The Body Is Society’s Most Honest Ledger — and Its Handiest Tool

Louis-René Villermé (1782–1863) had served as a surgeon in Napoleon’s army. Conscription left behind one hard threshold: men under 1.57 m were exempt. That rule, written purely to fill regiments, quietly accumulated a nationwide, year-by-year record of bodies. The prevailing explanation for regional differences in height was climate and “race.”

In 1829 Villermé published his memoir on the stature of Frenchmen in the inaugural volume of the Annales d’hygiène publique. He ranked the 86 départements by tax revenue and set that against the share of conscripts exempted for being too short. The relationship was close to monotonic: the poorer the département, the more young men were judged “too small.” His conclusion was blunt to the point of offence — height is set neither by latitude nor by bloodline, but by poverty. For the first time the body became an economic indicator you could compare across places. Eleven years later he applied the same method to cotton-mill families, and helped produce France’s first child-labour law in 1841.

The World Bank and WHO now read development off the under-five stunting rate rather than GDP per capita, to see whether growth actually landed on people. The move generalises: validate a flattering aggregate against a downstream metric that lives in the user and cannot be dressed up.

From the late Ming onward, bound feet marked Han women across every social class. The early Qing emperors Shunzhi and Kangxi both issued strict bans; both lapsed. In 1895 the Englishwoman Alicia Little founded the Natural Feet Society in Shanghai; reformers wrote footbinding into their theory of a “weakened race”; in 1902 the Empress Dowager Cixi issued an edict urging its abandonment; in 1928 the Interior Ministry banned it outright.

The official story closes there: progressive discourse defeats a barbarous custom. But the anthropologists Laurel Bossen and Hill Gates, interviewing some 1,800 elderly women in villages across north China, the northwest and Sichuan in the 2000s, found a different curve. The distribution of footbinding tracked girls’ handwork almost exactly. Spinning, weaving and mat-plaiting are sedentary trades — they want a workforce fixed indoors. Footbinding disappeared first not where the campaigning was loudest, but where machine-spun yarn and imported cloth arrived first. Once handloom income collapsed, binding a daughter’s feet stopped being an investment and became pure cost. The foundation went, and only then did the custom fall.

Standards of beauty change far less through moral advocacy than through the collapse of the accounts that sustain them. Recommendation algorithms are now working the other way: they raise the economic return on a particular body shape, and appearance anxiety and cosmetic demand rise with it. However loud the case for body diversity, it cannot outbid the price the distribution system sets.

For the first half of the twentieth century, disability was something medicine and eugenics handled. In Buck v. Bell (1927) the US Supreme Court upheld compulsory sterilisation 8–1, Justice Holmes writing that “three generations of imbeciles are enough”; some 60,000 Americans were sterilised thereafter. Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act said one thing: institutions receiving federal funds may not discriminate against disabled people. But the implementing regulations sat unsigned for four years — two administrations were costing out what retrofitting buildings and transit would take.

On 5 April 1977 protests opened in ten cities at once. In San Francisco one group walked into the Department of Health, Education and Welfare offices at 50 United Nations Plaza and stayed. Judy Heumann (1947–2023) and Kitty Cone held more than a hundred people inside for twenty-six days — the longest occupation of a federal building in US history. The government cut the phones and the hot water; the Black Panther Party delivered hot meals daily. On 28 April, Secretary Califano signed the regulations unweakened. The real turn was conceptual: the problem shifted from “this person is defective” to “this building has no ramp.” Move the responsibility, and a whole class of available actions appears.

Accessibility spillovers are the classic general dividend: ramps serve anyone pushing a pram, captions serve anyone on a train. Software a11y works the same way — constraints written for the extreme case force you to turn implicit assumptions into explicit interfaces, and everyone’s experience improves along the way.

Around 1925 the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company paid to broadcast exercise routines on American radio. The motive was not lofty: policyholders who die early cost the company money, and pushing mortality back a few years is a gain you can book. The first mover behind mass calisthenics was not the state. It was an actuarial table.

An official of Japan’s Postal Life Insurance Bureau saw the programme while on a study visit to the United States. On 1 November 1928, rajio taisō went on the air under the banner of commemorating the emperor’s enthronement — with the same plain reason underneath: the insurance bureau wanted lower payouts. It was then wired into national fitness surveys and wartime mobilisation. On 24 November 1951 the preparatory committee of the All-China Sports Federation released China’s first set of broadcast calisthenics, rolled out nationwide from 1 December; both Yang Lie, who proposed it, and Liu Yizhen, who choreographed it, had studied in Japan, while the institutional model came from the Soviet GTO system established in 1931. The same bending and stretching served three different purposes in thirty years: cut claims, mobilise for war, forge a new citizenry.

The actuarial logic is back unchanged: Discovery’s Vitality programme in South Africa (from 1997) trades exercise data for premium discounts, and health insurance is now linked to wearable step counts. Only the granularity differs — a whole city once tuned to one channel; now everyone wears a watch. Synchronised discipline has become individualised scoring, and a score is harder to refuse than a command.