Culture Dynamics and Great Divergence : Effect of Universal Education and Socialization Process

This paper builds a simple model to explain why relative high wage level in the Europe could cause the industrial revolution, and role of public education system in accelerating the economic growth. Different from the previous research, the reason for the high wage shift would lead to the industrial revolution in this paper is the U-shape incentive for the parents with "good" trait to pass their trait to the offspring with respect to the wage level. To our best knowledge, this paper is the first one that analyzes the effect of high wage shift and the public education on the economic growth through cultural transmission and socialization process, since we believe that the preference and culture are deeply influenced by the interaction between people, rather than simply determined by the gene