Jean-Pascal Bassino, Ting Chen, Vojtěch Kaše, @yuzurukumon.bsky.social , Ian Morris, Masaki Nakabayashi, Maya Shatzmiller, Ting Xu, Kaveh Yazdani, Valentin Thouzeau, Nicolas Baumard
thanks to all my co-authors: @mikekestemont.bsky.social, @folgertk.bsky.social @coraliechevallier.bsky.social, Kyle Harper, Elise Huillery, @markkoyama.bsky.social , @jvoth.bsky.social , Jutta Bolt, Jan Luiten van Zanden
This perspective complements, rather than replaces, economic indicators. It provides a way to study development where conventional data are missing.
And it highlights the importance of education, institutions, and cumulative knowledge.
Overall, our results suggest that sustained human development did not begin suddenly in the 19th century. Instead, it emerged earlier and gradually, across several civilizations, over many centuries. Industrialization appears as a late acceleration of longer processes.
In Antiquity, we observe peaks in Classical Greece and Rome. These episodes were significant but not sustained. Long-term growth appears later, during the medieval and early modern periods.
For example, in China, we can track development over more than 1,500 years. We identify multiple phases of expansion, including a period of strong late-imperial growth. These patterns are largely invisible in GDP-based accounts.
We then reconstruct long-term trajectories across regions.
We observe sustained growth well before industrialization in:
– Europe
– China
– Japan
– the Islamic world
– the Indian world
We then test whether this indicator tracks known dimensions of development.
Cultural production correlates positively with:
– GDP per capita
– life expectancy
– literacy
– numeracy
– homicide rates
– infant mortality
And correlations improve after correction.
This correction accounts for differences across periods, regions, and cultural product types (paintings, books, music, etc.) and helps reduce survivorship bias in historical archives.
To address this, we borrowed methods from ecology: in biodiversity research, scientists estimate how many species have never been observed. We adapt these “unseen species” models to cultural data, which allows us to estimate how many cultural producers are missing from the records.
A major difficulty is that most historical creators are forgotten, manuscripts disappear, archives are lost and works decay. Raw counts, therefore, underestimate past cultural activity.
We built a global dataset of more than 120,000 cultural producers, drawing on over 1,300 catalogs from 70 countries. These include national libraries, authority files, and international databases. This allows us to track long-term patterns across regions and centuries.
When more people can meet these conditions, more people can participate in cultural life. So changes in cultural production partly reflect how widely societies make learning and creative work possible. In this sense, cultural production can serve as an indirect indicator of human development.
Producing a book, a scientific text, or a work of art is not only a matter of talent. It usually requires:
– basic literacy
– time outside subsistence work
– minimum material security
– institutional support
These conditions tend to improve when education, health, and social infrastructure improve.
We explore a complementary approach. Instead of focusing only on economic output, we examine the number of people who were able to produce scientific, literary, or artistic works. We call this "Cultural Production".
Most long-run studies rely on GDP per capita. But historically, GDP faces major limitations: sparse sources, strong reconstruction assumptions, and uneven regional coverage. As a result, large parts of global history remain poorly measured.
Chinese world culltural trend
How can we study human development over two thousand years?
For most periods and regions, we lack reliable data on income, health, or education. Before 1800, and outside Europe, historical records are extremely fragmentary.
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