Declining Mortality Among British Scientists During the Age of Enlightenment

摘要

Traditional perspectives on economic growth and development usually interpret the process of mortality decline as a product of technological change. Preston (1975) famously reported that 75-90 percent of the increases in world life expectancy during the first half of the twentieth century were attributable to technological change. Historical work on the course of modern development and the demographic transition typically deduces causality based on the sequence of key events: scientific advancement starting in the seventeenth century, acceleration of population growth beginning in the eighteenth century, economic growth and the Industrial Revolution starting in the early nineteenth century, and widespread mortality decline taking hold later in the nineteenth century. While there is a range of views on how popular improvements in health and mortality decline resulted from earlier developments, the common thread is that lengthening life spans are the end result. Researchers typically assume that technological change is either fostered by the development of institutions or brought about by increases in population or in population density.