Catholic Work Ethic

The Protestant work ethic idea may have bit the dust...

...it’s worth ploughing through as much of Cantoni’s paper as you can understand, because so many common preconceptions about thrifty Protestants and bone-idle Catholics bite the dust. He sets out to test the hypothesis that the ethos of Protestantism (whether purely doctrinal or based on distinctive commercial practices) gave an economic advantage to certain German cities. And the hypothesis flunks his test because, even when Protestant cities perform better than Catholic ones, there is a better “fit” with other variables. More important, on the whole Catholic cities developed just as successfully as their Protestant equivalents. Catholic and Protestant cities, though different in many respects, both became economically dynamic over the centuries – thanks, mostly, to the benefits associated with the emergence of the modern nation state, something that post-Counter Reformation Catholic rulers nurtured alongside their Protestant opposite numbers.