In the ongoing and considerable debate about the history of living standards in modern Mexico, Moramay López-Alonso's Measuring Up not only makes a significant contribution, it fundamentally alters the field by adding a substantial new methodology never before applied in Mexican history. As a consequence, nobody who studies the topic will be able to ignore this volume, which argues that measuring the average change in height of the population over time presents a better approximation of the change in living standards than prior methods, mostly real wage or per-capita GDP studies. Since improving the standard of living is purportedly a goal of the modern economy, economists, sociologists, political scientists and policy-makers, in addition to historians, will find this volume's methods and arguments to be a compelling addition to the literature.
Section I, ‘Institutions and Living Standards’, contains a history of the most important institutions – primarily Church and government – that tackled the problem of poverty during the period of study, 1850–1950. Poverty, says López-Alonso, ‘all but defines modern Mexican history’ (p. 15), and the purpose of this section is to set the institutional stage which will later allow her to measure the efficiency of these institutions. As she will argue, while many of these organisations did help some of the poor, their overall impact was not great.
Section II, ‘The Measure of Well-Being and Growth’, is the heart of the book. It argues that change over time in the average height of populations is the best measure of changes in the standard of living. It points out that real wage studies have been historically limited to specific groups and territories, while per-capita GDP studies often ignored income distribution, which in any case is difficult to historically reconstruct. Such studies also ignore the impact of investment in public goods on relieving poverty.
Instead, López-Alonso proposes that physical measures – life expectancy, infant mortality, rates of population growth and height of the population – can be better indicators of changes in the standard of living. Of these, the latter is the best measure because it doesn't suffer from some of the culturally specific aspects of the first three (pp. 64–5). In order to measure changes in the height of different populations, López-Alonso worked with three data sets: the military archives of the Department of Defence, recruitment files of induced soldiers from the rural militia (1821–1910) which are now in the National Archives, and passport records from the Ministry of Foreign Relations. Because these sources contain information on occupation and sex, the use of the three data sets allows her to study the change in height by social class as well as by gender. Not all of these archives are open to the public, and López-Alonso's description of them and how she employed their data is important and illustrative; it could almost serve as an introduction on how to work in Mexican archives. In fact, since the core argument of the book is quantitative, her analysis of data, methods and quantitative problems is a model for how to carry out this kind of research. She is careful to present the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches, clearly explaining her decision in each case.
Her quantitative work yields conclusions that are both startling and expected. It will be a surprise for some that for the population as a whole, average heights (and presumably living standards) increased not at all over the hundred-year period covered in the book. Average heights declined from the 1850s to the 1890s, levelled out with some slight declines to the 1930s, then rose to the 1950s, by which decade they had recovered their 1850s levels. The conclusion is that a century of economic growth did not benefit most Mexicans. On the other hand, and perhaps more expected, elite heights rose continuously from the 1850s to the 1950s, in line with results from other Western countries. Economic growth benefited the rich and powerful, but not the poor and powerless.
Section III explains the relationship between health and nutrition and the evolution of height in Mexico. It is an interesting discussion, and one that shows that the author is as well versed in Mexican culture as she is in the quantitative data and methodologies.
This is an outstanding book in many ways. The methodological discussions are sophisticated and critical. López-Alonso tries to show the different sides of the arguments and why she chose one or the other in each case. She is careful to a fault to make sure the data and calculations are good. She contrasts different theories to argue why one may be superior to another, or why they need to be combined, and she is also careful to bring in international comparisons. But mostly the book provides a new way of looking at and measuring living standards in Mexico, one that future scholars of Mexican economic development will have to take into account.
I think each reader will take something different from this volume, but reading it impressed on me that the standard of living is both an obvious and a nuanced category, and that it is probably the case that we need different measures – real wages, per-capita GDP, average height and others yet to be studied – to bring out various aspects. On the other hand, Measuring Up adds to a considerable body of literature that suggests modernisation and economic growth have not always benefited the Mexican people, though elites have generally argued otherwise – which they should, since they have benefited most from these processes. In any case, this is an outstanding volume whose careful archival work and quantitative methodologies will change not only our understanding of the standard of living in Mexico, but how we go about measuring it.
