Economic history is one of those rare academic disciplines where scholarly impact and creative insights tend to improve with the author’s age. Now in her seventies, Anne Booth exemplifies this tendency nicely. Her fifth solely authored book under review here is chock-a-block full of methodological critiques of the status of poverty studies, and development economics more broadly. Only a seasoned scholar would have the depth of experience, and confidence, to lay out not just what the statistical record shows about improvements in Southeast Asian living standards over the ‘long century’ from 1900 to 2015, but also what is wrong with those statistics (a lot!) and with the conceptual underpinnings of the measurements themselves. Thirty years ago I reviewed Booth’s first major book, Agricultural Development in Indonesia (Booth 1988) for the American Journal of Agricultural Economics (Timmer 1990). It was a powerful book, structured around a comparison of historical Japan with modern Indonesia. Despite much gloomy pessimism about Asian development prospects broadly (Myrdal 1968) and agricultural involution and shared rural poverty in Indonesia specifically (Geertz 1963), Booth showed how the productivity gains newly visible in Indonesia’s agricultural sector after 1970 were driven by forces similar to those in Japan a century earlier: state-led agricultural research to improve smallholder productivity; widespread and accessible rural education; and the opening of rural markets to dynamic urban demand through infrastructure investments. Her optimistic conclusion that Indonesia still had lots of rural growth potential if it followed the lessons from Japan was a welcome tonic amidst a gloomy world mindset on the potential to reduce poverty and hunger (Griffin 1987). I mention this early book by Booth because it highlights three traits that have made her writings so influential: (1) she insists that modern economic issues are deeply rooted in the history of policies and institutions; (2) she accesses and utilises the best statistical data available for the issue under examination; and (3) she carefully critiques these data for problems of bias and measurement errors, and to determine whether they actually measure the concepts that they purport to measure. All three of these traits are displayed vividly in the current book. The rest of this review focuses on two broad themes of the book: several ‘big questions’ about the nature of poverty and the historical record on improving living standards, most of which are illustrated with data and historical experience from Southeast Asia, but which also transcend the region;1 and ‘Indonesia questions’ that

中文翻译：

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东南亚的生活水平：20 世纪的变化，1900-2015

经济史是其中学术影响力和创造性见解往往随着作者年龄的增长而提高的罕见学科之一。现在已经七十多岁的安妮布斯很好地体现了这种趋势。她在此审查的第五本完全由作者撰写的书充满了对贫困研究现状和更广泛的发展经济学的方法论批评。只有经验丰富的学者才能拥有丰富的经验和信心，不仅可以列出统计记录显示的 1900 年至 2015 年“漫长的世纪”期间东南亚生活水平提高的情况，而且还列出了这些统计数据的错误之处（很多！）以及测量本身的概念基础。三十年前，我回顾了布斯的第一本重要著作，印度尼西亚的农业发展（Booth 1988）为美国农业经济学杂志（Timmer 1990）。这是一本强有力的书，围绕历史日本与现代印度尼西亚的比较而构建。尽管对亚洲发展前景的普遍悲观情绪（Myrdal 1968）以及印度尼西亚的农业内卷化和共同的农村贫困（Geertz 1963），布斯展示了 1970 年之后印度尼西亚农业部门新出现的生产力增长是如何受到类似于一个世纪前的日本：国家主导的农业研究以提高小农生产力；广泛和可获得的农村教育；以及通过基础设施投资向动态的城市需求开放农村市场。在世界对减少贫困和饥饿的潜力持悲观态度的情况下，她乐观地得出结论，即印度尼西亚如果遵循日本的经验教训，仍然具有很大的农村增长潜力，这是一个受欢迎的补品（Griffin 1987）。我提到布斯的这本早期著作，是因为它突出了使她的著作如此有影响力的三个特征：（1）她坚持现代经济问题深深植根于政策和制度的历史中；(2) 她访问和利用可用于审查问题的最佳统计数据；(3) 她仔细地批评这些数据的偏差和测量误差问题，并确定它们是否真正测量了它们声称要测量的概念。所有这三个特征都在当前书中生动地展示出来。