The Economics of Height
The New York Times Blog features an interesting article about the different average heights between North- and South Koreans, and Europeans and Americans. The author Tara Parker-Pope writes about the relevance of height statistics for economic performance:
While the conditions for North Koreans are troubling, Americans have a similar height gap to worry about, and it also appears to be due to a lower standard of living, poor health care and inadequate nutrition. Last summer, the journal Social Science Quarterly reported that Americans are, quite literally, falling short of Europeans. In 1880, Americans were the tallest people in the world. But by 2000, American men, at an average height of 5-feet-10.5-inches, ranked 9th, and women, at about 5-feet-5-inches, fell to 15th. Several Northern European countries rank the highest in height, with the Dutch coming in first, at just over 6 feet for the men and 5-feet-7-inches for the women.
The height gap between Americans and Northern Europeans can’t be explained by an influx of short immigrants. Experts say the United States takes in too few immigrants to account for the disparity, and the height statistics cited in the article include only English-speaking native-born Americans, and don’t include people of Asian and Hispanic descent.
The real answer may be that Northern European countries do a better job of spreading the wealth and taking care of their children.
It would be interesting to run a simple regression on the prediction capability of average male height on GDP/capita. A short search on the internet only gave this small graph.
Topics of this post: GDP, height, Memo, statistics
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