Changes in the Process of Aging During the Twentieth Century: Findings and Procedures of the Early I...
Date Posted: Sep 20, 2009
The program project Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease and Death investigates how socioeconomic and environmental factors in early life can shape health and work levels in later life. Project researchers have approached this problem by creating a life-cycle sample that permits a longitudinal study of the aging of Union Army veterans, the first cohort to reach age 65 during the twentieth century. Comparing Union Army data with data from NHANES and NHIS has shown that age-specific prev
High Performing Asian Economies
Date Posted: Aug 24, 2009
To American and European economists in 1945, the countries of Asia were unpromising candidates for high economic growth. In 1950 even the most prosperous of these countries had a per capita income less than 25 percent of that of the United States. Between the mid-1960s and the end of the twentieth century, however, many of the countries of South and Southeast Asia experienced vigorous economic growth, some with growth rates far exceeding the previous growth rates of the industrialized countries.
Reconsidering Expectations of Economic Growth after
Date Posted: Aug 10, 2009
At the close of World War II, there were wide-ranging debates about the future of economic developments. Historical experience has since shown that these forecasts were uniformly too pessimistic. Expectations for the American economy focused on the likelihood of secular stagnation; this topic continued to be debated throughout the post-World War II expansion. Concerns raised during the late 1960s and early 1970s about rapid population growth smothering the potential for economic growth in less d
New: The Impact of the Asian Miracle on the Theory of Economic Growth
Date Posted: Jun 08, 2009
This paper, divided into seven sections, considers the development of economic growth theory in light of the spectacular advances of the economies of China, India, and Southeast Asia. Section 1 reviews the debate over the sources of technological change and the measurement of total factor productivity that emerged during the second half of the 1950s. Section 2, Convergence and Divergence, deals with the closing of the economic gap between the U.S. and other OECD nations that existed after World
New: Forecasting the Cost of U.S. Health Care in 2040
Date Posted: Oct 07, 2008
One of the most important debates among health economists in rich nations is whether advances in biotechnology will spare their health care systems from a financial crisis. We must consider that prevalence rates of chronic diseases declined during the twentieth century and that this rate of decline has accelerated. However, health care costs may continue to increase even as the age of onset of chronic diseases is delayed, because the proportion of a cohort living to late ages will increase. The
New: Changes in American and British Stature Since the Mid-Eighteenth Century: A Prelimanary Report on th...
Date Posted: Sep 21, 2008
No abstract is available for this paper.
New Sources and New Techniques for the Study of Secular Trends in Nutritional Status, Health, Mortal...
Date Posted: Jun 19, 2008
The aim of this paper is to describe the full dimensions of a new and rapidly growing research program that uses new data sources on food consumption, anthropometric measures, genealogies, and life-cycle histories to shed light on secular trends in nutritional status, health, mortality, and the process of aging. The exploitation of these types of data involves integration of analytical procedures in medicine and economics with those of demography. The discussion is divided into four parts. Part
Second Thoughts on the European Escape from Hunger: Famines, Price Elasticities, Entitlements, Chron...
Date Posted: Mar 14, 2008
This six principal findings of this paper are as follows: (1) Crisis mortality accounted for less than 5 percent of total mortality in England prior to 1800 and the elimination of crisis mortality accounted for just 15 percent of the decline in total mortality between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (2) The use of variations in wheat prices to measure variations in the food supply has led to gross overestimates of the variability of the food supply. (3) The famines that plagued Engl
New: Problems in Modeling Complex Dynamic interactions: The Political Realignment of the 1850s
Date Posted: Nov 13, 2007
No abstract is available for this paper.
New: Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease, and Death
Date Posted: Jun 27, 2007
This paper summarizes a collaborative project designed to create a public-use tape suitable for a prospective study of aging among a random sample of 39,616 men mustered into 331 companies of the Union Army. The aim of the project is to measure the effect of socioeconomics and biomedical factors during childhood and early adulthood on the development of specific chronic disease at middle and late ages, on labor force participation at these later ages, and on elapsed time to death. This paper sur
New: Toward a New Synthesis on the Role of Economic Issues in the Political Realignment of the 1850s
Date Posted: Jun 27, 2007
After sketching various ways in which economic issues influenced the political realignment of the 1850s, the paper concentrates on five questions: (1) the timing of the economic issues and the disjunctions in economic developments across regions and classes; (2) the size of the nonagricultural male labor force of the North toward the end of the 1850s and the ethnic and residential distributions of these workers; (3) changes in the ethnic composition of the northern electorate and the sharp shift
New: Capitalism and Democracy in 2040: Forecasts and Speculations
Date Posted: Jun 27, 2007
While the economies of the fifteen countries that were in the European Union (EU15) in 2000 will continue to grow from now until 2040, they will not be able to match the surges in growth that will occur in South and East Asia. In 2040, the Chinese economy will reach $123 trillion, or nearly three times the output of the entire globe in the year 2000, despite the influence of several potential political and economic constraints. India's economy will also continue to grow, although significant con
New: Why China is Likely to Achieve its Growth Objectives
Date Posted: May 15, 2006
In 2002, the Chinese Communist Party announced a goal of quadrupling per capita income by the year 2020. Starting at income levels of the year 2000, this would require a growth rate of 7.2 percent per annum in per capita income or close to 8.0 percent in GDP. Such unresolved and emerging problems as growing income disparities, increasing pollution, pressures on infrastructure, the inefficiency of state owned enterprises, and political instability are often cited as reasons to doubt the attainabi
Changes in the Physiology of Aging During the Twentieth Century
Date Posted: May 12, 2005
One way to demonstrate how remarkable changes in the process of aging have been is to compare health over the life cycles of 3 cohorts. For the first cohort, born between 1835 and 1845 (the Civil War cohort), life was short and disabilities were common even at young ages. Other factors contributing to lifelong poor health were widespread exposure to severely debilitating diseases and chronic malnutrition. Fewer of the World War II cohort, born between 1920 and 1930, died in infancy and most of t
The Economics of Mortality in North America, 1650-1910: A Description ofa Research Project
Date Posted: Jul 07, 2004
No abstract is available for this paper.
Some Notes on the Scientific Methods of Simon Kuznets
Date Posted: Jul 04, 2004
This paper discusses the scientific methods that guided the economic research of Simon Kuznets, with particular stress on his approach to measurement and theory. The paper closes with the transcription of a brief autobiographical talk by Kuznets at a dinner in honor of his eightieth birthday.
Changes in the Disparities in Chronic Disease during the Course of the Twentieth Century
Date Posted: Mar 09, 2004
Longitudinal studies support the proposition that the extent and severity of chronic conditions in middle and late ages are to a large extent the outcome of environmental insults at early ages, including in utero. Data from the Early Indicators program project undertaken at the Center for Population Economics suggest that the range of differences in exposure to disease has narrowed greatly over the course of the twentieth century, that age-specific prevalence rates of chronic diseases were much
Who Gets Health Care?
Date Posted: Aug 13, 2003
Around the world, as in the United States, concern is growing about who gets health care. Individuals from different socioeconomic backgrounds face distressingly different prospects of living a healthy life. Disparities in various measures of health between the privileged and the deprived still remain wide, despite the long-term tendency toward a healthier society. Some investigators believe the shift in the health care system in industrial countries from the principle of universal access to a m
Secular Trends in Physiological Capital: Implications for Equity in Health Care
Date Posted: Jun 15, 2003
Over the past three centuries there has been a rapid accumulation of physiological capital in OECD countries. Enhanced physiological capital is tied to long-term reduction in environmental hazards and to the conquest of chronic malnutrition. Data on heights and birth weights suggests that physiological capital has become more equally distributed, thereby reducing socioeconomic disparities in the burden of disease. Implications for health care policy are: (1) enhanced physiological capital has do
Simon S. Kuznets: April 30, 1901-July 9, 1985
Date Posted: Jun 25, 2001
This paper, prepared for the Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, presents an account of the scholarly career of Simon S. Kuznets. Among the issues considered are his contribution to the development of the empirical tradition in economics, his transformation of the field of national income accounting, his use of national income accounting during World War II to set production targets for both the military and civilian sectors of the economy, and to guide the implementation
Nutrition and the Decline in Mortality Since 1700: Some Additional Preliminary Findings
Date Posted: Jan 02, 2001
This paper is an extensive revision and expansion of Working Paper No. 1402. It centers on a new time series of life expectations in the U.S. since 1720, which has been constructed from the NBER/CPE pilot sample of genealogies. Native-born Americans achieved remarkably long life expectations toward the end of the eighteenth century but then experienced a 70-year decline. A new rise began late in the 1850s but it was not until 1930 that the Americans again achieved the level of life expectatio
Nutrition and the Decline in Mortality Since 1700: Some Preliminary Findings
Date Posted: Dec 31, 2000
This paper uses the data in the NBER/CPE pilot sample of genealogies to create a new time series on life expectation in the U.S. since 1720. After attaining remarkably high levels toward the end of the eighteenth century, life expectation as measured by e0(10) began a decline that lasted about 80 years before beginning the new rise with which we have long been familiar. Second, time series on the average adult stature of national populations in North America and Europe are used as a measure of
The Conquest of High Mortality and Hunger in Europe and America: Timing and Mechanisms
Date Posted: Dec 31, 2000
The modern secular decline in mortality in Western Europe did not begin until the 1780s and the first wave of improvement was over by 1840. The elimination of famines and of crisis mortality played only a secondary role during the first wave of the decline and virtually none thereafter. Reductions in chronic malnutrition were much more important and may have accounted for most of the improvement in life expectation before 1875. Chronic malnutrition were much more important and may have accoun
Economic Growth, Population Theory, and Physiology: The Bearing of Long-Term Processes on the Making...
Date Posted: Jul 26, 2000
This paper sketches a theory of the secular decline in morbidity and mortality that takes account of changes in human physiology since 1700. The synergism between technological and physiological improvements has produced a form of human evolution, much more rapid than natural selection, which is still ongoing in both OECD and developing countries. Thermodynamic and physiological aspects of economic growth are defined and their impact on growth rates is assessed. Implications of this theory fo
The Relevance of Malthus for the Study of Mortality Today: Long-Run Influences on Health, Mortality,...
Date Posted: May 16, 2000
This paper argues that the secular decline in mortality, which began during the eighteenth century, is still in progress and will probably continue for another century or more. The evolutionary perspective presented in this paper focuses not only on the environment, which from the standpoint of human health and prosperity has become much more favorable than it was in Malthus's time, but also on changes in human physiology over the past three centuries which affect both economic and biomedical p
The Relevance of Malthus for the Study of Mortality Today: Long-Run Influences on Health, Mortality,...
Date Posted: May 08, 2000
This paper argues that the secular decline in mortality, which began during the eighteenth century, is still in progress and will probably continue for another century or more. The evolutionary perspective presented in this paper focuses not only on the environment, which from the standpoint of human health and prosperity has become much more favorable than it was in Malthus's time, but also on changes in human physiology over the past three centuries which affect both economic and biomedical p