WEIGHT AND WELFARE OF AUSTRALIANS, 1890-1940

Views differ on whether living standards in Australia improved between 1890 and 1940. The pessimists, relying principally on product and incomes measures, argue that living standards stagnated; the optimists, using augmented measures of well-being, argue that living standards may have improved. This paper contributes to this debate between the pessimists and optimists by using alternative measures of living standards, namely the height and body mass index (BMI) of male Australian army recruits of World Wars I and II. The nature and usefulness of these measures is examined. The major findings are that the height data indicate an unequivocal improvement in living standards in the period under consideration. The BMI data tend to support a similar conclusion, but the results are ambiguous and there are difficulties in using them alone to determine exactly what happened to living standards.