I just came across a couple of interesting new working papers on the historical effects of Protestantism. The first builds on Robert Woodberry’s work on the effect of the printing press in Sub-Saharan Africa. In “The LongTerm Effects of the Printing Press in SubSaharan Africa,” Julia Cage and Valeria Rueda find “that, within regions located close to missions, proximity to a printing press significantly increases newspaper readership today” and that there is “a strong association between proximity to a printing press and contemporary economic development.”
Rossella Calvi and Federico Mantovanelli, in a paper titled “Long-Term Effects of Access to Health Care: Medical Missions in Colonial India” also find some positive long-term effects of Protestant missions, but this time in India. They show that “a 50% reduction in the distance from a historical medical facility increases current individuals’ body mass index by 0.4.” The path dependence “is not driven…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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