Jörg Baten

Baten received his doctorate from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich with his work about the biological standard of living in South Germany. Since 2001 he holds the chair of economic history at the University of Tübingen. In 2005 he was invited as a visiting professor at Yale University (Dept. Political Science) and was visiting professor at Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona in 2006/07. Since 2006, Baten has also been the Secretary General of the International Economic History Association.

Baten achieved prominence with his works about the long term development of human capital and living standards. In a global project he and his colleagues studied trends of numerical skills over centuries.[2] As an indicator for numeracy, the share of people being able to state their exact age was used, as well as consumption statistics of books. Baten drew the conclusion that early development of education in some countries caused today’s differences between poor and rich, whereas world trade played a rather marginal role.[3]

Jointly with Nikola Koepke, Baten studied the history of health and nutrition in Europe since the ancient world [4] and in joint work with other junior scholars (for example, Alexander Moradi), he explored other world regions such as Africa, the Middle East and Latin America using methods of anthropometric history.[5][6][7]

One fundamental achievement was that the health of historical populations depends on agricultural characteristics. A specialisation of animal husbandry, for example, reduces the catastrophal insufficiency of protein and calcium in preindustrial societies.

From 2015 to 2017, he was appointed president of the European Historical Economics Society, a learned society of European economic historians.[8]

In 2020, Baten analysed, jointly with Thomas Keywood, new evidence on elite human capital formation in Europe over a time period from the 6th to the 20th century. The focus on this study lies on tracing early roots of the Great Divergence of Europe. They find a substantial relationship between elite numeracy and elite violence, and conclude that violence had a detrimental impact on human capital formation. Their study provides evidence that the disparities in violence between Eastern and Western Europe helped shape the divergent movement via the elite numeracy mechanism and had substantial implications for the economic fortunes of each region over the following centuries.[9]

• Jörg Baten (Ed.): A History of the Global Economy. From 1500 to the Present. Cambridge University Press, 2016. ISBN 9781107507180.
• Steckel, R. H., Larsen, C. S., Roberts, C. A., & Baten, J. (Eds.). The backbone of Europe: health, diet, work and violence over two Millennia. Cambridge University Press, 2019.

• Jörg Baten at the website of University of Tübingen.