Short People

Randy Newman made a few enemies with a hit song that included the lyrics: "Short people got no reason to live." According to Joel Waldfogel's Slate Magazine Story it just gets worse from there:

It is well-documented that short people earn less money than tall people do. To be clear, pay does not vary lock step by height. If your friend is taller than you are, then it's nearly a coin toss whether she earns more. But if you compare two large groups of people who are similar in every respect but height, the average pay for the taller group will be higher. Each additional inch of height adds roughly 2 percent to average annual earnings, for both men and women. So, if the average heights of our hypothetical groups were 6 feet and 5 feet 7 inches, the average pay difference between them would be 10 percent.

But why? One possibility is height discrimination in favor of the tall. A second involves adolescence. A few years ago, Nicola Persico and Andrew Postlewaite of the University of Pennsylvania and Dan Silverman of the University of Michigan discovered that adult earnings are more sharply related to height at age 16 than to adult height...

Why so? Various theories have been advanced. Maybe height -> highschool prestige -> earnings potential. Or maybe society discriminates in favor of tall people. New studies make another idea even more plausible:

In a new study, Anne Case and Christina Paxson, both of Princeton University, find that tall people earn more, on average, because they're smarter, on average. Yikes.

Before you blast Case and Paxson with angry e-mails, let's look at their method. With detailed data from the United Kingdom, they followed two groups of kids, one born in 1958 and the other in 1970, through to adulthood. Every few years, the government collected information about height, weight, intelligence, educational experience, and, during adulthood, pay. Based on these data, Case and Paxton document once again that taller people earn more. Then they note that from an early age, height is related to intelligence. Even at age 5, a variety of intelligence measures—based on conceptual maturity, visual-motor coordination, and vocabulary—are higher on average for taller kids.

This sets up the study's major finding. While height, on its own, bears a strong relation to pay, when adult height is included along with measures of childhood intelligence in pay analyses, it no longer does the explanatory work on its own. Height appears to matter, when intelligence is not included, because taller people are, on average, smarter.

So, why did height at age 16 bear a stronger relationship than adult height to adult earnings in the earlier study by Persico, Postlewaite, and Silverman? Case and Paxson point out that kids who are tall at age 16 are those who have experienced their adolescent growth spurts at a relatively early age. And they point out that these kids turn out to be the well-fed and nurtured kids of parents who are on average smarter and richer than the rest, and who also pass on extra IQ points. The 16-year-old taller kids end up earning more for reasons apart from their height.

US Presidents have mostly been tall - and the taller man usually wins. When it doesn't happen (2000, 2004) the result is usually disastrous ;) A century ago, the English upper class male was nine inches taller than his lower class counterpart. Democracy, unions, and modern diets have largely erased that difference.

On the other hand, a lot of successful people are short: Tom Cruise, Bill Gates, Napoleon, Jon Stewart, and Frodo Baggins. Not to mention Tiny Tim, Tom Thumb, and Truman Capote.

Being tall is hardly an unmixed blessing. Tall people don't live as long, probably, if my experience is any guide, because we keep hitting our heads on low things, like chandeliers, low ceilings and door frames.

And people can always ask you: If you're so tall, why aren't you rich? Or smart?"