Stature and Economic Growth

John Komlos was the first to explain why populations of the then developed world became shorter at the onset of modern economic growth. He also discovered that after being the tallest in the world for 200 years, Americans became shorter than Western Europeans in the course of the twentieth century.

John Komlos was born in Budapest during World War II – just as the Russian army was beginning its assault on the city. He became a refugee twelve years later during the Hungarian revolution and grew up in Chicago, where he received PhDs in both history and in economics from the University of Chicago and where, in 1982, Nobel-Prize winning economic historian Robert Fogel introduced him to the field of anthropometric history. Mr Komlos devoted most of his academic career to developing and expanding this research agenda, which culminated in his founding the field of "Economics and Human Biology" with the journal of the same name in 2003.

While visiting CES, he will hold three lectures on "The Meltdown of 2008 and the Current State of the US Economy".

His work has been cited in radio programmes and on television as well as in most major newspapers around the globe, including several articles by Paul Krugman in The New York Times and a feature article in The New Yorker. More recently Mr Komlos has published on the lessons of the Financial Crisis of 2008 on the teaching of Economics. He also blogs on current economic policy as an advocate of humanistic economics.

John Komlos is Professor Emeritus of Economics and of Economic History at the University of Munich and is currently visiting the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has also taught at Duke, Harvard and the University of Vienna. He is a CESifo Research Network Fellow. Defying disciplinary boundaries, Komlos is among the very few scholars to publish in major journals of five disciplines: economics, history, biology, statistics and demography in journals such as The American Economic Review, The American Historical Review, The American Journal of Human Biology, Statistical Methodology, Genus and Mathematical Population Studies.