“……This issue of PNAS brings together a collection of six papers concerning the economics and demography of aging, written in honor of Robert Fogel's 80th birthday. Robert Fogel is the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions and the director of the Center for Population Economics in the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. The preeminent economic historian of our time, he received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1993 for his applications of economic theory and quantitative methods to explain economic and institutional change.

Since the mid-1980s, Robert Fogel's work has focused on understanding long-run changes in the physiology of aging in the United States. He has argued that recent increases in longevity and in health are too rapid to have been caused by genetic or evolutionary change and that explanations should focus on changes in the physical environment (1–4). Nutritional intake has improved, and the demands on that intake by disease, work, and climate have fallen, thanks to economic growth, technological change, investments in public health, and greater scientific knowledge. Some of these changes have had immediate effects on older-age mortality and morbidity, but others have had lagging effects because, as a growing body of evidence indicates (5–8), health at older ages depends both on early childhood health and on maternal health…..”.

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