection and Competition, significantly increased their presence in the public discourse immediately after the publication of On the Origin of Species. Moreover, several words that embedded the key concepts of the theory of evolution experienced semantic and sentiment changes – further channels through which Darwin’s theory influenced the broader discourse. Our findings represent the first large-sample, systematic quantitative evidence of the relation between two key determinants of long-term economic growth, and suggest that natural language processing offers promising tools to explore this relation.

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  • Michela Giorcelli & Nicola Lacetera & Astrid Marinoni, 2019. "How Does Scientific Progress Affect Cultural Changes? A Digital Text Analysis," NBER Working Papers 25429, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:25429
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    Cited by:

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    2. Luke Barber & Michael Jetter & Tim Krieger, 2023. "Foreshadowing Mars: Religiosity and Pre-Enlightenment Warfare," CESifo Working Paper Series 10806, CESifo.
    3. Gonzalez, Felipe & Coy, Felipe & Prem, Mounu & von Dessauer, Cristine, 2022. "Uncertainty from dictatorship to democracy: Evidence from business communications," SocArXiv gz934, Center for Open Science.
    4. Kyle R. Myers & Wei Yang Tham & Jerry Thursby & Marie Thursby & Nina Cohodes & Karim Lakhani & Rachel Mural & Yilun Xu, 2023. "New Facts and Data about Professors and their Research," Papers 2312.01442, arXiv.org.

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    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • B55 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - Current Heterodox Approaches - - - Social Economics
    • C55 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Large Data Sets: Modeling and Analysis
    • N00 - Economic History - - General - - - General
    • O30 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - General
    • Z1 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics

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