Height = prosperity

I found this article a while back, and thought it would be fun to share. It has some relevance to my earlier post about health care--specifically, how do you measure the quality of a country's health care? In short, one answer is "measure how tall they are."

Differences in height between two people living in the same society are due to genetic differences. However, the difference between the average height of populations is due to the quality of life in each society. Height is strongly affected by a combination of nutrition, disease, and environmental stress; thus, societies with lower quality of life will be, on average, shorter. When I was first reading the article, I was a bit skeptical; it seems like there would be other factors that matter. However, you'll find that most of these have been considered, and the premise still works very well: height = prosperity.

One interesting point is that Americans used to be the tallest people in the world. It was true around the time of the revolutionary war, and our height gradually increased all the way into the 1950's. However, something happened around then -- the average European heights kept increasing, while ours stayed pretty much the same. The average European is now significantly taller than we are. Sure, we win out on average income, but it's not translating into a lifestyle that makes us taller. The biggest contrast is in the Netherlands; we are 3-4 inches shorter than the average Dutch person (average height for men and women are 6'1" and 5'8" respectively; for Americans, it's about 5'10" and 5'5"). This is comparing American Caucasians to European Caucasians; if you include our immigrants, the difference increases by another inch.

The full article is here, and summarizes a lot of neat studies. I loved the study about serving the World War 2 rations of corned beef and cabbage for school lunches. It's a fun read, so enjoy it :).