Making Health Work: Human Growth in Modern Japan

Carl Mosk /

University of California Press, £35, pp 156 /

ISBN 0 520 08315 6

Specialists – particularly economists, psychologists, and statisticians – upbraid an outsider who abuses methods from their discipline and hence reaches unsound conclusions. Professor Mosk is an economist who (in my opinion) abuses the techniques of nutritional epidemiology. His central thesis is that growth in children is a measure of population quality (all right so far), and that the increased potential work capacity of the population of Japan “over the last several centuries is a result of improvements in net nutritional intake, that is, improvements in gross nutritional …