Shrinking in a Growing Economy? The Mystery of Physical Stature during the Industrial Revolution

The interest generated by the anthropometric research program since the pioneering publications of the late 1970s has been predicated to a considerable degree on the discovery of previously unknown cycles in human physical stature since the Industrial Revolution in both Europe and North America. A diminution in the physical stature of Americans born in the late 1830s was first reported by Robert Margo and Richard Steckel in 1983 on the basis of Union Army records (Figure 1) 2 This discovery, as well as the subsequent finding of a similar trend in life expectancy, called into question the common wisdom that the rapid expansion of the US economy during the antebellum decades brought about an unambiguous and monotonic improvement in the human condition. The biological standard of living was hardly expected to decline at a time when per capita output rose by some 50 percent between 1830 and 1860. After all, food is a normal good whose consumption should not diminish at a time of general economic prosperity. That Europeans were not exempt from such anthropometric cycles was discovered two years later. The first decrease in physical stature occurred earlier in Europe, coinciding with the onset of the Industrial Revolution (c.1760 to 1800). It is less paradoxical than the subsequent height cycle beginning in the 1830s, inasmuch as real wages fell consistently