Culture Matters

This is an excellent essay! However, in referring to the Protestant impact on economic development, I wish Harrison had referred to The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe by Philip S. Gorski. I think Gorski does a better job of explaining Protestantism's impact better than Weber, but I think he gives credit to the wrong group of Protestants. I believe Israel, in his histories of the Dutch Republic, demonstrates that the Calvinists would have retarded development, as they did in Scotland and in Switzerland under Calvin. In the Dutch Republic, it was the Erasmian Protestants, such as Grotius, who were later called Remonstrants, who created the institutions that powered the Dutch economic "miracle".

Sounds to me like this might be relevant to immigration policy.