In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Hockey-Stick EconomicsRobert Fogel, The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100
  • Joel Mokyr (bio)

In some circles, the idea that history is gradual and continuous is still tenaciously held.1 Economic historians know better. The past is not what it used to be, and changes have been, at times, dizzyingly abrupt. In terms of some material variables, both human and environmental, a new metaphor has caught on recently: a hockey stick. The image conveys the idea of a very sharp turn upward after a long period of stability. This figure of speech seems to have been first used by climatologist Michael Mann apropos of the sharp upturn of temperature after 1900, and it has become a common (and contested) description of the perceived environmental impact of industrialization.2

Such a discontinuity can be detected in vital statistics and other indicators of human biology. In a short but remarkable book, The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100: Europe, America, and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. xvii+191, $65/ $23.99), Robert William Fogel shows in great detail that somewhere around the same time that Mann's world temperature started shooting up, people began to live longer, buried fewer infants, and grew taller and healthier. Fogel's term for this is "techno-physio evolution" (possibly not a neologism that will become widely adopted), and his depiction of it (p. 22) looks [End Page 613] remarkably like a hockey stick. For Fogel, the twentieth century was the great turning point. He feels that material progress for the working class in the nineteenth century has been overstated and that 1900 or so marks a watershed after which progress became extremely rapid. In terms of any biological measure he can find, Fogel documents that in the twentieth century, the inhabitants of the industrialized world underwent a set of extraordinary transformations: living longer, growing taller, heavier, and healthier. Mann's and Fogel's hockey sticks are not, of course, causally related. They are both products of modern economic growth, the increased use of technology, resources, and capital to allow people to consume more while working less.

For Fogel, who seems little concerned with the environmental impact of growth, this is an almost unmitigated blessing—not only are people richer and healthier but they have the time to enjoy their wealth. The number of leisure hours available to the average person lucky enough to have been born in the twentieth century is vastly larger than what her ancestors enjoyed. Rather than being harried and overworked, the typical worker in Europe and North America now spends fewer hours on the job, starts work later in life, and spends many years in retirement, a phenomenon so new and radical that our fiscal institutions need to be redesigned to deal with it. The net result, Fogel points out in a striking passage, is that "today ordinary people have time to enjoy those amenities of life that only the rich could afford in abundance a century ago. Those amenities broaden the mind, enrich the soul, and relieve the monotony of much of earnwork" (p. 74). While a cynical reader might wonder if Professor Fogel has ever watched reality TV, in recent years even much of the hard and monotonous "earnwork" is being replaced by machines, bar-code readers, and sophisticated software.

Fogel is interested in both the economic significance and the biological implications of this revolution. In his rosy picture, twentieth-century Westerners are the first people who got enough to eat. In previous societies, excepting a small minority, people were chronically malnourished, physically stunted, and hence unproductive and poor. Fogel feels that in assessing economic progress, economists may be well advised to pay more heed to biomedical measures and less to such traditional economic indicators as income and consumption. This advice seems sage, but, as Fogel realizes, the human body is a complex mechanism, and it may interact in odd ways with economic progress. Whereas in the past malnutrition was a greater problem than it is now, in today's wealthy economies the decline in physical work paired with the low price of attractive foods has increased the incidence of its...

pdf

Share