Economists and economic historians want to know how much better life is today than in the past. Fifty years ago economic historians found surprisingly small gains from 19th century US railroads, while more recently economists have found relatively large gains from electricity, computers and cell...

Oxley finds that smallpox consistently reduced heights, but that the fall was not statistically significant outside London or for juvenile Londoners. We demonstrate that inappropriate subdivision of the data into small samples explains the lack of significance she obtains. Further analysis of...