# 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 argues it is over. The uncomfortable number is how long it took. Depending on where you put the endpoint, **130 to 250 years**, and the middle of it contains the two deadliest religious conflicts in European history. Social media is roughly **20 years old**. If the printing press is the right analogy, we are not near the end of anything. And there is a second finding hiding in the timeline: the adjustment was not people getting used to it. It was *institutions being built* — censorship regimes first, then copyright, libel law, and a professionalized press. That matters a lot for Acemoglu's argument, because it means "we adjusted" is not an argument against regulating; the adjustment largely *was* regulation. ## 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; 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](https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2017/10/the-peace-of-westphalia/), [English licensing](https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1818-06-05/debates/40418a40-99de-4ace-8850-7e1677288447/FromTheSelectCommitteeOnTheCopyrightActs), [Statute of Anne](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/anne_1710.asp). ## So how long? There are three defensible endpoints, and the choice of endpoint *is* the argument: | Endpoint | Reasoning | Elapsed from 1450 | |---|---|---| | **1648** — Peace of Westphalia | The religious wars the press amplified are over | **~200 years** | | **1695** — English Licensing Act lapses | The state gives up pre-publication control; free press becomes normal | **~245 years** | | **1648, dated from Luther** | Most generous reading: the adjustment starts when the technology first goes political, not when it's invented | **~130 years** | Even the friendliest number is **over a century**. Acemoglu's own framing — "think of American society or European society or even India or Latin America in the 1980s… human community was very well adjusted" — puts the settled state at roughly *five hundred* years after Gutenberg. ## Was it worse than social media? Almost certainly, yes — and that's Cowen's point The body count is not close. 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. No serious estimate puts social media's direct harms in that range. Cowen presses the case harder than the religious wars, and this 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. The 20th century's totalitarian catastrophes were print-borne. If your standard for restricting a communication technology is "it has been used to cause mass death," print fails the test far worse than TikTok. **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 establishing that adjustments are long and violent than at predicting this one. It mostly refutes the complacent reading of itself — "we adjusted to books, we'll adjust to this" is true only if you are prepared to accept a 150-year timeline with wars in the middle. ## The finding worth taking away Reading the timeline as a whole, the adjustment to print was not primarily people developing better habits. It was, in order: 1. **Censorship** (Index 1559, licensing regimes) — crude, state-run, largely failed 2. **Political settlement** (Westphalia 1648) — the wars ended by treaty, not by adaptation 3. **Property and liability law** (Statute of Anne 1710, libel doctrine) — who owns and who is answerable 4. **Professional norms** (much later — editors, mastheads, the idea of journalism) 5. **Constitutional protection** (1791) — *last*, and only once the rest existed **Acemoglu is proposing step 3 and Cowen is defending step 5.** They are arguing about different points on a sequence that historically took two centuries to traverse — and the historical order runs against Cowen's implicit assumption that free speech came first and worked. ## 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 *was* institution-building rather than habituation — with the sign reversed. The page treats the censorship regimes as part 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"](https://people.bu.edu/chamley/764-23/Dittmar.pdf), *QJE* 2011 — cities adopting print grew ~21 pp faster 1500–1600 - Rubin, ["Printing and Protestants"](https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1099&context=economics_articles) — 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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. **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](https://gautsch.org/research/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.