The Hidden Cost of Economic Development. The Biological Standard of Living in Antebellum Pennsylvania

Abstract

Timothy Cuff, The Hidden Cost of Economic Development. The Biological Standard of Living in Antebellum Pennsylvania , Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Pp. 296. £55. ISBN 0 7546 4119 8. The flip side of nineteenth-century American market integration and economic progress, Timothy Cuff argues in The Hidden Cost of Economic Development , was a deterioration in the health of the population. The divergence in traditional economic measures and biological indicators of living standards such as human physical stature points to a hidden cost incurred by the generations who prepared the ground for modern economic growth. Within the debate about the repercussions of industrialisation on contemporary living standards, Cuff's work supports the pessimists' viewpoint that in a laissez-faire regime, the market does not necessarily produce desirable outcomes in all respects for the average citizen. There already exists a sizable body of literature on the stature decline in antebellum America but a question mark has remained regarding the underlying factors. Adult height depends on one's genes of course, but also on the balance between nutritional intake, assaults by diseases and physical exertion during youth (and the timing of each of these factors). While differences in genetic endowments are thought to cancel each other out at the population level, changes in average height may depend on any, or a combination, of the remaining three factors. The main plot of the book is to demonstrate that the better part of the decline in stature is attributable to a decline in nutritional intake, as a consequence of economic change.