Download or read book Stature Living Standards and Economic Development written by John Komlos and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1994-12-12 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can body measurements tell us about living standards in the past? In this collection of essays studying height and weight data from eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, North America, and Asia, fourteen distinguished scholars explore the relation between physical size, economic development, and standard of living among various socioeconomic groups. Analyzing the differences in physical stature by social group, gender, age, provenance, and date and place of birth, these essays illuminate urban and rural differences in well-being, explore the effects of market integration on previously agricultural societies, contrast the experiences of several segments of society, and explain the proximate causes of downturns and upswings in well-being. Particularly intriguing is the researchers' conclusion that the environment of the New World during this period was far more propitious than that of Europe, based on data showing that European aristocrats were in worse health than even the poorest members of American society.
Download or read book Stature and Living Standards in the United States written by Richard Hall Steckel and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper briefly reviews the literature on the evolution of approaches to living standards and then applies the methodology discussed for stature to the United States from the late 18th through the early 20th centuries. Part I of the paper emphasizes two major strands of the subject: national-income accounting and related measures, developed by economists and government policy makers, and anthropometric measures (particularly stature), developed by human biologists, anthropologists, and the medical profession. I compare and contrast these alternative approaches to measuring living standards and place anthropometric measures within the context of the ongoing debate over the system of national accounts. Part II examines the relationship of stature to living standards beginning with a discussion of sources of evidence and the growth process. A statistical analysis explores the relationship of stature to per capita income and the distribution of income using 20th century data. Part III presents evidence on time-trends, regional patterns, and class differences in height. The major phenomena discovered to date are the early achievement of near-modern stature, the downward cycle in stature for cohorts born around 1830 to near the end of the century, the height advantages of the West and the South, and the remarkably small stature of slave children. The secular decline in height is puzzling for economic historians because it clashes with firm beliefs that the mid-nineteenth century was an era of economic prosperity. I establish a framework for reconciling these conflicting views on the course of living standards and discuss possible explanations for the height patterns noted in the paper.
Download or read book Living Standards in the Past written by Robert C. Allen and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2005-03-24 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did Europe experience industrialisation and modern economic growth before China, India or Japan? This is one of the most fundamental questions in Economic History and one that has provoked intense debate. The main concern of this book is to determine when the gap in living standards between the East and the West emerged. The established view, dating back to Adam Smith, is that the gap emerged long before the Industrial Revolution, perhaps thousands of years ago. While this view has been called into question - and many of the explanations for it greatly undermined - the issue demands much more empirical research than has yet been undertaken. How did the standard of living in Europe and Asia compare in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? The present book proposes an answer by considering evidence of three sorts. The first is economic, focusing on income, food production, wages, and prices. The second is demographic, comparing heights, life expectancy and other demographic indicators. The third combines the economic and demographic by investigating the demographic vulnerability to short-term economic stress. The contributions show the highly complex and diverse pattern of the standard of living in the pre-industrial period. The general picture emerging is not one of a great divergence between East and West, but instead one of considerable similarities. These similarities not only pertain to economic aspects of standard of living but also to demography and the sensitivity to economic fluctuations. In addition to these similarities, there were also pronounced regional differences within the East and within the West - regional differences that in many cases were larger than the average differences between Europe and Asia. This clearly highlights the importance of analysing several dimensions of the standard of living, as well as the danger of neglecting regional, social, and household specific differences when assessing the level of well-being in the past.
Download or read book Living Standards in the Past written by Robert C. Allen and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2005-03-24 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did Europe experience industrialisation and modern economic growth before China, India or Japan? This is one of the most fundamental questions in Economic History and one that has provoked intense debate. The main concern of this book is to determine when the gap in living standards between the East and the West emerged. The established view, dating back to Adam Smith, is that the gap emerged long before the Industrial Revolution, perhaps thousands of years ago. While this viewhas been called into question - and many of the explanations for it greatly undermined - the issue demands much more empirical research than has yet been undertaken. How did the standard of living in Europe and Asia compare in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? The present book proposes ananswer by considering evidence of three sorts. The first is economic, focusing on income, food production, wages, and prices. The second is demographic, comparing heights, life expectancy and other demographic indicators. The third combines the economic and demographic by investigating the demographic vulnerability to short-term economic stress.The contributions show the highly complex and diverse pattern of the standard of living in the pre-industrial period. The general picture emerging is not one of a great divergence between East and West, but instead one of considerable similarities. These similarities not only pertain to economic aspects of standard of living but also to demography and the sensitivity to economic fluctuations. In addition to these similarities, there were also pronounced regional differences within the East andwithin the West - regional differences that in many cases were larger than the average differences between Europe and Asia. This clearly highlights the importance of analysing several dimensions of the standard of living, as well as the danger of neglecting regional, social, and household specificdifferences when assessing the level of well-being in the past.
Download or read book American Economic Growth and Standards of Living before the Civil War written by Robert E. Gallman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This benchmark volume addresses the debate over the effects of early industrialization on standards of living during the decades before the Civil War. Its contributors demonstrate that the aggregate antebellum economy was growing faster than any other large economy had grown before. Despite the dramatic economic growth and rise in income levels, questions remain as to the general quality of life during this era. Was the improvement in income widely shared? How did economic growth affect the nature of work? Did higher levels of income lead to improved health and longevity? The authors address these questions by analyzing new estimates of labor force participation, real wages, and productivity, as well as of the distribution of income, height, and nutrition.
Download or read book Stature Nutrition Health and Economic Growth written by and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historically, scholars of economic growth have focused almost exclusively on aggregate output or income as a way to assess the standard of living in a society. The purpose of this dissertation is to supplement and challenge this methodology by using evidence of the biological standard of living to measure the physiological adjustments of human populations to changes in the economic climate. Human stature captures the biological costs and benefits of economic activity, and as such, it serves as a primary indicator of the biological standard of living. When approximated by output and income alone, the standard of living in society appears to steadily improve over time. Human stature offers a different picture though, fluctuating through time even as incomes rise, implying that the general increase of incomes came at the expense of both health and nutrition and ultimately height. The divergence between economic and biological indicators reveals the importance of representing economies both by material and physical measures: a reflection of both purchasing power and health. This dissertation uses stature to approximate income and estimate the health effects of economic fluctuations. It begins by using an innovative estimation technique to generate per capita GDP growth rates and identifies several undocumented growth episodes in Colonial America. The results of this chapter suggest that early growth rates were higher than previous estimates indicate. It then shifts focus to the regional growth pattern of stature over the nineteenth-century United States, exploring changes in human welfare associated with the convergence of stature as reflected by the gap between short and tall populations. The results imply that human welfare did not improve for large segments of the population until the last two decades of the century and in fact, the physical costs associated with economic activity overwhelmed the physical benefits for much of the century. The United States experience.
Download or read book The Hidden Cost of Economic Development written by Timothy Cuff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The process of industrialization in nineteenth century Europe and America drew people away from a largely rural and agricultural life, to an urban and industrial one. Whilst this has generally been regarded as a long term benefit to a country's economy, this book argues that there are hidden costs in terms of a nation's health.
Download or read book Living Standards in Latin American History written by Ricardo Donato Salvatore and published by David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The recent work has focused on physical welfare, often referred to as “biological” well-being.
Download or read book The Standard of Living and Revolutions in Russia 1700 1917 written by Boris Nikolaevich Mironov and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first full-scale anthropometric history of Imperial Russia (1700-1917). It mobilizes an immense volume of archival material to chart the growth, weight, and other anthropometric indicators of the male and female populations in order to chart how the standard of living in Russia changed over slightly more than two centuries. It draws on a wide range of data--statistics on agricultural production, taxation, prices and wages, nutrition, and demography--to draw conclusions on the dynamics in the standard of living over this long period of time. The economic, social, and political interpretation of these findings make it possible to reconsider the prevailing views in the historiography and to offer a new perspective on Imperial Russia.
Download or read book The Biological Standard of Living in Comparative Perspective written by John Komlos and published by Franz Steiner Verlag. This book was released on 1998 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inhalt: Part I: The Americas, Asia and Australia: Mit Beitr�gen von: Stephen L. Morgan; Stephen Nicholas / Robert Gregory / Sue Kimberley; Henk-Jan Brinkman / J.W. Drukker; Ricardo Salvatore / J�rg Baten; Ricardo D. Salvatore; Insong Gill; Richard H. Steckel / Paul W. Sciulli / Jerome C. Rose; Michael R. Haines; Philip R. P. Coelho / Robert A. McGuire; Lee A. Craig / Thomas Weiss; Timothy Cuff; John Komlos; Brian A'Hearn; Barry Bogin / Ryan Keep; Markus Heintel; W. Peter Ward Part II: Europe: Mit Beitr�gen von: Edwin Horlings / Jan-Pieter Smits; Jos� M. Martinez Carri�n / Juan J. Perez Castej�n; Gloria Quiroga Valle; Sebasti�n Coll; Lydia Sapounaki-Dracaki; Bernard Harris; Markus Heintel / Lars G. Sandberg / Richard H. Steckel; Joaquim da Costa Leite; Jesper L. Boldsen / Jes S�gaard; Holle Greil; Sally Horrocks / David Smith; Philip T. Hoffman - Joerg Baten / John Komlos: Conclusion "Die mit umfangreichen Literaturverweisen bereicherten Beitr�ge bieten ueberraschend konkrete Einblicke in die Sozialstruktur der verschiedensten Bev�lkerungsgruppen und ihre Lebensbedingungen." Das Historisch-Politische Buch .
Download or read book The Effects of Economic Development on the Biological Standard of Living written by Thimothy Cuff and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Research in Economic History written by Christopher Hanes and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2014-03-10 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The latest volume in the series Research of Economic History contains articles on the economic history of Europe and the U.S.
Download or read book How Was Life Global Well being since 1820 written by OECD and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-02 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the first systematic evidence on long-term trends in global well-being since 1820 for 25 major countries and 8 regions in the world covering more than 80% of the world’s population.
Download or read book The Biological Standard Of Living On Three Continents written by John Komlos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-11 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The effort of anthropometric historians to unearth the broad patterns of human biological well-being has led to the examination of nearly forgotten, centuries-old records from dusty archives in practically all the continents of the globe. French historians in the Annales tradition were among the first to adopt methods from physical anthropology and from the biological sciences, but the real expansion of the field dates from the pathbreaking work of Richard Steckel and Robert Fogel, which launched the discipline of anthropometric history on American soil Research has confirmed that physical stature is related to nutritional status and therefore to real family income, and thus to the general standard of living. Historians and development economists will find this line of research useful, as it informs us about the standard of living of members of society for whom data on wages are seldom available—women, children, aristocrats, farmers, and slaves. In addition, this research has shown that the biological standard of living may diverge from conventional indicators of welfare during the early stages of industrialization. Thus, per capita income is an ambiguous measure of welfare during some phases of growth, and it must be supplemented with data from other indicators, such as physical stature. The essays in this volume broaden our knowledge of the human effects of the momentous economic changes of the last two centuries, extending analysis to regions for which such information has been lacking, including Russia, Canada, Indonesia, Italy, and Spain.
Download or read book Health and Welfare during Industrialization written by Richard H. Steckel and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this unique anthology, Steckel and Floud coordinate ten essays that bring a new perspective to inquiry about standard of living in modern times. These papers are arranged for international comparison, and they individually examine evidence of health and welfare during and after industrialization in eight countries: the United States, Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Japan, and Australia. The essays incorporate several indicators of quality of life, especially real per capita income and health, but also real wages, education, and inequality. And while the authors use traditional measures of health such as life expectancy and mortality rates, this volume stands alone in its extensive use of new "anthropometric" data—information about height, weight and body mass index that indicates changes in nations' well-being. Consequently, Health and Welfare during Industrialization signals a new direction in economic history, a broader and more thorough understanding of what constitutes standard of living.
Download or read book Gender and Well Being in Europe written by Lina Gálvez and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first of four books based on a series of symposia funded by COST, which is an intergovernmental framework for the promotion of European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research. It draws on both historical and contemporary European case-studies to offer a sophisticated account of the relationship between gender and well-being. The authors focus on key discussions of the changing conceptions of well-being from early twentieth century calculations of the relationship between income and the cost-of-living, to more recent critiques from feminist writers. Their fascinating answers allow them to significantly challenge the issue with the idea that well-being is not only associated with income or opulence but also relates to more abstract concepts including capabilities, freedom, and agency of different women and men and will be of considerable interest to economic and social historians, sociologists of health, gender, sexuality and economists.
Download or read book Family Well Being written by Almudena Moreno Minguez and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-07-15 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the international literature there is a broad scope for comparative research on the welfare regime, family change and gender relations, but we have no book that comprehensively collects the main research that has been conducted from the perspective of family well-being. Thus, this volume focuses on the comparative analyse of family and well-being in a European perspective, a dimension which literature has not covered till the present. This book collects the researches done in Europe on family well-being and compares family change and well-being in different institutional and cultural contexts. It takes a deeper look at early evidence of family well-being and presents a compilation of findings from the main researchers on this topic. A broad range of topics is covered from the theorizing of children’s well-being to the development of specific measures of family well-being. The book also outlines pivotal methodological and conceptual issues. A distinguished, international group of researchers provide insights into the dynamics of family change and well-being, using indicators as a means to confront new phenomena as well as to bridge data and theory.
