Where Purchasing Power and Stature diverge: Examining the Costs of Economic Activity

Revision with unchanged content. 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. This work supplements and challenges this methodology by using evidence of the biological standard of living to measure the physiological adjustments of human populations to changes in economic conditions. Human stature captures the biological costs and benefits of economic activity and serves as a primary indicator of the biological standard of living. While income and output appear to steadily improve over time, human stature fluctuates through time, implying that the general increase of incomes came at the expense of health, nutrition, and ultimately height. The book begins by using an innovative estimation technique to generate per capita GDP figures for Colonial America, then finds evidence of convergence and divergence of stature in the nineteenth-century United States, before concluding with the global exploration of the impact of economic and health variables on stature in the nineteenth century. The book is addressed to researchers in Economics, History, Nutrition, and Health.