Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 9 of my GMU Econ colleague Mark Koyama’s, and his co-author Jared Rubin’s, 2022 book, How the World Became Rich (link added):

We observe a strong positive relationship between gains in height and per capita GDP in the past 200 years. People in the past were short. The mean height of an 18 year old in the English army between 1763 and 1767 was 160.76 cm (around 5’3″) (Floud, Fogel, Harris, and Hong, 2011, p. 27). The increase in average height partly reflects the improvement in nutritional standards achieved since the onset of modern economic growth.

DBx: As Koyama and Rubin note elsewhere in their book, the improved nutritional standards that increased humans’ average height are ones not only for children but also for mothers during pregnancy.