State of the Art: Economic Development Through the Lens of Paintings
This paper uses 627,369 paintings since 1400 to study how societies experienced major socioeconomic transformations. We develop computer vision algorithms to extract two signals from each artwork—emotional expression and visual indicators of material living standards—and validate them against modern measures of wellbeing and economic output. Our empirical analysis documents how populations experienced socioeconomic changes by exploiting variation in emotional and material signals within artists’ oeuvres and conditional on painting sub-genres. While both respond to shocks to living standards, such as climate or trade, emotional expression also varies with broader economic and institutional conditions, often without corresponding changes in material outcomes. These findings suggest that paintings provide a long-run measure of experienced welfare, complementing conventional indicators of economic performance.
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Copy CitationClément Gorin, Stephan Heblich, and Yanos Zylberberg, "State of the Art: Economic Development Through the Lens of Paintings," NBER Working Paper 33976 (2025), https://doi.org/10.3386/w33976.Download Citation
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