New publication | Catholic Censorship and the Demise of Knowledge Production in Early Modern Italy
Censorship hampers new ideas, affects knowledge growth, and redirects talents toward compliant activities, resulting in a 43% decrease in scholarly publication. Fabio Blasutto, Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics at SSE, and co-author publish new article in The Economic Journal.
Censorship affects the availability of new ideas and reduces non-compliant idea development. A new method is proposed to measure censorship's impact on knowledge growth, revealing that while censored authors were initially of higher quality, the censorship's intensity and the quality gap decreased over time. This informs a model that shows censorship significantly hindered knowledge diffusion and occupational choices, leading to a 43% lower average scholar publication in Italy, with compliant activities explaining half of this effect.
