Paul Krugman: America Comes Up Short

[Demeter]

http://welcome-to-pottersville.blogspot.com/2007/06/paul-krugman-america-comes-up-short.html#links


...To the casual observer, Europeans — who often seemed short, even to me (I’m 5-foot-7), when I first began traveling a lot in the 1970s — now often seem tall by American standards. And that casual observation matches what careful researchers have found.

The data show that Americans, who in the words of a recent paper by the economic historian John Komlos and Benjamin Lauderdale in Social Science Quarterly, were “tallest in the world between colonial times and the middle of the 20th century,” have now “become shorter (and fatter) than Western and Northern Europeans. In fact, the U.S. population is currently at the bottom end of the height distribution in advanced industrial countries.”
........

And although the Komlos-Lauderdale paper suggests that growing income and social inequality in America might be one culprit, the remarkable thing is that, as the authors themselves point out, even high-status Americans are falling short: “rich Americans are shorter than rich Western Europeans and poor white Americans are shorter than poor Western Europeans.”
........

A broader explanation would be that contemporary America is a society that, in a variety of ways, doesn’t take very good care of its children. Recently, Unicef issued a report comparing a number of measures of child well-being in 21 rich countries, including health and safety, family and peer relationships and such things as whether children eat fruit and are physically active. The report put the Netherlands at the top; sure enough, the Dutch are now the world’s tallest people, almost 3 inches taller, on average, than non-Hispanic American whites. The U.S. ended up in 20th place, below Poland, Portugal and Hungary, but ahead of Britain.

Whatever the full explanation for America’s stature deficit, our relative shortness, like our low life expectancy, suggests that something is amiss with our way of life. A critical European might say that America is a land of harried parents and neglected children, of expensive health care that misses those who need it most, a society that for all its wealth somehow manages to be nasty, brutish — and short.

[glowing]

1. I'd have to say Monsanto and food co. in general have seen to

it to make us fat and undernutritioned.

[TwilightGardener]

2. Disagree--America was predominantly of Northern European (read: tall) stock

in our first two centuries. In the last hundred or so years, folks from "shorter" areas of the world (Southern/Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia) have migrated and interbred with that Northern European stock to dilute the "tall" genes--just a product of our mongrel heritage. I can attest to this, at 4'11". My entire Eastern/Southern European family is short but well-nourished--so are my kids, who are shorter than average (because of me) even though I married a tall man of Northern-European descent. It's genetics.

[Warpy]

3. What part of "corrected for ethnicity" didn't you read?

The truth is that they did take that into account and we're still getting shorter, probably as a combination of poor folks' food and shit for healthcare.

[TwilightGardener]

4. Uh, I didn't open the link--didn't need to. The article is bullshit. Being

short has nothing to do with anything in the richest, fattest, most well-fed nation on earth--unless a cultural norm of frequent weight-bearing exercise and calcium/Vitamin-D intake in other European countries has something to do with it (building bone), but that's a long-shot. That's the only thing I can think of. We are NOT nutritionally depleted here. We are overfed. It's genetics. I do take exception to the notion of height being an indication of physical/cultural superiority and health--that's an insult to genetically short people like myself and my ancestors/descendants. Sometimes it's true (third-world countries), sometimes it's not. Folks lacking proper nourishment in Africa can still end up pretty tall.

[DavidDvorkin]

7. Wrong

Englishmen traveling to the American colonies often remarked on how much taller the colonists were than people at home. As I remember, studies at the time showed that difference to be on the order of two or three inches.

Genetically, the two populations were the same. Even their social and political structures were very similar, at that time. The big difference was the amount and type of food available to the colonists vs. the average Englishman. In particular, the colonists tended to have more high-quality beef.

[uncertainty1999]

11. ...but there is a lot of variation *within* non-Hispanic whites

The 'correction' that was mentioned in the article was eliminating non-Hispanic whites from the comparison. Comparing the western Europeans to a more mixed group of non-Hispanic whites could still lead to a biased result.

[Demeter]

5. If You Saw All the Dweeby, Undernourished Young Men

on the U of M campus these days, compared to my generation, you'd take back those assumptions.

[DBoon]

6. Combined with declines in other public health measures, this is bad

At one point (up to the 1970s), the USA was number one (or close to it) in many measures of public health - infant mortality was low, average lifespan was high, etc.

We have now sunk to ranking equal to that of many developing nations in these measures.

Something very bad has been going on in the last 30 years. Not quite as bad as Russia, where average life expectancy is now the lowest in the industrialized world.

[Demeter]

8. And Modern Russians Are the Size of 12 Year olds

But this IS reversible--if the country decides that people are more important than corporate profits and indicidual greed.

[DBoon]

9. Are they really?

nt

[Demeter]

10. Half of the Emigrees I've Met in Ann Arbor Are Tiny

male and female. Well below average for any population.