Dantzig explains why the language of number had to be 
increased to meet the needs created by the new technology of 
letters.

*     The unremitting pressure on society to discover accurate 
means of quantification is in ratio to the individualist pressures 
in the society. Print intensified the tendency to individualism as 
all historians have testified. It also provided the means of 
quantification in its very technology. The monumental work of 
William I. Thomas and Florian Znanlecki, The Polish Peasant in  
Europe and America , is indispensable to any serious analyst of 
the effects of print culture on peasant culture. They write (vol. 
I, p. 182):

     But of course when once the egotistic attitude is 
     introduced into economic relations, these relations have