Origins of the knowledge economy

In contemporary settings, there is broad support for the notion that education acts as an engine of economic growth. However, there is less to support this argument in historical contexts. Whereas Britain was a first-mover in terms of industrialisation, relatively low rates of literacy imply that education did not play a major role. Lars Sandberg described nineteenth-century Sweden as an ‘impoverished sophisticate’, characterised by widespread schooling but relatively low living standards.

Differences across the distribution of human capital might matter more for development than the overall stock or average levels of education. Joel Mokyr posits that the technical changes that characterised industrialisation depended more on the capabilities of a specialised elite than the skill level of the population at large. This upper-tail human capital was instrumental for the development and dissemination of new ideas, techniques and products.

My dissertation is a study of higher education — upper secondary and tertiary levels of education — as a channel for the accumulation of upper-tail human capital. Denmark, Norway and Sweden provide rich case studies for examining the growth of higher education during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Already by 1800, the three Scandinavian countries were relative front-runners in access to basic education, with higher literacy rates than in most other countries. But very few continued on to high school and beyond. Only by the late nineteenth century did enrolment rates in higher education begin to increase markedly.

I examine higher education through two lenses: To what extent did changes in the provision of higher education increase access to education beyond a small elite in society? How did changes in the provision of and access to higher education influence Scandinavia’s development in the lead-up to and during industrialisation? The changes in the provision of higher education include:

• the admission of female students
• the opening of Norway’s first university
• the introduction and expansion of polytechnic education
• the growth in demand for highly trained engineers.

I employ two sets of novel source material from Scandinavia, which directly observe who pursued higher education. The first set comprises student enrolment records and grade lists from Denmark and Norway, which provide a comprehensive basis for examining high school education and academic performance. The second set are graduate biographies from Denmark and Sweden, which capture the universe of graduates from two polytechnic institutes and report their employment outcomes. These sources have been transcribed using a combination of machine learning techniques and artificial intelligence (AI) tools — accompanied by a considerable amount of manual checks and quality control.

My dissertation comprises four quantitative, empirical analyses of higher educational attainment and its effects. Also related (but outside the scope of the dissertation) are two additional papers documenting the source material I use are. Taken together, my results offer new insights into social mobility and economic development during a critical period of history.

Timeframe:
September 2020 – October 2024

Defence:
January 2025

Supervisors:

• Kristin Ranestad (primary)
• Paul Sharp
• Jonas Ljungberg