Economic Welfare and Health During Development

In this book, Scott Alan Carson considers the relationship between economic development and net nutrition. Highlighting new health patterns found from a thorough analysis of more than 320,000 height observations across imprisoned individuals and the general public in the 19th- and 20th-century United States, the book highlights a new history of United States net nutrition, health, and urbanization.

The book begins with historical observations regarding wealth, income, agricultural productivity, transportation revolution, and disease in urban landscapes. Chapters span the Barker hypothesis, nutritional variations by region, migratory patterns, and domestic residence. Analysing data related to height, race, gender, socioeconomic status, and disease, Carson reveals previously unexplored and undetected health variation. The book examines the historical health of the American populace during industrialization as it relates to broader economic change and public well-being.

Exploring the human cost of urbanization, the book offers economists, anthropometric researchers, economic historians, and anthropologists a new way to conceptualize the relationship between historical health data and urbanization.

Scott Alan Carson  is Professor of Economics for the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Texas, Permian Basin. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley for over 20 years.