The Obesity of the Nations

Via Economist:

Self-promotion

They are talking about the book that contains, among many very interesting papers, the one that Shikida, Nogueról, and I have written on the stature of Brazilians.

Jorge Luís Borges reads "Del rigor en la ciencia" (On Exactitude in Science) (Via Boing Boing)

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Borges' short stories give lessons in Methodology . "El rigor..." is a perfect response when somebody criticizes a model for being an abstraction of reality. "Funes, the Memorious" explains why it is dangerous to consider all details of reality or history. Abstraction is a necessity.

How useful is anthropometric history?

...Some reflections on Paul Hohenberg’s recent presidential address to the American Economic History Association by John Komlos:

"In his recent presidential address to the American Economic History Association, Paul Hohenberg argued that anthropometric history does not meet his criteria for useful research in the field of economic history. He considers research useful if (a) it “helps shape one of our underlying disciplines”; b) it contributes “to clear—even fresh—thinking about current, policy-related issues or on-going scholarly debates about the historical past"; and c) it “penetrates the fuzzy realm of identity-shaping popular discourse”. I argue briefly that only a superficial reading of the literature would lead to the conclusion that anthropometric history has not been useful."

Obviously I am on Professor Komlos' side. (In fact, I think that Economic History should not try to be useful in any sense. Searching for the truth (or Truth or "truth", you choose) is a mission tough enough.)

Whipple's index in R

The index measures the degree of age heaping in demographic data. Joerg Baten have been applying it to appraise the numeracy of historical populations. Surely there is neater way to do it, but here is the code in R that I've just written:

tmp1<-data[data>=23 & data<=62]
tmp2<-tmp1%%5
whipple<-(length(tmp2[tmp2==0])/length(tmp1))*500
whipple

Graph of regression results

Thanks to the R code written by the guys at Tables2Graphs (take a look at the blog of Eduardo Leoni, one of the authors), I've managed to get the graph bellow. It represents the estimated coefficients of a regression concerning the height of workers born between 1889-1921 and registered at Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.

Click here for amazing R graphs.

Heights and Human Welfare: Recent Developments and New Directions

Richard Steckel, one of the founding fathers of Anthoropometric History, has written a new survey.

The worst mistake

Jared Diamond says that our problems started when we adopted agriculture:

To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.(...)

There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. ... Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies... led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease.

Via Brad Delong.

Height and Income

This article gets almost everything wrong. It says that the causality runs in the direction height -> income. In fact, kids that have access to better nutrition and health receive a better education as well and end up being taller and more successful (on average). Height is just a confounding variable and does not cause financial or emotional success, as the article suggests. (OK, I do admit that there is labour market discrimination against shorter people, but I guess that these effects are not really important in developed economies.)

PS: Are you interested in Anthropometrics? So read anything from Prof Komlos, Prof Steckel, and Prof Fogel.