Jörg Baten (*1965 in Hamburg) is a German economic historian.
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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 Eberhard Karls 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 is 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.[1] 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.[2]
Jointly with Nikola Koepke, Baten studied the history of health and nutrition in Europe since the ancient world [3] 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.[4]
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.