Colors of Growth
7 comments
·December 8, 2025dvrp
“Our findings [show] that light […] provides a credible and independent source of information on early modern economic activity.”
Wow!
nasvay_factory
they be like: dark is bad, light is good and popularity of each is changing over time
i mean, it's so natural, no? Yin Yang and stuff, like common sense type of things.
mhb
We develop a novel approach to measuring long-run economic growth by exploiting systematic variation in the use of color in European paintings. Drawing inspiration from the literature on nighttime lights as a proxy for income, we extract hue, saturation, and brightness from millions of pixels to construct annual indices for Great Britain, Holland, France, Italy, and Germany between 1600 and 1820. These indices track broad trends in existing GDP reconstructions while revealing higherfrequency fluctuations-such as those associated with wars, political instability, and climatic shocks-that traditional series smooth over. Our findings demonstrate that light, decomposed into color and brightness components, provides a credible and independent source of information on early modern economic activity.
calebm
Interesting idea.
typeofhuman
Caution: PDF
BubbleRings
I don’t understand. The link opens to a web page, and the download link is clearly labeled as a PDF. Why the warning? And why warn about PDFs in general, have they been having zero day embedded malware lately or something?
As a photographer, I’ve noticed that no two photos of a given painting ever look the same. There is much variation due to lighting, color temperature, sensor capabilities, etc. Without controlling for these variables, it’s hard to see how comparisons can be made accurately.