This article investigates the influence of health on the growth paths of ten industrialized countries over the course of 100 to 125 years. Changes in health increased their pace of growth by 30 to 40 percent, altering permanently the slope of their growth paths. This finding is robust across five measures of long-term health and it remains largely unchanged when “controlled” for investment in physical capital. Health-related variables correlate positively with years of schooling. However, schooling variables by themselves do not replicate the results obtained from health-related measures. Health improvements thus do not merely follow economic progress.

The Epidemiologic Transition can help us understand population aging. Noninfectious degenerative diseases, the ones associated with aging, were prominent in the Malthusian epidemiologic regime through the 1860s. They used to be fatal at much younger ages than they are today. Shortly after infectious maladies began receding in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, noninfectious diseases began trending downward, ushering in more aging and longer lives than before. Hidden in the descent of noninfectious diseases were age-profiles of cohorts raised in the different regimes. As the regimes transitioned from the Malthusian to the modern one, the age-profiles had shifted downward: noninfectious diseases had shrunk at each age, increasing the aging potentials of the cohorts. The shifts associated closely with the epidemiologic conditions in childhood, whose influence surfaced at early adult ages and extended to the advanced ages. The changing childhood conditions also appear to be one circumstance under which the aging potentials of the newer cohorts were misgauged, including in one troubling episode in the first half of the nineteenth century when, contrary to expectation, the potentials were thrown into reverse.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract