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Nutrition, the Biological Standard of Living, and Cliometrics

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Handbook of Cliometrics

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Abstract

In much of the world today, populations are richer, taller, and enjoy longer healthier lives than their counterparts in the past. Cliometricians debate the extent to which this “health transition” was the result of nutritional improvements or other factors, such as the increase in public health infrastructure that followed mastery of the germ theory of disease. Although the long-run trend in health was positive, in the nineteenth century, many Western countries experienced cyclical downturns in the biological standard of living, the so-called antebellum puzzle. While the long-run trends in the growth of real GDP, income, and wages were positive, as the presence of the antebellum puzzle suggests, the onset of industrialization was accompanied by an increase in inequality, the stagnation of the expectation of life at birth, increases in morbidity, declines in mean adult stature, and an erosion in the consumption of net nutrients. Taken together, this experience has been labeled the “Malthusian squeeze.”

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The difference between the production of goods and their consumption is captured, at least partly, by the “change in business inventories” component of GDP.

  2. 2.

    Feldstein 1990, p. 10

  3. 3.

    Williamson 2013

  4. 4.

    It also omits many types of economic activity, though this was not a point of emphasis for Kuznets.

  5. 5.

    It was this article that generated the famous “Preston curve,” which shows life expectancy as a function of income (or real GDP) per capita. The first derivative of the resulting function is positive, but the second is negative, suggesting that, beyond some point, increases in income do not lead to further increases in life expectancy.

  6. 6.

    To be fair, Preston also mentioned nutrition as a causal element; to wit, “Income, food, and literacy were unquestionably placing limits on levels of life expectancy…” (1975, p. 240).

  7. 7.

    Which involves allocating nutrition across various physical activities.

  8. 8.

    Floud et al. 2011, p. 117

  9. 9.

    Floud et al. 2011, pp. 116–118

  10. 10.

    Interestingly, US slaves and the very rich did not experience a downturn in the biological standard of living (Craig and Hammond 2013; Sunder and Woitek 2005).

  11. 11.

    This list is broadly consistent with, though not identical to, that found in Komlos (1987, p. 905).

  12. 12.

    As defined by Atack and Bateman (1987), this measure represents the surplus of nutrients beyond that consumed by the county’s human and livestock populations.

  13. 13.

    The other variables reflect the impacts of urbanization, the individual’s occupation, the wealth of the region in which he grew up, and a dummy variable capturing whether or not the region had access to water or rail transportation.

  14. 14.

    The other variables include or reflect the impacts of wealth, region, urbanization, and the age distribution of the population.

  15. 15.

    Steckel estimated stature as a function of income; thus, this coefficient represents the inverse of his estimate.

  16. 16.

    United Nations 1999, Table 1

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, 27695-8110, USA

    Lee A. Craig

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  1. Lee A. Craig
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. BETA/CNRS (UMR 7522), University of Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Study, Strasbourg Cedex, France

    Claude Diebolt

  2. University of Wisconsin Department of Economics, La Crosse, Wisconsin, USA

    Michael Haupert

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Craig, L.A. (2014). Nutrition, the Biological Standard of Living, and Cliometrics. In: Diebolt, C., Haupert, M. (eds) Handbook of Cliometrics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40458-0_22-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40458-0_22-1

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