A部分

Over the last decade, a huge database about the lives of southwest German villagers between 1600 and 1900 has been compiled by a team led by Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Economics. It includes court records, guild ledgers, parish registers, village censuses, tax lists and – the most recent addition – 9,000 handwritten inventories listing over a million personal possessions belonging to ordinary women and men across three centuries. Ogilvie, who discovered the inventories in the archives of two German communities 30 years ago, believes they may hold the answer to a conundrum that has long puzzled economists: the lack of evidence for a causal link between education and a country’s economic growth.

B部分

As Ogilvie explains, ‘Education helps us to work more productively, invent better technology, and earn more … surely it must be critical for economic growth? But, if you look back through history, there’s no evidence that having a high literacy rate made a country industrialise earlier.’ Between 1600 and 1900, England had only mediocre literacy rates by European standards, yet its economy grew fast and it was the first country to industrialise. During this period, Germany and Scandinavia had excellent literacy rates, but their economies grew slowly and they industrialised late. ‘Modern cross-country analyses have also struggled to find evidence that education causes economic growth, even though there is plenty of evidence that growth increases education,’ she adds.

C部分

In the handwritten inventories that Ogilvie is analysing are the belongings of women and men at marriage, remarriage and death. From badger skins to Bibles, sewing machines to scarlet bodices – the villagers’ entire worldly goods are included. Inventories of agricultural equipment and craft tools reveal economic activities; ownership of books and education-related objects like pens and slates suggests how people learned. In addition, the tax lists included in the database record the value of farms, workshops, assets and debts; signatures and people’s estimates of their age indicate literacy and numeracy levels; and court records reveal obstacles (such as the activities of the guilds) that stifled industry.

Previous studies usually had just one way of linking education with economic growth – the presence of schools and printing presses, perhaps, or school enrolment, or the ability to sign names. According to Ogilvie, the database provides multiple indicators for the same individuals, making it possible to analyse links between literacy, numeracy, wealth, and industriousness, for individual women and men over the long term.

D部分

Ogilvie and her team have been building the vast database of material possessions on top of their full demographic reconstruction of the people who lived in these two German communities. ‘We can follow the same people – and their descendants – across 300 years of educational and economic change,’ she says. Individual lives have unfolded before their eyes. Stories like that of the 24-year-olds Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmüllerin, who were chastised in 1707 for reading books in church instead of listening to the sermon. ‘This tells us they were continuing to develop their reading skills at least a decade after leaving school,’ explains Ogilvie. The database also reveals the case of Juliana Schweickherdt, a 50-year-old spinster living in the small Black Forest community of Wildberg, who was reprimanded in 1752 by the local weavers’ guild for ‘weaving cloth and combing wool, counter to the guild ordinance’. When Juliana continued taking jobs reserved for male guild members, she was summoned before the guild court and told to pay a fine equivalent to one third of a servant’s annual wage. It was a small act of defiance by today’s standards, but it reflects a time when laws in Germany and elsewhere regulated people’s access to labour markets. The dominance of guilds not only prevented people from using their skills, but also held back even the simplest industrial innovation.

E部分

The data-gathering phase of the project has been completed and now, according to Ogilvie, it is time ‘to ask the big questions’. One way to look at whether education causes economic growth is to ‘hold wealth constant’. This involves following the lives of different people with the same level of wealth over a period of time. If wealth is constant, it is possible to discover whether education was, for example, linked to the cultivation of new crops, or to the adoption of industrial innovations like sewing machines. The team will also ask what aspect of education helped people engage more with productive and innovative activities. Was it, for instance, literacy, numeracy, book ownership, years of schooling? Was there a threshold level – a tipping point – that needed to be reached to affect economic performance?

F部分

Ogilvie hopes to start finding answers to these questions over the next few years. One thing is already clear, she says: the relationship between education and economic growth is far from straightforward. ‘German-speaking central Europe is an excellent laboratory for testing theories of economic growth,’ she explains. Between 1600 and 1900, literacy rates and book ownership were high and yet the region remained poor. It was also the case that local guilds and merchant associations were extremely powerful and legislated against anything that undermined their monopolies. In villages throughout the region, guilds blocked labour migration and resisted changes that might reduce their influence.

‘Early findings suggest that the potential benefits of education for the economy can be held back by other barriers, and this has implications for today,’ says Ogilvie. ‘Huge amounts are spent improving education in developing countries, but this spending can fail to deliver economic growth if restrictions block people – especially women and the poor – from using their education in economically productive ways. If economic institutions are poorly set up, for instance, education can’t lead to growth.’

在过去的十年里，由剑桥大学经济学院的Sheilagh Ogilvie教授带领的团队编制了一个关于1600年至1900年间德国西南村民生活的庞大数据库。它包括法院记录、行会账簿、教区注册册、村庄普查、税务清单，以及最近添加的9,000份手写清单，列出了三个世纪内普通男女拥有的一百多万个个人财产。Ogilvie教授在30年前在两个德国社区的档案中发现了这些清单，她认为它们可能揭示了一个长期困扰经济学家的难题的答案：教育与一个国家的经济增长之间缺乏因果关系的证据。

正如Ogilvie解释的那样，“教育帮助我们更有生产力地工作，发明更好的技术，并赚更多钱……它肯定对经济增长至关重要。但是，如果你回顾历史，没有证据表明高识字率使一个国家更早实现工业化。”在1600年至1900年期间，英国的识字率仅在欧洲标准下属于中等水平，但其经济增长迅速，是第一个实现工业化的国家。在这个时期，德国和斯堪的纳维亚地区的识字率很高，但他们的经济增长缓慢，工业化较晚。“现代的跨国分析也很难找到教育导致经济增长的证据，尽管有大量证据表明增长会提高教育水平，”她补充道。

Ogilvie正分析的手写清单中包含了婚姻、再婚和死亡时男女的财产。从獾皮到圣经，从缝纫机到红色胸衣——乡村居民的全部财产都被包括在内。农业设备和手工工具的清单揭示了经济活动；书籍和与教育相关的物品如笔和石板的所有权则表明了人们的学习方式。此外，数据库中包含的税务清单记录了农场、车间、资产和负债的价值；签名和人们对自己年龄的估计则表明了识字和计算能力水平；而法院记录则揭示了阻碍工业发展的障碍（如行会的活动）。

以往的研究通常只有一种将教育与经济增长联系起来的方式，例如学校和印刷机的存在，学校注册率，或者签字能力。根据Ogilvie的说法，该数据库为同一人提供了多个指标，使得可以分析识字率、计算能力、财富和勤劳程度与个体女性和男性的长期关系。

Ogilvie和她的团队在这两个德国社区的完整人口重建的基础上构建了庞大的物质财产数据库。“我们可以追踪相同的人及其后代在300年的教育和经济变化中的生活，”她说。个人的生活在他们眼前展开。比如24岁的Ana Regina和Magdalena Riethmüllerin在1707年因在教堂里读书而受到责备。“这告诉我们，她们在离开学校至少十年后仍在继续发展阅读能力，”Ogilvie解释道。该数据库还揭示了在小黑森林社区Wildberg生活的50岁未婚女子Juliana Schweickherdt的案例，她在1752年被当地织工行会指责“违反行会条例，织布和梳毛”。当Juliana继续接受为男性行会成员保留的工作时，她被传唤到行会法庭并被告知支付相当于仆人年薪三分之一的罚款。从今天的标准来看，这是一个小小的反抗，但它反映了德国和其他地方的法律对人们进入劳动力市场的限制。行会的主导地位不仅阻碍了人们运用自己的技能，也阻碍了最简单的工业创新。

该项目的数据收集阶段已经完成，现在，根据Ogilvie的说法，是“提出重大问题的时候了”。一个研究教育是否导致经济增长的方法是“保持财富不变”。这意味着在一段时间内跟踪具有相同财富水平的不同人的生活。如果财富保持不变，就有可能发现教育是否与开垦新作物或采用缝纫机等工业创新有关。该团队还将探讨教育的哪个方面帮助人们更多地参与生产和创新活动。例如，是识字率、计算能力、拥有书籍、在学校的年限？是否需要达到一个阈值，即一个影响经济绩效的临界点？

Ogilvie希望在接下来的几年里开始找到这些问题的答案。她说，已经有一件事很清楚：教育与经济增长之间的关系远非简单。“德语中欧洲是一个测试经济增长理论的优秀实验室，”她解释道。在1600年至1900年期间，识字率和书籍所有权很高，但该地区仍然贫穷。还有一种情况是，当地的行会和商会非常强大，并立法反对任何可能削弱它们垄断权益的事情。在该地区的村庄中，行会阻止劳动力迁移，并抵制可能减少其影响力的变革。

“早期的发现表明，教育对经济的潜在好处可能会被其他障碍所阻碍，这对今天有着重要意义，”Ogilvie说。“在发展中国家，花费巨大的资金来改善教育，但如果限制阻碍人们（尤其是妇女和穷人）在经济上有生产性的利用其教育，这些开支就无法带来经济增长。如果经济制度安排不当，教育就无法引领增长。”