John Komlos On the Biological strongStandard of Livingstrong of.pdf

John Komlos: On the Biological Standard of Living of Eighteenth-Century Americans: Taller, Richer, Healthier Munich Discussion Paper No. 2003-9 Department of Economics University of Munich Volkswirtschaftliche Fakultät Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Online at http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/53/ On the Biological Standard of Living of Eighteenth-Century Americans: Taller, Richer, Healthier John Komlos Department of Economics University of Munich Abstract: This study analyses the physical stature of runaway apprentices and military deserters based on advertisements collected from 18th-century newspapers, in order to explore the biological welfare of colonial and early-national Americans. The results indicate that heights declined somewhat at mid-century, but increased substantially thereafter. The findings are generally in keeping with trends in mortality and in economic activity. The Americans were much taller than Europeans: by the 1780s adults were as much as 6.6 cm taller than Englishmen, and at age 16 American apprentices were some 12 cm taller than the poor children of London. JEL: N11, N31, I12, I31 Key Words: Anthropometrics, Living Standards, 18th century, colonial US 1 While the extremely rapid – and historically unprecedented - population growth in the New World enables us to infer indirectly that the physical environment must have been quite propitious to the health of its inhabitants relative to that of Europe, reliable quantitative evidence substantiating this view in the colonial and early national periods remains somewhat sparse.1 Conventional indicators of living standards such as income, wealth, and per-capita GNP are limited both regionally and temporally, or are based on either backward extrapolations of nineteenth century values or on Jones’s monumental