Life Was... Short
8/5/09 10:32 PM
Grasping Reality with Both Hands The Semi-Daily Journal of Economist Brad DeLong: A Fair, Balanced, Reality-Based, and More than Two-Handed Look at the World J. Bradford DeLong, Department of Economics, U.C. Berkeley #3880, Berkeley, CA 94720-3880; 925 708 0467; delong@econ.berkeley.edu.
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Life Was... Short
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Life Was... Short
8/5/09 10:32 PM
Source: Nikola Koepke and Joerg Baten (2006), "The Biological Standard of Living in Europe During the Last Two Millennia" http://www.eco.rug.nl/~jacobs/jjdownload/Workshop14May-Koepke.pdf My visualization of the Cosmic All is deficient: why can we see the impact of the Black Death on living standards in female adult heights but not in male adult heights? And do we take the rise in heights during the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west as a sign (a) that the barbarians killed a lot of people or (b) that post-barbarian invasion income distributions were much more equal than Roman ones? And is it right to infer that the status of women was unusually and especially low in the Roman Principate and in the High Middle Ages? RECOMMENDED (4.85) by 4 people like you [How? ] You might like:
Geert Wilders Speaks (@Moonbattery) The Revolt of the Stenographers... (@this site) 2 more recommended posts Âť Brad DeLong on July 28, 2009 at 04:18 PM in Economics, Economics: Health, Economics: History, History | Permalink TrackBack TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00e551f08003883401157242fc14970b Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Life Was... Short:
Comments You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post. "why can we see the impact of the Black Death on living standards in female adult heights but not in male adult heights?" I suspect is because under the preceding conditions of scarcity men received more and better food, medical treatment, etc., so that when economic conditions improved, the primary beneficiaries were women. Much like why women's life expectancy in India has http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/07/life-was-short.html
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Life Was... Short
8/5/09 10:32 PM
when economic conditions improved, the primary beneficiaries were women. Much like why women's life expectancy in India has increased more than men's as the country develops(though it is still the only country were men on average live longer than women). Posted by: DrDick | July 28, 2009 at 04:58 PM I dunno, I'm skeptical of this data. The variation for men is only about 1.2%, for women about 2.5% - and the article explains the many assumptions and calculations that went in to calculating the heights. How much of this is just noise? Posted by: Bloix | July 28, 2009 at 05:24 PM I bet that the increase in height during the 4th to 6th centuries is due to more tall Germans (goths, visigoths, vandals, etc) who came into the Empire and proceeded to multiply. Posted by: M. Carey | July 28, 2009 at 05:47 PM What Bloix said. Put another way: any visualization of the Cosmic All needs error bars. (Presumably the Arisians' error bars are very small.) Posted by: Cosm Shalizi | July 28, 2009 at 05:49 PM Roman agriculture with their light scratch-plows didnt change as they went away from the Meditteranean soils. Barbarian agriculture, with their heavy plows, do a much better job of getting calories per acre. Posted by: Ian Whitchurch | July 28, 2009 at 09:51 PM The noise in the data is probably a product of where the most records comes from. The further away from the centers of writing that the original data is described, the more exaggerations and biases come into play. Call it the Herodotus Effect. I'm mostly curious about that huge jump in female heights after the printing press... Posted by: shah8 | July 29, 2009 at 01:19 AM Roman society had terrible wealth inequality issues. This is why it collapsed. Those on the bottom were unwilling to fight to keep their repressive system. This is why the Muslim reform movement swept through North Africa so rapidly in the late 600-700s. Posted by: bakho | July 29, 2009 at 05:09 AM
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