Industrial Growth Puzzle
The Industrial Growth Puzzle , also known as the Antebellum Puzzle in the US , deals with the phenomenon of decreasing average height while real per capita income increased during the industrial revolution in the 19th century in almost all industrial countries.
Basic assumptions and observations
In addition to environmental influences, the height of a person indirectly depends on income and prices. This is based on the fact that the height of a person also depends on his food intake. Especially the diet in childhood determines the final height. The positive relationship between diet and height can also be proven empirically .
Despite rising real per capita income during the industrial revolution, a drop in average height can be observed in all industrial nations of the time. This is reflected in the pattern of recruits and prisoners. The hypothesis that diet influences body size is therefore in contradiction.
Attempts to explain
This contradicting phenomenon has been researched for years, especially in the field of economic history. The following explanations result:
The population increased during the Industrial Revolution. Despite the agricultural revolution , protein-rich foods such as meat became scarce compared to foods rich in carbohydrates. As a result, despite the increased real income level, the relative prices of protein-rich food rose. The result was a higher proportion of carbohydrate-rich food. Furthermore, the income gap between better-off and worse-off social classes widened. As a result, the worse-off sections of society in particular ate worse from generation to generation. While the body size of the socially better off social classes stagnated or increased slightly, the body size fell due to the changed diet of the socially disadvantaged. Furthermore, increasing urbanization made food access difficult . The increasing international trade activities also meant that diseases or epidemics could spread faster. This is what caused the change in height observed during the Industrial Revolution.
One possible attempt at an explanation lies in the methodological criticism of the historical studies on the development of body size during the industrial revolution. Since the historical data used is often statistical information on military personnel, prisoners and slaves that is not representative of society as a whole, the problem of sample bias must be taken into account. From this perspective, the income-height paradox is interpreted as an artifact of a non-representative, biased sample.
literature
- Michel R. Haines, Lee A. Craig & Thomas Weiss: The Short and the Dead: Nutrition, Mortality, and the "Antebellum Puzzle" in the United States . In: The Journal of Economic History . No. 63 . Cambridge University Press, October 2003, pp. 382-413 , doi : 10.1017 / S0022050703001839 .
- John Komlos : Why did people get smaller in a growing economy . In: Historical Social Research . No. February 22 , 1997, p. 150-162 ( PDF ).
- Susanne Schalch: The “Antebellum Puzzle” - Is there a positive correlation between wealth and height? Rich Academic Children and Poor Farmers: The Relationship Between Income, Urbanization, and Height in 19th Century America . GRIN, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-640-16401-1 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Thomas A. Mroz, Timothy W. Guinnane, Howard Bodenhorn: Sample-Selection Biases and the Industrialization Puzzle . In: The Journal of Economic History . tape 77 , no. 1 , 2017, ISSN 1471-6372 , p. 171–207 , doi : 10.1017 / S0022050717000031 ( cambridge.org [accessed December 13, 2018]).