Vertaile menetelmiä

	Historical Inequality Reconstruction	Anthropometric History
Tieteenala	Economic History	Economic History
Menetelmäperhe	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Syntyvuosi	2011	1995
Kehittäjä	Branko Milanovic, Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson	Robert Fogel, Richard Steckel, John Komlos and collaborators
Tyyppi	Inequality estimation from grouped data	Biological standard-of-living estimation
Alkuperäislähde	Milanovic, B., Lindert, P. H., & Williamson, J. G. (2011). Pre-Industrial Inequality. The Economic Journal, 121(551), 255-272.	Steckel, R. H. (1995). Stature and the Standard of Living. Journal of Economic Literature, 33(4), 1903-1940.
Rinnakkaisnimet	Social table inequality estimation, Inequality possibility frontier, Extraction ratio analysis, Milanovic-Lindert-Williamson method	Height history, Stature-based welfare analysis, Biological standard of living, Auxological economic history
Liittyvät	4	4
Tiivistelmä	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.	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.