Working Paper: NBER ID: w25429
Authors: 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.
Keywords: scientific progress; cultural change; Darwin; text analysis; natural language processing
JEL Codes: B55; C55; N00; O30; Z1
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Publication of 'On the Origin of Species' (Y30) | Increase in frequency of Darwin's concepts in public discourse (E32) |
| Increase in frequency of Darwin's concepts in public discourse (E32) | Semantic changes in associated terms (Y80) |
| Darwin's theory (O40) | Changes in meanings and attitudes associated with terms (O33) |
| Darwin's theory (O40) | Broader societal impact (O35) |
| Diffusion of Darwinian concepts (B15) | Influence on cultural discussions in non-English speaking countries (F69) |