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Short End
Tall people earn more because they're smarter.
By Joel Waldfogel
Posted Friday, Sept. 1, 2006, at 1:36 PM ET
In the late 1970s, Randy Newman scored a hit with a song containing the lyric, "Short people got no reason to live." The line was supposed to be satire, but outraged diminutive listeners didn't see it that way. Boy, are they going to be mad at a couple of economists now.

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—suggesting, scarily, that the high-school social order determined the adult economic order. For boys at least, height at 16 affects things like social and athletic success—scoring chicks and baskets or, as the authors put it, "participation in clubs and athletics." And maybe those things affect later earning power.

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Slate.com link

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In 1998, public expenditures of 1.1 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on higher education in the United States were second-highest among the countries presented; only Canada spent a greater percentage of its GDP on higher education (figure 1a).

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1) Statistically, variation between races and variation within races are ususally treated separately.

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Originally posted by Comicbook Guy:
The Japanese are smart and short. I don't think this study is very accurate.

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CBG, I would like to suggest to you, not with my moderator hat on, but as a contributor to babble, to ponder and consider what it means to post here about mainstream racist stereotypes such as "The Japanese are smart." This remark, counted with your other comment about understanding why people may have hatred towards Muslims, is problematic at the very least, and is in fact repeating and reasserting racist stereotypes, even if that's not what you intended.

As a progressive board, there is little interest here in reading mainstream notions of race, gender, etc, as we already know them. A gajillion other sites repeat that offensive material ad nauseum. We know the issues and try, instead, to have intelligent, critical and deconstructive conversations about them. Simply repeating mainstream opinions is not doing any of that.

[ 04 September 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

There could be some biological merit to the study though, if growth spurts could be related to some sort of intelligence growth/maturity... But thats just reaching for strings.

So, the fact that there is CORRELATION between height and "intelligence" is utterly unsurprising.

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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—suggesting, scarily, that the high-school social order determined the adult economic order.

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I have a problem with rating intelligence on the $/y scale. Actually, i have a problem with the whole study. Actually, i'm getting a faint whiff of manure.
(But that might just be a short, bright, poor person's bias.)

[ 05 September 2006: Message edited by: nonsuch ]

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Noise, the reference to "scoring chicks" was from the author of the article, not the author of the research paper.

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Doesn't matter who said, I just thought it's a sad reflection when thats the best measure of success he could come up with for a 16 YO male

Theres alot of big jumps they are making within this article however, one of the bigger ones is coresponding intelligence directly to pay. That aside...

I wonder if they could include family origins and wealth into the study? Does wealth and IQ correlate? Does Height and Wealth somehow correlate? If so, are we seeing wealth = higher intelligence... Just translated through hieght?

Likely the entire relation is much more complicated... nourishment at a young age tranlsates to hieght and intelligence (in which case, hieght and intellect correlate as didtated by nourishment?).

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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.

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I dislike the correlation between intelligence and pay as well... But I think they went further than pay with the study.

added:
Beh, perhaps I should read the study and not some guys opinion on the study ^^

[ 07 September 2006: Message edited by: Noise ]

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Morbid obesity in toddlers linked to lower IQ
Last Updated Fri, 01 Sep 2006 15:51:25 EDT
CBC News

Excess weight may take a toll on young, developing brains, say researchers who found a link between morbid obesity in toddlers and lower IQ scores later in life...

"We're postulating that early-onset morbid obesity and these metabolic, biochemical problems can also lead to cognitive impairment," said Dr. Daniel Driscoll, a professor of pediatric genetics at the University of Florida.

Driscoll and his colleagues studied 18 children and adults with early-onset morbid obesity — those who weighed at least 150 per cent of their ideal body weight before age four — to two other groups.

The study, in the August issue of the Journal of Pediatrics, found the second group of 19 children and adults had Prader-Willi syndrome — a genetic disorder that causes people to eat non-stop and become morbidly obese at a young age if not supervised.

A group of 24 normal-weight siblings who shared the same genetic and socio-economic background as the research subjects acted as controls.

Children and teens who were obese as toddlers for no known genetic reason fared almost as poorly on IQ tests (average score of 78) as people with Prader-Willi (average score of 63)...

"Their control siblings were 106," Driscoll said...

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Full article

Poor nutrition affects development, period.

The powers-that-be, who bow to the gods of productivity and non-stop economic growth, should be concerned about the findings in this study. While they spend millions of dollars on programs telling people to exercise and eat their fruit and veggies, they ignore the fact that families in poverty - who already know what's good for them and what's not - cannot heed the advice. The result is that the greatest incidence of obesity in children occurs in families in poverty.