Measuring Up: A History of Living Standards in Mexico, 1850-1950 by Moramay López-Alonso (review)

The 1850-1950 century represents a period of critical importance in the history of Mexico, encompassing both the Porfiriato regime (1876-1911), the first period of economic expansion after many decades of conflict and economic stagnation following Mexico's Independence (1821), and the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and post-revolutionary construction of the principal economic and social institutions of modern Mexico (1920-1950). Despite a vast historical literature on the Porfiriato and Revolution, empirical evidence on the evolution of living standards over this period, and especially on the distribution of these standards, is surprisingly scarce in this literature. Measuring Up: A History of Living Standards in Mexico, 1850-1950 represents an original and important contribution in filling this critical knowledge gap.

The book makes two principal contributions to the historiography of this period: (1) it documents the history of living standards using an anthropometric dataset constructed by the author from historical military and passport archives, complemented with health and nutrition data from other sources, and (2) it presents a detailed history of welfare and health institutions—governmental and non-governmental—to provide context and interpretation for this evolution. In both themes the book presents compelling and surprising findings, which I will consider in turn.

The principal finding of the book is a long-term decline in the living standards of the lower strata of the population between 1850 and 1920, as proxied by the registered height of rural and federal soldiers born in this period. The trend reverses after 1920, but the data suggest that by 1940 living standards for these strata was similar to what they had achieved a full century before, in 1840. This decline happened in a period when real income per capita roughly doubled, and the living standards for upper income strata, as measured through the passport sample, increased continuously. The implied increase in inequality in living standards during the Porfiriato's economic boom is consistent with recent findings on long-term inequality in the Latin American region (see Leandro Prados de la Escosura, "Inequality and Poverty in Latin America:

A Long-Run Exploration," in The New Comparative Economic History [2007], ed. Timothy Hatton, Kevin O'Rourke, and Alan Taylor; and Jeffrey Williamson, "Five centuries of Latin American inequality", Revista de Historia Economica [2010]), though the reasons for this are very different from the interpretation offered by López-Alonso (see below). What is more surprising is the absolute decline in living standards in this expansive period, which is particularly steep in the case of rural soldiers. One limitation of the military data is that it is not a random sample of the lower-strata population. It is, therefore, possible in principle that the decline in height reflects a change in the composition of the sample, rather than a decline in living standards. For example, the voluntary rural corps may have attracted men from increasingly poor backgrounds as the Porfiriato's economic expansion created more employment opportunities for better off workers from more dynamic regions. An important limitation of the book is that it presents no evidence to ensure the robustness of this dataset, exploring neither possible composition effects, nor alternative and more complete measures of living standards in this period. Available sources of evidence on living standards, which could have been used for a more complete and certain account of living standards in this period, include: (1) unskilled wage/GDP per capita ratios (Jeffrey Williamson, "Real Wages and Relative Factor Prices in the Third World 1820-1940: Latin America," Harvard University Discussion Paper No. 1853 [1998]); (2) human development proxis at the state level (Raymundo M. Campos-Vázquez and Roberto Vélez-Grajales, "Did Population Well-being Improve During Porfirian Mexico? A Regional Analysis Using a Quasi-Human Development Index," Journal of Human Development and Capabilities [2012]), and productive assets (labor and land).

To account for these results, Measuring...