Compare methods

	Anthropometric History	Historical Inequality Reconstruction
Field	Economic History	Economic History
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1995	2011
Originator	Robert Fogel, Richard Steckel, John Komlos and collaborators	Branko Milanovic, Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson
Type	Biological standard-of-living estimation	Inequality estimation from grouped data
Seminal source	Steckel, R. H. (1995). Stature and the Standard of Living. Journal of Economic Literature, 33(4), 1903-1940.	Milanovic, B., Lindert, P. H., & Williamson, J. G. (2011). Pre-Industrial Inequality. The Economic Journal, 121(551), 255-272.
Aliases	Height history, Stature-based welfare analysis, Biological standard of living, Auxological economic history	Social table inequality estimation, Inequality possibility frontier, Extraction ratio analysis, Milanovic-Lindert-Williamson method
Related	4	4
Summary	Anthropometric history reads the material conditions of the past from the human body itself, using mean adult stature by birth cohort as a barometer of the biological standard of living. Final height reflects net nutritional status during the growth years—the food a child consumed minus the energy claimed by disease and physical labour—so a population's average height encodes the quality of life experienced by its members as they grew up. Pioneered by Robert Fogel, Richard Steckel and John Komlos, the approach exploits height records left by armies, prisons, slave registers and conscription boards. It proved its worth by revealing the antebellum puzzle—Americans growing shorter during decades of rising income—and by tracking living standards in places and periods where wage and price data fail. Steckel's influential surveys established stature as a complement, and sometimes a corrective, to conventional money-metric measures of welfare in economic history.	Historical inequality reconstruction estimates how unequally income was distributed in pre-industrial societies that left no household surveys, by exploiting social tables—contemporary or reconstructed enumerations of social classes with their populations and average incomes, in the tradition of Gregory King's 1688 anatomy of England. Branko Milanovic, Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson developed the modern framework, computing a Gini coefficient from these grouped data and then placing it in context with two further concepts. The inequality possibility frontier defines the maximum inequality a society could sustain once everyone must receive at least subsistence; because poor societies have little surplus above subsistence to redistribute upward, their feasible inequality is constrained. The extraction ratio—actual inequality divided by this maximum—measures how fully the elite extracted the available surplus. Together these tools let historians compare not just raw inequality but the rapacity of ruling classes across societies of vastly different average income.