Max Weber’s Protestant ethic is the most famous cultural explanation in social science. Protestantism supposedly instilled a psychological orientation toward capital accumulation that launched modern capitalism.
Economist Davide Cantoni tested this with a natural experiment using the 1555 Peace of Augsburg, which assigned Protestantism or Catholicism to German cities based on their ruler’s religion. Protestant regions didn’t develop faster.
Economists Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann identified the actual mechanism that fooled Weber and others into thinking that Protestantism increased economic development. Luther promoted universal literacy so Christians could read the Bible. The economic advantage was human capital, not theology, at least in Prussia. And even the Prussian result is challenged by Kersting and coauthors, who showed that the apparent gap in Prussia disappears once you control for ethnicity. Weber confused a literacy program encouraged by a new religious belief chosen by local rulers that affected some Germans for an exogenous cultural independent variable
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