Health, Education, and Welfare

摘要

This book is based on several of Robert Fogel's papers on long-term trends in health and aging. The themes emphasized in this volume will be familiar to those who have read Fogel's work on aging. The food supply and the population are brought into balance not through crisis mortality, but through chronic malnutrition, which produces a stunted, underweight population. By modern standards, this population suffers from high rates of chronic disease and of mortality at older ages. This chronically malnourished population is also unproductive. In France, at the start of the Industrial Revolution, one-fifth of the population only had sufficient energy to beg. Parents' poor health was perpetuated in their children because they did not have the resources to invest in their children. The escape from hunger could only occur only when agricultural and related technologies permitted the per capita consumption of food to increase by 50 percent. These technological advances began with the second Agricultural Revolution circa 1700 and produced an explosion in world population. A large proportion of the improvements in health and longevity came from bringing those at the bottom of the income distribution to the level of those at the top of the income distribution.