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Book Review
| The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100: Europe, America, and the Third World. By ROBERT W. FOGEL. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 216 pp. $70.00 (cloth); $23.99 (paper).
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A review of the most recent book by the 1993 Economics Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel has to start with the man himself. Fogel has completed now more than four decades of distinguished research on the intersection of history, economics, demography, and public health. His earlier contributions focused mostly on American economic history and more specifically on the history of slavery. As in this book, Fogel's research is data-based and typically involves meticulous construction of large and complicated datasets that enable him to answer previously unanswerable questions. |
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An important dataset that Fogel was instrumental in constructing, and which is utilized at length in this book, is a longitudinal dataset based on the pension records of the Union Army from the second half of the nineteenth century that contains medical histories of veterans from childhood until death. This dataset, and similar ones constructed by others for French, English, and Norwegian data, are the cornerstone of The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100. |
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The central theme of this short manuscript (111 pages of text and 80 pages of bibliographical and other notes) is what Fogel terms the "technophysio evolution"—a process that describes the dynamic links between health, longevity, and productivity of humans in the last three hundred years. The first and most significant part of the book (chapters 1–2) describes the synergies between the technological developments in production and health throughout the human life span. As is typical for this data-centered work, the main research question is made clear in Table 1.1 (p. 2), in which we observe continuously increasing life expectancy (at birth) in, for example, England from thirty-two in 1725 to forty-eight in 1900 and seventy-six in 1990 with by far the most significant increase occurring between 1900 and 1920. After describing the history of medical and other research on this trend, Fogel suggests that "technophysio evolution" is the appropriate descriptor for this historical process. |
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