Solar Eclipses and the Origins of Critical Thinking and Complexity

Anastasia Litina () and Èric Roca Fernández

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Abstract This paper relates curiosity to economic development through its impact on human capital formation and technological advancement in pre-modern times. More specifically, we propose that exposure to inexplicable phenomena prompts curiosity and thinking in an attempt to comprehend these mysteries, thus raising human capital and technology, and ultimately, fostering growth. We focus on solar eclipses as one particular trigger of curiosity and empirically establish a robust relationship between their number and several proxies of economic prosperity. We also offer evidence compatible with the human capital and technological increases we postulate, finding a more intricate thinking process and more developed technology among societies more exposed to solar eclipses. Among other factors, we study the development of written language, the playing of strategy games and the accuracy of folkloric explanations for eclipses, as well as the number of tasks undertaken in a society, their relative complexity, and broad technological indicators. Lastly, we document rising curiosity both at the social and individual level: societies incorporate more terms related to curiosity and eclipses in their folklore, and people who observed a total solar eclipse during their childhood were more likely to have entered a scientific occupation.

Keywords: Eclipses; Human capital; Development; Curiosity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-12-27
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://uca.hal.science/hal-04399972v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in The Economic Journal, 2023, ⟨10.1093/ej/uead117⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: Solar Eclipses and the Origins of Critical Thinking and Complexity (2024)
Working Paper: Celestial enlightenment: eclipses, curiosity and economic development among pre-modern ethnic groups (2020)
Working Paper: The Terror of History: Solar Eclipses and the Origins of Social Complexity and Complex Thinking (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04399972

DOI: 10.1093/ej/uead117

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().