Some key paragraphs from the paper "Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of the Printing Press" by American University professor Jeremiah Dittmar:
"The first printing press was accomplished around 1450 in Mainz, Germany (see graph above on left). Contemporaries saw the technology ushering in dramatic changes in the way knowledge was stored and exchanged.
Printing was from the beginning a for-profit enterprise. But what was the economical shock of this rotation in information technology? By threatening the price of disseminating ideas, did the detonation of print media erode the grandness of location?
I discover that cities in which printing presses were established 1450-1500 had no prior growth advantage, but later grew far quicker than similar cities without printing presses. My work uses a difference-in-differences estimation strategy to document the connection between printing and city growth. The estimates suggest early acceptance of the printing press was associated with a population growth advantage of 21 percentage points 1500-1600, when mean city development was 30 percentage points. The difference-in-differences model shows that cities that adopted the printing press in the late 1400s had no prior growth advantage, but grew at least 35 percentage points more than similar non-adopting cities from 1500 to 1600.
Cities that adopted print media benefitted from positive spillovers in human capital accumulation and technical change broadly defined. These spillovers exerted an upward force on the returns to labour, made cities culturally dynamic, and attracted migrants.
The printing press was one of the greatest revolutions in information technology. The touch of the printing press is tough to place in aggregate data. However, the dissemination of the technology was associated with extraordinary subsequent economic dynamism at the city level. European cities were seedbeds of ideas and business practices that swarm the passage to modern growth. These facts indicate that the printing press had very far-reaching consequences through its encroachment on the growth of cities."
MP: It`s estimated that the design of the printing press started Information Age 1.0 by threatening the price of processing, copying and disseminating information by some 1,000 times. The commercial introduction of the chip in 1971 was the design that launched Information Age 2. and it`s estimated that the microchip lowered the price of entropy by around 10 million times. And today`s microchips are nearly 30,000 times quicker than the 1971 version.
HT: Paul Kedrosky