Long-run Cultural Change and Economic Development: Evidence from 100 Years of Ethnographic Data in India

Introduction

Culture—a set of socially transmitted beliefs and values—is increasingly discussed as a major driver of economic development. Cultural factors such as trust of strangers and gender norms shape, and are shaped by, the nature of economic activity. Yet economic research on the relationship between culture and development has been constrained by the lack of long-run data on cultural change.

Research Agenda

My ERC CoG develops an ambitious research agenda on the two-way relationship between economic development and culture. I will create an unprecedented quantitative panel dataset describing the long-run evolution of cultural norms across India’s 4635 endogamous social groups by digitizing thousands of ethnographic reports produced by the Anthropological Survey of India between 1880 and 1990.

I will match them to modern survey data to study the relationship between group-level cultural norms and individual behavior. My research group has already assembled the inputs for this project and proven that large language models like GPT-4 can be used to extract standardized data from these ethnographies.

Outputs

This proposal builds on a research agenda and data science toolkit that I have been developing over the past fifteen years. I will generate three major sets of outputs:

1. The world’s first long-run, large-scale panel dataset on cultural change: standardized data on hundreds of norms across 4635 social groups covering 100 years. To grow the community of scholars working on culture and development, I will make the data open source and I will write a paper describing these data and the text-as-data tools I will develop.

2. Evidence on how culture shapes economic opportunity: two papers will focus on the impacts of cultural capital and cultural diversity shape opportunity, cooperation, and segregation.

3. Evidence on how economic change affects long-run cultural evolution: in the forms of urbanization and climate change, and how cultural context shapes responses to economic challenges.