New Anthropometric History: An Analysis of the Secular Trend in Height
Résumé
In using human-height measurements as a gauge of the biological standard of living of a given population, anthropometry (in this regard not unlike demography) offers an alternative to the standard indexes of economic history. For instance, anthropometry reveals that a paradoxical phenomenon occurred during industrialization in eighteenth-century Europe: a decline in human height-in tandem with downward trends in real wages and in temperatures-was accompanied by a population increase, thereby contradicting, for the first time, the famous Malthusian theory that population growth is eventually checked by widespread famine and disease. The decreasing human height in Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, in spite of improvements in the standard of living as measured in terms of real wages income, is a reminder of the negative consequences of the early industrialization that Marx, among others, decried. In contrast, while the standard indexes record economic stagnation during the first half of the twentieth century, height increased, reflecting improvements in public health, thanks largely to progress in the field of medicine. On another front, anthropometric history, with its reliance on impartial demographic index, permits an accurate appraisal of the economic performances of totalitarian regimes and, more generally, of the well-being of all those populations who have been excluded from the standard indexes of economic and social performance: most notably, Afro-American slaves, eighteenth-century European craftsmen and peasants, and nineteenth-century Western women.
Domaines
Histoire
Origine :
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