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

Michela Giorcelli, Nicola Lacetera and Astrid Marinoni

No 25429, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

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.

JEL-codes: B55 C55 N00 O30 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-cmp, nep-cul, nep-his, nep-pay and nep-soc
Note: DAE PR
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Published as Michela Giorcelli & Nicola Lacetera & Astrid Marinoni, 2022. "How does scientific progress affect cultural changes? A digital text analysis," Journal of Economic Growth, vol 27(3), pages 415-452.

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Journal Article: How does scientific progress affect cultural changes? A digital text analysis (2022)
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