Size Matters Redux

NewMexiKen had been sulking since I read earlier today “that for every inch taller a man is than his speed-dating rivals, the number of women who want to meet him goes up by about five percent.”

And I always thought it was wit and intelligence that women looked for.¹

But anyway, I did a little research and found this interesting article from The New Yorker in 2004. It included these factoids:

The men of the northern Cheyenne, he found, were the tallest people in the world in the late nineteenth century: well nourished on bison and berries, and wandering clear of disease on the high plains, they averaged nearly five feet ten.

In the First World War, the average American soldier was still two inches taller than the average German. But sometime around 1955 the situation began to reverse. The Germans and other Europeans went on to grow an extra two centimetres a decade, and some Asian populations several times more, yet Americans haven’t grown taller in fifty years. By now, even the Japanese—once the shortest industrialized people on earth—have nearly caught up with us, and Northern Europeans are three inches taller and rising.

Women, meanwhile, seem to be getting smaller. According to the National Center for Health Statistics—which conducts periodic surveys of as many as thirty-five thousand Americans—women born in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties average just under five feet five. Those born a decade later are a third of an inch shorter.

He has subdivided the country’s heights by race, sex, income, and education. He has looked at whites alone, at blacks alone, at people with advanced degrees and those in the highest income bracket. Somewhere in the United States, he thinks, there must be a group that’s both so privileged and so socially insulated that it’s growing taller. He has yet to find one.

¹ NewMexiKen is exactly the average height for American men but I’ve got a Mensa pin around here somewhere.