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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Timothy Cuff. The Hidden Cost of Economic Development: The Biological Standard of Living in Antebellum Pennsylvania. (Modern Economic and Social History Series.) Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing Company. 2005. Pp. xvii, 277. $99.95.
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| Timothy Cuff has written a timely, important, and very dry book that only a statistician could truly love. A scholar of historical anthropometrics, "the study of longitudinal or cross-sectional patterns in human body size" (p. 10), Cuff has scrutinized the height records of 20,000 Pennsylvania Civil War soldiers. Cuff compares the soldiers' heights to their region of origin in Pennsylvania and correlates each soldier's biological standard of living with the degree of market orientation present in his home region. |
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Cuff seeks to measure the past by using a variant of the human development index, the modern concept for assessing the standard of living that moves beyond merely quantifying gross national product (GNP) or real income. While both measurements are obviously important, the United Nations, many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and even the World Bank are concluding that a more meaningful measurement includes such things as nutrition levels, life expectancy, access to health care and education, and intangibles such as a sense of fulfillment and general satisfaction with one's lot in life. Using this more complete measurement, the modern U.S. is not the leader on the human development index. |
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