IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/10299.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: Health and Nutrition in Pre-Columbian America

Author

Listed:
  • Richard H. Steckel

Abstract

Lack of evidence has been the major obstacle to understanding trends and differences in human welfare over the millennia. This paper explains and applies methods that are obscure to most academics and essentially unknown to the general public. A millennial perspective is best obtained from skeletal remains, which depict not only childhood health conditions but also processes of degeneration that accompany aging and strenuous physical effort. Compiled into an index of health, data from 23 localities as part of a large collaborative project on the Western Hemisphere reveal diverse health conditions for the pre-Columbian population. For reasons not yet understood populations moved over time into less healthy ecological environments. The analysis has implications for understanding environmental determinants of health, the pattern of European conquest, pre-contact population size, investigating human adaptation to climate change, and discovering prime movers of very long-term economic growth.

Suggested Citation

  • Richard H. Steckel, 2004. "The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: Health and Nutrition in Pre-Columbian America," NBER Working Papers 10299, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:10299
    Note: DAE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w10299.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jones Charles I., 2001. "Was an Industrial Revolution Inevitable? Economic Growth Over the Very Long Run," The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, De Gruyter, vol. 1(2), pages 1-45, August.
    2. Robert Fogel & Dora Costa, 1997. "A theory of technophysio evolution, with some implications for forecasting population, health care costs, and pension costs," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 34(1), pages 49-66, February.
    3. Gary D. Hansen & Edward C. Prescott, 2002. "Malthus to Solow," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 92(4), pages 1205-1217, September.
    4. Jeffrey D. Sachs, 2001. "Tropical Underdevelopment," NBER Working Papers 8119, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. David N. Weil & Oded Galor, 2000. "Population, Technology, and Growth: From Malthusian Stagnation to the Demographic Transition and Beyond," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(4), pages 806-828, September.
    6. Michael J. Boskin, 1998. "Consumer Prices, the Consumer Price Index, and the Cost of Living," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 12(1), pages 3-26, Winter.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Oded Galor & Omer Moav, 2004. "Natural Selection and the Evolution of Life Expectancy," GE, Growth, Math methods 0409004, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Richard H. Steckel, 2003. "What Can Be Learned from Skeletons that Might Interest Economists, Historians, and Other Social Scientists?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 93(2), pages 213-220, May.
    2. Olsson, Ola & Hibbs, Douglas Jr., 2005. "Biogeography and long-run economic development," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 49(4), pages 909-938, May.
    3. Matthias Doepke, "undated". "Growth Takeoffs," UCLA Economics Online Papers 409, UCLA Department of Economics.
    4. Gonçola Monteiro & Alvaro Pereira, 2006. "From Growth Spurts to Sustained Growth," Discussion Papers 06/24, Department of Economics, University of York.
    5. Nils‐Petter Lagerlöf & Thomas Tangerås, 2008. "From rent seeking to human capital: a model where resource shocks cause transitions from stagnation to growth," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 41(3), pages 760-780, August.
    6. Matthias Doepke, 2004. "Accounting for Fertility Decline During the Transition to Growth," Journal of Economic Growth, Springer, vol. 9(3), pages 347-383, September.
    7. Iyigun, Murat & Walsh, Randall P., 2007. "Endogenous gender power, household labor supply and the demographic transition," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 82(1), pages 138-155, January.
    8. Michael Bar & Oksana Leukhina, 2010. "The role of mortality in the transmission of knowledge," Journal of Economic Growth, Springer, vol. 15(4), pages 291-321, December.
    9. Nils‐Petter Lagerlöf, 2003. "Mortality and Early Growth in England, France and Sweden," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 105(3), pages 419-440, September.
    10. Francesco Cinnirella & Marc P. B. Klemp & Jacob L. Weisdorf, 2012. "Malthus in the Bedroom: Birth Spacing as a Preventive Check Mechanism in Pre-Modern England," CESifo Working Paper Series 3936, CESifo.
    11. Galindev, Ragchaasuren, 2008. "The Evolution of Population, Technology and Output," MPRA Paper 17116, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 22 Aug 2009.
    12. Broadberry Stephen, 2012. "Recent Developments in the Theory of Very Long Run Growth: A Historical Appraisal," Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte / Economic History Yearbook, De Gruyter, vol. 53(1), pages 277-306, May.
    13. Schäfer, Andreas & Prettner, Klaus, 2016. "The fall and rise of inequality," VfS Annual Conference 2016 (Augsburg): Demographic Change 145806, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    14. Gonçalo Monteiro & Alvaro S. Pereira, 2006. "From Growth Spurts to Sustained Growth: The Nature of Growth and Unified Growth Theory," DEGIT Conference Papers c011_004, DEGIT, Dynamics, Economic Growth, and International Trade.
    15. Emmanuel Bovari & Victor Court, 2019. "Energy, knowledge, and demo-economic development in the long run: a unified growth model," Working Papers hal-01698755, HAL.
    16. Sunde, Uwe & Cervellati, Matteo, 2007. "Human Capital, Mortality and Fertility: A Unified Theory of the Economic and Demographic Transition," CEPR Discussion Papers 6384, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    17. David E Bloom & Michael Kuhn & Klaus Prettner, 2020. "The contribution of female health to economic development [The costs of missing the Millennium Development Goal on gender equity]," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 130(630), pages 1650-1677.
    18. Chu, Angus C. & Peretto, Pietro F., 2023. "Innovation and inequality from stagnation to growth," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 160(C).
    19. Kevin H. O'Rourke & Jeffrey G. Williamson, 2002. "From Malthus to Ohlin: Trade, Growth and Distribution Since 1500," CEG Working Papers 20023, Trinity College Dublin, Department of Economics.
    20. Chu, Angus C. & Furukawa, Yuichi & Wang, Xilin, 2022. "Rent-seeking government and endogenous takeoff in a Schumpeterian economy," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 72(C).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • N0 - Economic History - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:10299. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.