Living Standards in Latin American History: Height, Welfare, and Development, 1750–2000 (review)

In this volume Ricardo Salvatore, John Coatsworth, and Amílcar Challú unite eight papers, most of which were originally presented at a conference at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies in 2005, and add a short introduction. Living Standards in Latin American History is thus not a survey of human development in the region since 1750; we will have to wait for that much-needed text. However, it does advance current scholarship in two very important ways. First, most of the chapters use a still relatively new methodology, anthropometrics, to study questions of welfare and development. Second, individual chapters seriously challenge existing narratives of the economic, social, or political developments in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Guatemala in various periods, thanks to their alternative approach. For this reason, the volume was awarded the Premio Vicens Vives of the Asociación de Histo-ria Económica Española.

Anthropometrics uses human height as a means of understanding biological welfare and Living Standards offers a great sample of its analytical potential. For economic historians, it is not only a way to probe periods for which estimates of such measures as GDP are impossible to construct—it is also a much-needed corrective to economists’ single-minded focus on national income and growth in that it centers squarely on human well-being. The principle that height is an aggregate measure of pre- and post-natal nutrition, health, environment, and childhood labor makes it a great proxy for living standards and is as such generally accepted in comparative studies. As Ríos and Bogin demonstrate, if Guatemalan Mayans’ heights have been stunted throughout the twentieth century, it has nothing to do with ethnicity and much to do with persistently poor living standards.

One criticism of this volume is that neither the introduction nor the country-specific chapters discuss clearly the relationship between inequality and living standards. The starting point for most discussion is that inequality was historically and is still today supposed to be a particularly persistent Latin American problem. This notion underpins the chapters that explore the importance of body height; the chapter by Bertola and co-authors on the Mercosur countries, which methodologically focuses on the human development index; and McGuire’s chapter on Chile that seeks to relate political regimes with infant mortality. It becomes rather obvious that these papers were written several years ago, and thus had little chance to engage with the very recent debates that suggest that historical inequality in Latin America might in fact have been quite comparable to European levels until the nineteenth century. The debates also suggest the reversal of a historical trend due to active social policies, over the last 20 years and invites a revision to the incidence of state actions and social policies.

Nevertheless, historians of Latin America will find fascinating the debates regarding such received wisdom in these chapters. Challú’s chapter on Mexico, for example, challenges the conventional historiography by arguing that living standards of the lower-income groups declined in the late eighteenth century just as the economy began to grow rapidly. López-Alonso equally contradicts the established characterization of the period between 1850 and 1950 by showing that neither growth nor increased urbanization nor the Revolution did much for Mexican’s biological well-being during that time. Meisel and Vega claim that half a century of economic growth between 1870 and 1920 in Colombia also failed to improve living standards for the elites. Salvatore shows that the export boom did nothing for the living standard of most Argentines. Paradoxically, neither World War I nor the Great Depression had negative impact. Monasterio and co-authors demonstrate that while Brazilian income distribution improved over the second half of the twentieth century, inequality as measured by human welfare did not.

This volume will probably be read most often as separate chapters...