These two volumes bring together important and influential articles and papers on different aspects of the history of health and welfare. The collection includes classic and more recent essays on the origins and nature of mortality decline; the early-life origins of adult health and disease;...

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 reviews the evidence regarding the main trends in the height of the British population since the early eighteenth century. We argue that the average heights of successive birth cohorts of British males increased slowly between the middle of the eighteenth century and the first quarter...

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...

Though rates of intergenerational mobility differ little between the U.S. and Europe today, attitudes toward redistribution – that should reflect at least in part those rates – differ substantially. We examine the differences in intergenerational mobility between the U.S. and France since...

Comparé aux autres pays européens, le vieillissement de la population a été, en France, particulièrement précoce. La part des personnes âgées de plus de soixante ans passe de 8,5% à 12,5% de la population entre la première moitié du XIXème siècle et l’entre-deuxguerres. Il ne fait...