The Welfare Impact of a New Good: The Printed Book

Gutenberg’s printing press was the great revolution in Renaissance information technology. Economists have struggled to identify its impact in data on productivity, output, or wages. This paper documents the welfare impact of the technology by exploiting data on the price and consumption of books in England between the late 1400s and 1700. I find that the welfare impact of the printed book was equivalent to 3%-7% of income by the 1630s using a calibration strategy and aggregate data. These estimates exceed similarly measured welfare effects so far associated with the personal computer. Increases in consumer variety delivered further welfare benefits and are identified in a sample of 16,000 transcribed books using Bayesian topic models. The welfare impacts of print media may explain why significant investments in human capital accumulation were undertaken before the emergence of corresponding wage premia for literacy and education.