How beneficent is the market? A look at the modern history of mortality.

The concept of human development has recently emerged to rival economic development as a worldwide objective of public policy. In assessing human welfare, advocates of this concept would, at a minimum, place indicators of social conditions, notably life expectancy and educational achievement, on equal footing with traditional economic measures like GDP per capita and a poverty index; some would go further and include indicators of political and civil liberties. In this paper, I focus on only one of the proposed new measures, life expectancy at birth (referred to subsequently simply as life expectancy). I think it is fair to say that, so far as life expectancy is concerned, the common reaction among economists and economic historians is skepticism of the broader measure of human development. This is because improved life expectancy is typically viewed as a natural byproduct of economic development or of the institutional conditions that foster economic development. Thus, elevating life expectancy to the status of a social goal commensurate with economic growth raises no issues that economists are not already dealing with in focussing on economic growth and its determinants. It is this view to which the present article is addressed. Specifically, the questions of concern here are: (1) is life expectancy largely or wholly a function of economic growth? (2) if