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Did industrialization lift all boats? I spent yesterday cleaning and harmonizing data on 10,000 Swedish convicts to shed some light on how disadvantaged groups fared during the Industrial Revolution. (1/9)
Prisons recorded a rich set of physical characteristics of convicts including their height: a widely used summary measure of living standards in the anthropometric literature. Here& #39;s one example of such a prison record: (2/9)
Criminals convicted between 1826-1939 were drawn mainly from working-class groups, while farmers were heavily underrepresented: (3/9)
Heights started to increase among convicts born from the mid-19th century and onwards, when economic growth and industrialization took off. By the early 20th century, heights had increased by approximately 5 cm: (4/9)
Notably, convicts were on average at least as tall as the average military conscript and saw comparable growth over the period: (5/9)
Yet significant differences in height existed among convicts from different socioeconomic groups: unskilled workers, for example, were approximately 5 cm shorter than higher managers: (6/9)
While all social groups saw rising stature over time, gaps in height between social groups seemingly persist among those born in the early 20th century: (7/9)
Heights similarly differed across regions: (8/9)
But there was rapid regional convergence in heights over the century prior to World War I presumably due to the spread of growth and industrialization: (9/9)
