Average Height as an Indicator of National Social Success

Carl Zimmer has produced an absolutely fascinating look at the various ways in which living things, including we humans, can inherit the characteristics that define us.  There are some very surprising pathways available.  He presents his work in She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity.  One of the topics he covers is the inheritability of height.  There clearly is a correlation between parental height and that of a child, but the correlation is not perfect.  Figuring out exactly how this transference is accomplished genetically is not a trivial undertaking.  In the process of explaining the complexities of the necessary genetic analysis, he provides an interesting discussion of environmental factors.  Of particular interest was the discussion of how height could be affected by general health, nourishment and well-being.  In fact, researchers have spent a considerable amount of effort trying to use average height within a population as an indicator of national well-being.

The first effort in using average height as data is attributed to Luis-René Villermé who tallied the average height of the men who entered the French army during the Napoleonic Wars.  He discovered that this value declined during the war years but began to rise again once peace had been established.  He attributed this effect to wartime food shortages.  It would be a long time before the man’s hypothesis would be reexamined. 

“Villermé’s insight went neglected for the next 150 years, until a small group of economists led by Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel started charting height in different countries over the course of decades.  They made a compelling case that height could serve as an economic barometer, recording the well-being of societies.”

The historical data is quite compelling—and quite interesting.  Data from Europe goes back about 30,000 years.  There was a human culture at the time referred to as the Gravettians.  They seemed to be hunter-gatherers who had a diet heavy in meat.  This ample protein supply elevated their average height to about six feet.  When the beginnings of an agricultural economy arrived in Europe, this development delivered a host of new diseases as population density increased.  The dietary focus also shifted to lower protein sources such as grains.  Average height indicated this “progress” was very hard on humans.

“When agriculture arrived in Europe some eight thousand years ago, people experienced a tremendous drop in stature.  Men lost eight inches in height….For the next seven thousand years, European stature hardly changed, wavering just an inch or two from century to century.  In the eighteenth century, the average European man stood five foot five.”

Those moving to America in colonial times must have found the environment considerably healthier than that which they left behind in Europe.

“When English people emigrated to the American colonies, men swiftly climbed to five foot eight, becoming the tallest men in the world.  By the end of the eighteenth century, American apprentices at age sixteen stood almost five inches taller than poor sixteen-year-olds in London.”

However, the current data on height suggests that the United States is no longer considered a particularly healthy place in which to watch your children grow.

“In both the United States and Europe, the average height dipped in the first half of the nineteenth century.  But then, starting around 1870….people in both Europe and the United States started getting taller.  Over the next century, Americans grew by about three extra inches on average, hitting a plateau in the 1990s.  In Europe, the boom was even more dramatic.  With each succeeding decade, Europeans added about half an inch of average height, and kept growing that way into the twenty-first century.  Northern and central European countries were the first to begin this ascent, but the southern regions started catching up by the mid-1900s.  Today, Latvian women have become the tallest women in the world, jumping from about five foot one to five foot seven.  Dutch men rose from five foot seven in 1860 to just over six feet tall, making them the tallest men on Earth.”

Just a few years ago data such as these became available for most of the countries of the world.  One can peruse data on people born from 1896 to 1996.  National ranking for both genders can be found here.  Line plots providing more detailed information over that period are available here for average height in each country.

US women born in 1896 ranked fourth in average height behind Sweden, Norway, and Iceland.  US women are now ranked forty-second in the world.  Latvian women headed in the opposite direction, going from twenty-eighth to first.  US men born in 1896 ranked third behind Sweden and Norway.  US men are now ranked thirty-seventh.  Men from the Netherlands moved up from twelfth to first.

If one believes that height data is a measure of the “quality” of the society which produces it, then there are significant political implications.  Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson addressed those political issues in American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper. 

“Height has a lot to do with genes, but height differences across nations seem to be caused mostly by social conditions, such as income, nutrition, health coverage, and social cohesion.  Indeed, one reason for the correlation between height and achievement is that kids whose mothers are healthy during pregnancy and grow up with sufficient food, medical care, and family support tend to be taller adults.”

“So it’s striking that Americans are no longer the tallest people in the world.  Not even close: Once three inches taller than residents of the old world, Americans are now three inches shorter.  The average Dutch height for men is six foot one, and for women, five foot eight—versus five foot nine for American men and five foot five for American women.  The gap is not, as might be supposed, a result of immigration: White, native born Americans who speak English at home are significantly smaller, too, and immigration isn’t substantial enough to explain the discrepancy in any case.”

These authors then add an even more troubling aspect to the height data: it is mostly our current young who are losing ground to other nations.

“….average heights have barely budged in recent decades, so young Americans—again, even leaving out recent immigrants—are barely taller than their parents.  Older Americans are roughly on a par with their counterparts abroad; younger Americans are substantially shorter.  The United States is the richest populous nation in the world.  Nevertheless, its young are roughly as tall as the young in Portugal, which has a per capita gross domestic product (GDP) less than half ours.”

Our professional basketball teams—where height is critical— have long been dominated by black athletes.  The number of US whites making it into professional ball dropped significantly as black athletes gained greater access to improved training methods and high-level competition.  A new trend has emerged recently that has seen an influx of good white players.  Where are they coming from?  Mostly, they are coming from those taller, healthier European nations.

So much for a brief diversion into sports.  As for the political implications, make of the data what you wish, but at least the Europeans are finally catching up to the Gravettians of thirty thousand years ago.  We are unlikely to ever get there.

 

The interested reader might find the following article informative:

Early States, Capitalism, and the Domestication of Humans