Compare methods

	Real-Wage and Welfare-Ratio Analysis	Anthropometric History
Field	Economic History	Economic History
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2001	1995
Originator	Robert C. Allen (building on the Phelps Brown-Hopkins tradition)	Robert Fogel, Richard Steckel, John Komlos and collaborators
Type	Living-standards index construction	Biological standard-of-living estimation
Seminal source	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.	Steckel, R. H. (1995). Stature and the Standard of Living. Journal of Economic Literature, 33(4), 1903-1940.
Aliases	Allen welfare ratio, Subsistence-basket real wages, Bare-bones and respectability baskets, Purchasing-power wage analysis	Height history, Stature-based welfare analysis, Biological standard of living, Auxological economic history
Related	4	4
Summary	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.	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.