The power of the Kashrut: older but shorter:The impact of religious nutritional and hygienic rules on stature and life expectancy of Jewish conscripts in the early 19th century

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: We test the impact of several demographic, economic and social factors on stature in an early nineteenth century environment. SUBJECTS/METHODS: We use a database of conscripts from the period 1818-1860 of a rural province in The Netherlands (Drenthe). This area had a rather high biological standard of living. This database of 413 conscripts contains information about family structure, family rank order, height, tax income, occupation and age of death. Conscripts came from two communities: one from a particular village (Oosterhesselen) and the other was Jewish conscripts that came from the countryside of the province. RESULTS: Our statistical analysis shows a positive significant relationship between family size and height, which confirms the resource dilution theory. Remarkably, the sign of the relation between family size and life expectancy is inverse. Other factors such as the potato crisis and income had the expected effect on conscript heights. The community effect was strong. Jewish conscripts were much shorter than their counterparts. Access to nutrition, the specific food laws and other factors can explain this difference. CONCLUSIONS: An increasing sibship size had a negative impact on body height but positive effects on life expectancy when adulthood was reached. Specifically for the Jewish community was the positive effect of the death of the father on conscript height. The mechanisms behind this phenomenon are unclear and open for further research

The rejection of industrial democracy by Berle and Means and the emergence of the ideology of managerialism.

One distinctive feature of the American variant of capitalism is the near absence of any of the industrial democracy institutions found in many European firms. This article examines ideology as a factor behind the absence of industrial democracy institutions in the United States. It focuses on the early 1930s, when the ideology of managerialism was being formulated by Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means, the authors of a book that had a well-documented influence on American business culture. As the article shows, many American firms in the 1910s and 1920s experimented with worker representation systems that contemporaries called industrial democracy. Berle and Means were aware of these moves to democratize the American workplace, but they rejected all forms of industrial democracy. The article advances an explanation for their rejection and thereby contributes to our understanding why the United States did not take the path towards democracy within companies