“It’s called the antebellum puzzle,” said Lee Craig, a professor of economics at North Carolina State University, whose research belongs to an obscure subgenre of the field called cliometrics: the application of econometric analysis to history. Antebellum refers to the decades prior to the American Civil War, which began in 1861. The “puzzle,” according to Craig, is that during these decades in the United States and Western Europe, “biological measures of the standard of living erode, even though the standard economic measures seem to be going up.”
