Overview
American economic historian (University of Chicago, 1926–2013), Nobel laureate in Economics (1993, with Douglass North) and a founder of cliometrics. His later work on nutrition, body size, and longevity — "technophysio evolution" — linked improvements in nutrition and net food intake to long-run gains in health and mortality.
Key Contributions / Features
- Nutrition and the secular decline in mortality: used anthropometric history (heights, body-mass) to argue that better nutrition and reduced disease burden drove much of the long-run improvement in health and life expectancy — developing the quantitative strand of the McKeown–Szreter determinants-of-mortality debate. See Preston Curve.
- Cliometrics: pioneered the application of formal economic theory and quantitative methods to economic history.
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