The Printing Press - How Long Was the Adjustment — reading pack

Page: https://gautsch.org/research/the-printing-press-how-long-was-the-adjustment/

How to use this pack

Help the reader explore this rabbit hole. Start by asking what caught their attention, then discuss one question at a time. Explore the strongest counterargument and what remains uncertain. Distinguish the original speakers’ claims, Adam’s question, the site’s research commentary, and your own interpretation. Do not treat the commentary as a transcript or assume Adam endorses every claim. Preserve corrections and uncertainty; do not invent sources or pretend to have opened links.

This pack contains the page’s current research text, references and figure text. Related rabbit holes are linked, not included. It is a reading companion, not an independently verified source.

The short version

Adam read the exchange correctly: Acemoglu concedes the printing press had a violent adjustment period and says it is over. How long it took depends on where you start and stop the clock — about 130 years from Luther to Westphalia, about 245 from Gutenberg to the end of English licensing, longer on other endpoints — and those years overlap the deadliest religious wars in European history, though a timeline cannot say how much of that violence print caused. What the timeline does show is that the settlement ran through institutions, and in both directions: censorship and licensing, then the end of licensing, then copyright, libel law and constitutional protection. So “we adjusted” is a weak argument for leaving social media alone, and just as weak for any one kind of regulation. It also cannot tell us how long social media’s adjustment will take.

Relevant transcript excerpt

Source: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/daron-acemoglu-2/

Annotated transcript: https://gautsch.org/research/#a14

ACEMOGLU: Now, perhaps in 10 years’ time, our education system, not by the way so optimistic about our education system, that’s a different conversation, but it’s possible that our education systems, our social norms will evolve such that we are well adapted to those algorithms. Perhaps at that point, I could have a different view. Right now, I find the ability of these very powerful companies to exploit the free speech of other people potentially very damaging to mental health, to people’s daily social activities, and to political discourse.

Research commentary

Adam asked: “I’d love a rabbit hole giving me a timeline around the printing press adoption and how long it took to normalize the technology… How long do we believe that to have been before the adjustment was over? Do we believe that adjustment is going to be faster or slower for social media? Was the printing press adjustment more or less negative than social media?”

The timeline

Europe, then Britain & the United States · c. 1450–1791

A press arrives.A settlement takes centuries.

How long did adjustment take? It depends on when you start the clock—and what counts as the end.

Three ways to count

From Gutenberg to Westphalia ≈198 years

1450–1648 · A political settlement: the Thirty Years’ War ends.

From Gutenberg to the end of English licensing ≈245 years

1450–1695 · A change in press control, in one country.

From Luther to Westphalia ≈131 years

1517–1648 · The shorter clock starts with the Reformation.

Bar lengths compare elapsed years on the same scale. These are interpretations, not a measured date when society “finished” adjusting.

The milestones · chronological, not to scale

01 Print spreads c. 1450–1517

• c. 1450 Gutenberg’s press, Mainz The starting point here is movable-type printing in Europe.

• 1450–1500 The incunabula period Printing spreads across Europe during the first half-century.

• 1455 The Gutenberg Bible A landmark of the new printing process.

• 1517 Luther’s 95 Theses Print becomes a vehicle for religious controversy. This is the alternative start of the adjustment clock.

02 Conflict and control 1524–1648

• 1524–1525 German Peasants’ War Religious and political upheaval turns violent.

• 1545–1563 Council of Trent The Catholic Church organizes its response to the Reformation.

• 1559 Index of Prohibited Books Formal Catholic censorship attempts to control what circulates.

• 1562–1598 French Wars of Religion Decades of conflict; the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre follows in 1572.

• 1618–1648 Thirty Years’ War The long conflict that makes 1648 one possible endpoint.

03 Settlements, not a finish line 1648–1791

• 1648 Peace of Westphalia Ends the Thirty Years’ War. A political settlement, not the end of every religious conflict.

• 1662 English Licensing Act Pre-publication licensing regulates the English press.

• 1695 English licensing lapses The licensing system expires — a liberalization; other restrictions on publication remain.

• 1710 Statute of Anne Britain establishes statutory copyright with limited terms.

• 1791 First Amendment The United States gives freedom of the press constitutional protection.

The useful comparison: adoption and institutional adjustment run on different clocks. These milestones do not show that print alone caused the wars—or predict how long social media’s adjustment will take. Based on this page’s reading list. Endpoint references: Westphalia, English licensing, Statute of Anne.

So how long?

There are three defensible endpoints, and the choice of endpoint is the argument:

Even the shortest of these clocks runs over a century. But they are endpoints for different questions — the end of confessional war on the Continent, the end of pre-publication licensing in one country — not measurements of a single process finishing. Acemoglu’s own example of a settled state — “think of American society or European society or even India or Latin America in the 1980s… human community was very well adjusted” — tells you when he is confident the adjustment was over, not when it ended.

Was it worse than social media? The numbers don’t compare

The wars on the print side were enormous. The Thirty Years’ War killed somewhere between 4.5 and 8 million people and depopulated parts of Germany by a fifth to a third; the French Wars of Religion killed millions more. But those are totals for whole conflicts with dynastic, fiscal and confessional causes of their own, not deaths attributable to print. Setting them beside social media’s direct harms puts an entire war on one side of the scale and a single channel’s effects on the other. A chronology cannot say how much of either is the technology’s doing, so this page offers the war totals as historical context, and no verdict on which adjustment was worse.

Cowen makes a different comparison, and it is the strongest thing he says in the exchange:

“Say book markets and the printing press, they weaponized Marx and Lenin for many decades. That’s an algorithm in the very broad sense that led to terrible consequences, much worse than whatever you might think current social media have done, and yet we believe in free speech for the printing press.”

That is a serious argument, and it is a consistency test rather than a body count. Print carried ideas that led to terrible consequences; we protect a free press anyway; so the fact that a medium carries harmful content cannot, by itself, be the reason to restrict it.

Acemoglu’s answer is not “print was fine.” He grants all of it — “I don’t know what my reaction to that would have been” if he’d lived through the religious wars. His answer is that algorithms are categorically different, and the difference is targeting:

“Once algorithms can see, ‘Tyler has a weakness for this specific thing, I can fan the flames,’ I think that’s a completely new world.”

A book is broadcast: it says the same thing to everyone, and you have to go get it. An algorithmic feed is personalized and adversarial: it selects, for you specifically, the content most likely to capture you. His proposed remedy follows exactly from that distinction — not banning speech, but requiring chronological, non-algorithmic feeds. “That’s like the Myspace kind of model.”

Whether that distinction holds is the crux. Two ways to attack it: propaganda has always been targeted at susceptible populations (print runs aimed at particular regions, languages, classes), so the difference may be one of degree; and conversely, personalization at individual scale with real-time feedback may be a genuine phase change that has no print analogue.

Faster or slower this time? — arguments both ways

Faster:

• We have institutions now — regulators, courts, a body of media law — that took centuries to invent the first time. The adjustment does not start from zero.
• Adoption itself was near-instant, so the reaction cycle compresses too.
• We can see what is happening. Nobody in 1520 had a research literature on the effects of pamphlets.

Slower, or never:

• The technology keeps changing. The printing press was largely static for centuries; recommender systems are re-engineered continuously, and each change resets the adaptation.
• The adaptation is adversarial. Print did not optimize against your resistance; a feed does.
• The print settlement required the state to give up control (1695). The current analogue would require a handful of firms to give up optimization, and nothing forces them to.

My honest read: the printing press analogy is better at showing that an adjustment can be long, contested and institutional than at predicting this one. It does not say social media’s will take a century, and it does not locate us near the start or the end. What it undercuts is the complacent version — “we adjusted to books, so we’ll adjust to this” — because the adjustment to books was not something that simply happened; it was argued over and built, one institution at a time.

The finding worth taking away

Reading the timeline as a whole, the adjustment to print was not only people developing better habits. It ran through institutions, mostly English and American on this timeline, and they pointed in both directions:

• Censorship and licensing (Index 1559; England’s Licensing Act 1662) — state and church control before publication
• Political settlement (Westphalia 1648) — the Thirty Years’ War ended by treaty, not by adaptation
• Liberalization (English licensing lapses, 1695) — the state gives up pre-publication control, though seditious libel and other restrictions remain
• Property and liability law (Statute of Anne 1710; libel doctrine) — who owns a text and who answers for it
• Constitutional protection (First Amendment, 1791)
• Professional norms (later still — editors, mastheads, the idea of journalism)

Some of these restricted print and some released it. The end of English licensing is deregulation, and it is one of this page’s own endpoints — so the history does not support a one-direction story in which the adjustment simply was regulation, any more than one in which it was simply freedom.

What this does and does not say about the exchange. Cowen’s argument is the consistency test above. Acemoglu’s reply is that algorithmic targeting is a different mechanism, not a bigger dose of the same one. The print timeline cannot settle that disagreement. What it adds is that the free-press settlement Cowen appeals to was reached through a long run of institutions, restrictions and their removal included. The live question between them is what the equivalent institutions for recommender systems should be — licensing, liability, design rules like his chronological feed, or constitutional protection — and history supplies precedents for each, not a verdict.

From the book

The analogy is Cowen’s, not Acemoglu’s. The press appears once in twelve hours of What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, and not as a technology-adjustment story at all — it is Chapter 2’s example of a community refusing a technology, the Ottoman Empire that gave Europe inoculation while it “steadfastly opposed the dissemination of other valuable knowledge and the adoption of useful technologies such as the printing press.” There is no adjustment period, no counting of years, and no comparison to social media anywhere in the book.

The Reformation is in there, and it is on the other side of the ledger. Chapter 8, Social Engineering, treats the century after Luther as a case of institutions tightening rather than of a society adapting:

“In the centuries after the Reformation, following Martin Luther’s influential 95 Theses that launched Protestantism, the Catholic Church doubled down on indoctrination and thought policing. Beginning with the Council of Trent, 1545 to 1563, the Church tried to stop the spread of Protestantism by more closely policing religious practice and thought. Recent scholarship suggests that these efforts did more than slow down the advance of the dangerous ideas of Protestantism, they stopped scientific inquiry and even the sharing of scientific findings.”

That is a striking convergence with the finding this page arrives at independently — that the adjustment ran through institutions rather than habituation — with the sign reversed. The page counts the censorship regimes among the institutions of the settlement. Chapter 8 treats them as the disaster: the Index and the Inquisition are its examples of social engineering doing lasting epistemic damage. Both readings are available from the same events, and which one you take decides what “we adjusted” is supposed to prove.

On social media, the book does not use an adjustment frame at all. Chapter 9’s diagnosis is structural and current: an “algorithmic cage of norms” produced by a business model — “Social media companies have an incentive to build an algorithmic cage” because “digital ads exploit strong emotions and proclivities toward intense norm enforcement and thought policing.” His counterfactual is not that we will get used to it but that it could have been built otherwise: “if social media platforms did not algorithmically boost the most sensationalist and emotion-triggering content and were organized more like neutral repositories, accurate information could be obtained.” And the prescription is immediate rather than generational — “in the age of algorithms, the regulation of social media and AI should be at the top of the list.”

So the honest placement of this page is that it answers Adam’s question and Cowen’s frame, not a thesis of the book. Acemoglu’s on-air concession that the press had a violent adjustment period which is now over is a concession made in conversation; his book never argues it, and the mechanism it does supply for social media — designed incentives, correctable now — is one on which waiting for an adjustment is the wrong response.

Reading

• Dittmar, “Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of the Printing Press”, QJE 2011 — cities adopting print grew ~21 pp faster 1500–1600 (a study of city growth, not of conflict)
• Rubin, “Printing and Protestants” — towns with a press by 1500 were 52 pp more likely to adopt the Reformation by 1530
• Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979) — the canonical account
• Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (2010) — the commercial reality, a useful corrective to Eisenstein
• Wikipedia, Propaganda during the Reformation — orientation

Working notes

Numbers. Death tolls for the Thirty Years’ War and the French Wars of Religion are genuinely contested — the ranges given are the conventional spans, not precise figures, and the German population loss figure varies enormously by region and by whether you count plague and famine as war deaths (most historians do). The Dittmar and Rubin coefficients are from their published abstracts and are solid.

A weakness in my own framing. I’ve treated “adjustment over” as a single event, which is too clean. Print censorship in France persisted past 1695; the Index was not abolished until 1966. If you use the Index as the endpoint, the adjustment took five centuries. I picked endpoints that seemed defensible, but the choice is contestable and I’d rather you saw the seam than have it hidden.

Confounding worth stating plainly: the printing press did not cause the religious wars in a simple sense. The Reformation had causes of its own, and print amplified and accelerated it. Any comparison to social media inherits the same problem — it is very hard to separate the technology from what it carried.

Draft 2 could add: a side-by-side adoption-curve comparison (share of European cities with a press, 1450–1600, vs. share of adults on social platforms, 2004–2026). The print side is available from the incunabula short-title catalogue. That would answer the “faster or slower” question with a picture instead of an argument.

Corrected 2026-09-18. Earlier drafts said that if print is the right analogy “we are not near the end of anything,” that accepting the precedent meant accepting “a 150-year timeline with wars in the middle,” that the print adjustment was “almost certainly” worse than social media’s by body count, and that the historical order “runs against Cowen’s implicit assumption that free speech came first and worked.” The page’s own timeline caveat already ruled out the first two: selected milestones do not measure a completed adjustment or predict another. The body-count verdict compared whole wars with a single channel’s direct harms, and nothing in the interview establishes the assumption attributed to Cowen. All four are gone. The timeline stays, liberalization is now one of the institutions, and the section on the exchange addresses the argument Cowen actually makes. Checked against the interview transcript.

Checked against the book, and the framing needed a caveat. The press-as-adjustment analogy is Cowen’s; the book contains one passing reference to the printing press and no adjustment argument at all. Chapter 8 does cover the post-Reformation century, and reads the same censorship regimes this page counts as settlement as the central case of social engineering doing damage. That is a genuine tension between the page and the book, and it is now stated above rather than smoothed over. The endpoint question below is unaffected — the book takes no position on it either.

Source and its limits. Checked against the audiobook edition (Penguin Random House Audio, narrated by John Lee), machine-transcribed, so references are by chapter and quotations are transcribed speech. The claim that the press appears only once rests on that transcript and is the weakest kind of finding it can support; the positive readings from Chapters 2, 8 and 9 are solid.

Related: Social Contract Theory and Its Critics — the free-speech-absolutism question runs on the same tension between a floor of rights and a community’s room to regulate.

Research page built in conversation with Claude and Codex.