Blog: Economics in Action

What would you do with a database of the weights, measurements and life histories of fourteen thousand people? Economic historian Marco Sunder used them to relate life expectancy to Body Mass Index. He reached the surprising conclusion that slightly “overweight” people lived longer.

Nobody’s implying that healthy eating and regular exercise are bad for you. All the advice is that these are worth doing for good reasons but what Sunder found, and was borne out by subsequent medical research, was that people dieting excessively to bring their bodies into the “normal” range were decreasing their life expectancies.

This is one of many intriguing, succinct and occasionally odd economic ideas in “Economics 2.0: What the best minds in Economics can teach you about business and life,” a book released this year by economics journalists Norbert Häring and Olef Storbeck. Other topics they explore include The Economics of Beauty, Why Economists love Sports, How Bad Will the Financial Crisis Get and why Europeans were a great deal shorter in the 17th Century.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 5:23 pm and is filed under Death. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.