Does education fuel economic growth?
A
AProfessor Liesl Marogg, an economic historian at the University of Basel, has spent much of the past decade assembling a vast database documenting the lives of villagers in the Swiss canton of Graubünden between 1620 and 1880. The team she leads has drawn together parish registers, guild ledgers, tax rolls, village censuses and court records, and lately some 7,000 handwritten inventories cataloguing more than 800,000 personal belongings owned by ordinary men and women across nearly three centuries. It was Marogg who, over two decades ago, came upon these inventories in the parish archives of two Alpine communities, and she is convinced they may settle a question that has long baffled economists - why so little evidence exists that education actually causes a nation's economy to grow.
B
B'Education makes us more productive, helps us design better tools and lets us earn more,' Marogg observes, 'so surely it must be vital to economic growth? And yet, looking back over history, we find no sign that a highly literate population caused a country to industrialise any sooner.' England, she points out, had no more than average literacy by the European standards of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, and yet it industrialised before anyone else and its economy expanded quickly. The German-speaking lands and Scandinavia, by contrast, enjoyed some of the finest literacy rates on the continent throughout those years, and still their economies crept forward slowly and industrialisation came to them late. 'Even present-day studies that compare many countries have struggled to show that education produces growth,' she adds, 'though there is no shortage of evidence for the opposite - that growth pushes up levels of education.'
C
CThe inventories record everything people owned at the great turning points of marriage, remarriage and death, preserving the villagers' entire material world - from goatskins and prayer books to copper pans and embroidered waistcoats. Farming gear and workshop tools show how a household made its living, while books and writing equipment such as quills and slates hint at how its members came by their learning. The tax rolls, for their part, set a value on farms, workshops, holdings and debts; the way people signed their names, or could not, together with the ages they claimed for themselves, reveals how far they could read, write and reckon; and the court records lay bare the obstacles - the doings of the guilds above all - that held manufacturing back. Earlier studies had usually leaned on a single measure to connect education with economic growth: the number of schools and printing presses, perhaps, or school enrolment, or the share who could sign their name. Marogg's database instead supplies many such measures for the very same individuals, so that literacy, numeracy, wealth and industriousness can be traced together, person by person, over the long run.
D
DOn top of a full demographic reconstruction of everyone who lived in the two communities, Marogg and her colleagues have built this immense record of possessions. 'We can follow the very same people - and the offspring who came after them - right across three hundred years of educational and economic change,' she says. Whole lives have risen up out of the documents. Take the cousins Barbla and Ursina Cadonau, both twenty-two, who in 1698 were scolded for poring over printed books in church instead of attending to the preacher. 'That tells us they were still sharpening their reading a good decade after their schooldays had ended,' Marogg says. Or take Anna Barbla Tscharner, a forty-eight-year-old unmarried woman from the mountain village of Tarnau, whom the linen-weavers' guild reprimanded in 1738 for spinning and finishing cloth against its statutes. When she went on taking work reserved for the guild's male members, she was summoned before the guild court and ordered to pay a penalty worth a third of a maidservant's yearly wage. By today's standards it was a slight act of defiance, yet it belongs to an age when statutes in the German-speaking lands and elsewhere governed who could enter the labour market. The guilds' hold did more than keep people from using their skills; by barring outsiders from each trade, it smothered even the simplest industrial innovation.
E
ENow that the gathering of data is over, Marogg says the time has come 'to put the big questions'. One way to test whether education drives economic growth is to 'hold wealth constant' - to track, across the years, a set of people who all own the same amount. Where wealth stays put, one can begin to see whether education went together with, say, planting new crops or taking up labour-saving machines like the mechanical loom. The team also means to ask which part of education it was that pulled people toward more productive and inventive work - was it reading, arithmetic, the owning of books, the years spent in school? And was there a threshold, a tipping point, that had to be reached before education made any difference to economic performance?
F
F'German-speaking central Europe,' Marogg explains, 'makes a superb laboratory for testing theories of economic growth.' All through the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries its people read widely and owned no shortage of books, and still the region remained poor. Its guilds and merchant associations, moreover, held enormous power and legislated against anything that might chip away at their monopolies; throughout the region they blocked the movement of workers from place to place and beat back any change that might loosen their grip. 'What is starting to come clear,' she says, 'is that other barriers can hold back whatever good education might do an economy - and that has a lesson for the present. Enormous sums go into better schooling in the developing world, yet the spending may yield no growth if restrictions stop people - women and the poor above all - from turning their education to productive use. Where economic institutions are badly built, education cannot lead to growth.'
G
G* guilds: associations of craftspeople or merchants that controlled the practice of a trade in a town or region
Kéo chỉnh
Question 1 - 5
Which section contains the following information?
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
1.
a claim that the earliest nation to undergo industrialisation was not especially literate
2.
a list of the different kinds of historical records that were combined to build the database
3.
mention of a possible minimum level of education needed before it can affect an economy
4.
a description of how a guild punished someone who had broken its rules
5.
a warning that money spent on education may not produce growth where other obstacles remain