Steven Johnson makes a connection between the coffee house culture and the Age of Reason:
His point is that in the 17th and 18th centuries England changed from a culture that was drunk during the daytime to one that was caffeinated.
That’s an interesting point that I’m going to have to add to my lectures about how economic growth began before the industrial revolution.
I have two additions.
First, I think there’s an issue of economic serendipity here. People drank all day at that time because the water wasn’t safe to drink. They didn’t understand the mechanism, but there were clear medicinal reasons for a lot of beer and wine (remember that spirits were in their infancy at this point).
Yet, people had the technology to boil their water. The thing is, they didn’t recognize the advantages of this. There’s an unusual research project there for a Ph.D. student: why exactly wasn’t this discovered. Because what’s interesting is that they did learn to boil water to make a mild drug: coffee or tea. So it clearly took a little extra marginal benefit to convince people to drink hot liquids, but not too much.
Secondly, there’s a general point that is specifically relevant to where I teach: relatively dry Utah (pun intended). Mormon culture is proud of their alcohol avoidance. But, a little known fact in Utah is that while there have been other dry-ish cultures around the globe, prior to the provision of clean public drinking water, the only places those cultures were successful was in arid and mountainous regions. The reason is that there isn’t much water to get polluted in those areas — so people see it as more valuable, and it’s never standing — so that it’s biological impurities can’t thrive. In short, pure mountain streams make teetotaling more feasible.
What’s interesting about Utah is that the local culture doubled-down on this advantage: not only to they discourage alcohol, but they’ve also discouraged hot caffeinated drinks for over a century. Interestingly, there are a lot of quibbles about how effective that ban was in the 19th century. What is clear is that it became much more solid in the 20th century with the provision of clean public water.
And to finish, many Mormons are aware that alcohol, coffee, and tea were used substantially more by Mormons in their faiths first two decades. But the strong religious discouragement of those really began to take hold only after the faithful moved away from the plentiful, but fetid and slow-moving waters of Illinois, Missouri, Ohio, and New York.
Video via Greg Mankiw.