Edgar Sydenstricker, a pioneer of health economics

Abstract

The economist Edgar Sydenstricker, who spent most of his working life at the United States Public Health Service and at the Milbank Memorial Fund, examined a wide range of health economics issues. He contributed to the debate around the cause of the disease pellagra. This research was followed by many studies quantifying income-related health inequalities. Sydenstricker was heavily involved in the use of surveys to collect information and he was instrumental in the development of the first US National Health Survey. Other contributions include extending health insurance in the United States and methods of evaluating public health programs. KEYWORDS Socioeconomic inequality of health; history of health economics; early 20th century; Edgar Sydenstricker JEL CLASSIFICATION CODES B31; I14; I18

Sense and Sensibility: a History of the Early Brazilian Cost-of-Living Indexes in Pursuit of a Minimum Wage, 1935–1939

“…The first of Davis's influences were the works of Sydenstricker andKing (1921a, 1921b), which he used to define the measurement per equivalent adult male, a unit that takes into account the age and the gender of the members of a household in order to identify their dietary needs in relation to the needs of an adult male. Edgar Sydenstricker and Willford King were statisticians with close ties to economics, whose work, among other things, orbited the making of index numbers and the application of statistics to health economics (see King 1930;Clarke and Erreygers 2022). In the case of the equivalent-adult-male scale, they start from a sample of 1,500 selected families living in the South Carolina cotton-mill villages in 1917 to establish the "fammain" unit, which stands for "food for adult male maintenance" (Sydenstricker & King, 1921a, p. 588;1921b, p. 847).…”