John Komlos is an economic historian at the University of Munich.
I don’t know how tall he is, and don’t much care, really. Since my work does not involve scouting for the NBA, his height is simply not very important to me.
Height is important to Professor Komlos, though. He is a leading light in a field of study called anthropometric history, which studies the relationship between economics and human physiology; between the standard of living and physical size.
One of the key indicators that he looks at in his studies is height. And he has given us something to worry about.
At the end of World War II in 1945, for example, Americans were, on average, the tallest people of any country in the world. That was to change, however, as other nations caught up and we refocused our growth effort from vertical to horizontal development.
By the 1960s, most of the countries in Western Europe had outgrown the United States. Today, the World’s Tallest Country is, somewhat surprisingly, the Netherlands, where the average male adult stands approximately 2.5 inches taller than the average guy in the United States.
The Netherlands is a country that generally stays out of the global headlines. We might even call it a low-profile country, but that image would clash somehow with its being the world’s tallest. Recently, though, its tourism industry has gotten a boost from the country’s becoming known as a venue of convenience – to U.S. celebrities who can claim that their personal knowledge of marijuana was acquired there, where it is legal.
Economics has had a long-standing interest in the interaction between living standards and human development, but it is a complicated relationship. Our economic development affects our height, but our height, in turn, has an effect on our economic development certainly at the microeconomic, personal level. Taller people, men certainly, tend to be more respected; they are paid more and promoted more often.
The research in the other direction, however, on exactly how our standard of living affects our height, has not been as conclusive.
The role of nutrition, for example, has become a lot more complicated than it used to be. Good nutrition is directly related to growth and good health, but the value of nutrition is a lot easier to measure when you are measuring its affects on people who are chronically hungry compared with people who have a healthy diet and enough to eat.
It gets more difficult when people have the income to afford good nutrition, but choose instead to live on high-calorie baked goods and the kind of thirst-inducing snacks that saloons used to give away to boost beer sales. But because making unwise and unhealthy decisions to choose high-calorie, low-nutrition diets is inversely correlated with income – the richer you are the less likely you are to be seriously overweight – economics is still the driving force in determining overall health as well as height.
Komlos’ work suggests that the reason for our declining height is the American health care system. After adjusting for demographic and genetic factors, analysis of the decline in average height suggests that poor pre-natal care and unhealthy childhood are the major factors – things that affect the economically deprived more than those with good jobs and health insurance.
In one sense, the data on average height is not something new to worry about as much as yet another indicator that our health care system needs work. From an economics standpoint it is not actuarially sound and from a health standpoint it is not delivering the goods.
In another sense, though, the analytical look at our physiological development offers an opportunity for a new economic perspective on the importance of height. In short, who needs it?
We are now engaged in hand-wringing and hectoring each other over global warming and reducing our carbon footprints, the amount of carbon dioxide we produce. If we really wanted to save the planet and ourselves, though, we should be thinking about reducing our physical footprints – leaving smaller ones because we are shorter and smaller.
From an economic productivity standpoint, there are a diminishing number of jobs where height and big size affect output positively. Yet the bigger we are, the more resources we consume just to live and work.
Generally speaking, individuals cannot choose their heights. We are what we are. Whether we like it or not, though, the developments in genetic engineering will soon begin to offer us choices in what kind of people we want the next generations to be – including their height. If the competition for resources continues to increase, it looks like economics will play a role in those choices. And being tall in the saddle is going to get a lot more expensive.
James McCusker is a Bothell economist, educator and consultant. He also writes “Business 101” monthly for the Snohomish County Business Journal.
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