In their different ways, both Thomas Malthus and Thomas McKeown raised fundamental questions about the relationship between food supply and the decline of mortality. Malthus argued that food supply was the most important constraint on population growth and McKeown claimed that an improvement in...

In The Changing Body (Cambridge University Press and NBER, 2011), the authors presented a series of estimates showing the number of calories available for human consumption in England and Wales at various points in time between 1700 and 1909/13. The current paper corrects an error in those...

This paper is a progress report on the usefulness of data on physical height for the analysis of long-ten changes in the level of nutrition and health on economic, social, and demographic behavior. It is based on a set of samples covering the U.S. and several other nations over the years from...

Economic and social historians have traditionally been concerned to measure changes in the income and welfare of populations in the past.Until recently, however, they have not recognized that anthropometric data, such as evidence on the average height achieved by a population at a particular...

One way to demonstrate how remarkable changes in the process of aging have been is to compare health over the life cycles of 3 cohorts. For the first cohort, born between 1835 and 1845 (the Civil War cohort), life was short and disabilities were common even at young ages. Other factors...

At the close of World War II, there were wide-ranging debates about the future of economic developments. Historical experience has since shown that these forecasts were uniformly too pessimistic. Expectations for the American economy focused on the likelihood of secular stagnation; this topic...

To American and European economists in 1945, the countries of Asia were unpromising candidates for high economic growth. In 1950 even the most prosperous of these countries had a per capita income less than 25 percent of that of the United States. Between the mid-1960s and the end of the...

Longitudinal studies support the proposition that the extent and severity of chronic conditions in middle and late ages are to a large extent the outcome of environmental insults at early ages, including in utero. Data from the Early Indicators program project undertaken at the Center for...

The program project Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease and Death investigates how socioeconomic and environmental factors in early life can shape health and work levels in later life. Project researchers have approached this problem by creating a life-cycle sample that permits a...

Over the past three centuries there has been a rapid accumulation of physiological capital in OECD countries. Enhanced physiological capital is tied to long-term reduction in environmental hazards and to the conquest of chronic malnutrition. Data on heights and birth weights suggests that...