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David Goldenberg, Statshot. Wall Street Journal, Sept 7, 2013
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB ... 59112745893206.html
* Underneath the graphic, there are three round dots (the first is orange and the next two grey. Click a grey dot to move to the next graphic.
My comment: Graphic 1 is based on
(a) Press release: New data reveals that the average height of European males has grown by 11cm in just over a century.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-09/oup-ndr083013.php
(b) Timothy J Hatton, How have Europeans grown so tall? Oxford Economic Papers, _: _ (online publication Sept 1, 2013).
http://oep.oxfordjournals.org/co ... /29/oep.gpt030.full
(i) Quote from each section:
(A) "1. Introduction":
"The average stature of human populations is a key indicator of health conditions, particularly during childhood. On this measure the long-run trends are striking. In a little more than a century, the average height of young adult European males has increased by about 11 cm. Although average height has fluctuated across the centuries, the increase since the late nineteenth century has been truly unprecedented. This article asks how that happened.
"A little more surprising is the fact that except for southern Europe, the gains in height were particularly strong in the period around the two world wars and the Great Depression.
(B) "2. Trends in the heights of Europeans":
"The database of average adult heights (at the age of about 21) for 5-year birth cohorts used here covers 15 European countries, where possible going back to the middle of the nineteenth century. It builds on the work of many others
"The data are plotted by birth cohort in Fig. 1. Between the birth cohorts of 1871–75 and 1976–80, average male height in these countries increased by 11 cm, or about 1 cm a decade. This unprecedented increase in height is consistent with results independently derived by Baten and Blum (2012, p. S75).1 They also show that over this period European heights outpaced those typical of Africa, Latin America, and South Asia (Stegl and Baten, 2009; Baten and Blum, 2012). There is also some evidence of a distinct acceleration in growth in the middle of the data period. This can be see more clearly in Table 1 * * * Here [in Fig 1 and Table 1] the countries are grouped into three regions: North (Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden), Middle (Austria, Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland), and South (France, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Spain).
(C) "3. Socioeconomic determinants of health and height":
"As most of the literature attests, the two key influences on height are food and disease. These ‘inputs’ interact to produce net nutrition, and they have their major effects during early childhood.
(ii) Footnote 1 to this report states: "Longer-run data reveal no precedent. In their study of height in Europe over two millennia, Koepke and Baten (2005) find the maximum change (up or down) between any two adjacent centuries is about 2 cm (see also Steckel 2004).
(iii) I read the article and it seems to me that the only new finding is acceleration of height increases among Europeans after excluding those from southern Europe. The "five inches" (more precisely, 11 cm) increase or causes (including whether disease reduction or nutrition boost was more important--neither is new. |
发表于 9-7-2013 11:02:43
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