Compare methods

	Historical Auxology	Real-Wage and Welfare-Ratio Analysis
Field	Economic History	Economic History
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1986	2001
Originator	James Tanner (auxology); Richard Steckel and growth-profile economic historians	Robert C. Allen (building on the Phelps Brown-Hopkins tradition)
Type	Growth-trajectory analysis	Living-standards index construction
Seminal source	Steckel, R. H. (1995). Stature and the Standard of Living. Journal of Economic Literature, 33(4), 1903-1940.	Allen, R. C. (2001). The Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices from the Middle Ages to the First World War. Explorations in Economic History, 38(4), 411-447.
Aliases	Growth-profile history, Age-specific stature analysis, Catch-up growth history, Developmental anthropometrics	Allen welfare ratio, Subsistence-basket real wages, Bare-bones and respectability baskets, Purchasing-power wage analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	Historical auxology shifts the anthropometric lens from final adult height to the trajectory of growth itself, analysing how children and adolescents grew, age by age, in the past. Where cohort-stature analysis treats terminal height as a single summary, auxology reads the whole developmental curve—the timing and tempo of growth, the depth of stunting at particular ages, the adolescent growth spurt, and the phenomenon of catch-up growth when deprivation eases. Grounded in James Tanner's clinical science of human growth and adapted to historical child-height data from slave manifests, school surveys and reformatory records, the approach can localise hardship to specific developmental windows. A dip in stature relative to modern standards at age eight, followed by recovery, tells a different story than uniform lifelong stunting. By treating growth as a process rather than an endpoint, historical auxology extracts finer-grained, age-targeted evidence about when in childhood living conditions bit hardest.	Real-wage and welfare-ratio analysis measures the material living standards of working people by asking a deceptively simple question: how many baskets of basic goods could a worker's earnings buy? Robert Allen, refining the older Phelps Brown-Hopkins price-and-wage tradition, devised the welfare ratio—annual household earnings divided by the annual cost of a fixed consumption basket scaled to subsist a family. By specifying a spartan bare-bones basket meeting minimum calorie and nutrient needs, and a more generous respectability basket, and by converting wages and prices into grams of silver, Allen made living standards comparable across the great cities of Europe and Asia and across many centuries. The method underpinned his Great Divergence findings, showing that London and Amsterdam workers enjoyed welfare ratios far above bare subsistence while many Asian and southern European labourers hovered near it. It has become the workhorse for cross-cultural comparison of pre-industrial living standards.