Weber Revisited: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Nationalism
重新检验韦伯关于新教促进经济发展的假说，发现民族主义比宗教更能解释19世纪末普鲁士地区收入、储蓄和识字率的差异，并指出反波兰歧视可能是关键因素。
We revisit Max Weber’s hypothesis on the role of Protestantism for economic development. We show that nationalism is crucial to both, the interpretation of Weber’s Protestant Ethic and empirical tests thereof. For late nineteenth-century century Prussia we reject Weber’s suggestion that Protestantism mattered due to an “ascetic compulsion to save.” Moreover, we find that income levels, savings, and literacy rates differed between Germans and Poles, not between Protestants and Catholics, using pooled OLS and IV regressions. We suggest that this result is due to anti-Polish discrimination.