Anthropometric measures of standard of living
In more recent years increasing attention has been devoted to various anthropometric measures of standard of living, most notably heights and body mass index (see Steckel 1995 for a review).
Here we will limit our attention to heights, since this is the only measure available for Sweden in this period. Human final height serves as a measure of net- nutrition, that is, actual food intake minus claims on nutrition made by body maintenance functions, work, and disease. Even if genetic factors have an impact on individual height, the differences in average heights between different populations can largely be accounted for by environmental rather than genetic factors (Steckel 1995). In particular the nutritional intake and disease load during infancy and adolescence—the two most pronounced growth phases of humans—are important determinants of final height.Sandberg and Steckel have in several articles studied the development of heights in Sweden using data for soldiers (Sandberg and Steckel 1980, 1987, 1988, 1997). They found soldiers born in the early nineteenth century to have been about 1 cm taller than their counterparts born in the second half of the eighteenth century, indicating an improvement in standard of living (Sandberg and Steckel 1980). However, what is perhaps more interesting is their finding that the cohorts born in the late 1830s and the 1840s experienced declining heights, which would indicate a worsening of the situation, at least for the social groups from which the soldiers were recruited, during this period (Sandberg and Steckel 1988). It is difficult to immediately connect the declining stature for cohorts born during the 1840s to lower living standards, since, as was made clear above, it is uncertain to what degree the increase in child mortality was related to changes in standard of living. Since heights measure net- rather than gross-nutrition, it may well be the increased disease load facing these cohorts that accounts for the decline in stature, which in turn might be only weakly related to nutrition and standard of living. Thus, also in the case of heights, it turns out to be difficult to draw any firm conclusions concerning the standard of living development for the landless in the phase of agricultural transformation. After this temporary decline in stature, a continuous
increase begins, showing no adverse effects of the more rapid industrialization in the final decades of the nineteenth century (Sandberg and Steckel 1997).
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