> John Komlos, an economic historian who has studied height extensively, thinks we Americans lost our height advantage because of poorer overall healthcare and nutrition compared to Europe. Our social shortcomings, he believes, are literally making us come up short.
"lost our height advantage". These kinds of articles always seem to boil down to "why has America fallen from grace/stopped being #1?".
With an added hammer pounding for European-style healthcare, which is mentioned three or four times while considering American immigration influx from "shorter" populations is a throwaway word at the end of the article.
There certainly seems to a popular opinion/belief that tallness is inherently good; describing a person as tall seems to often be a compliment (at least for men). But I'm not sure that is the case for this article. It seems to be saying that overall tallness in a general population might indicate that the people of the population have had a good childhood, on average, with regards to nutrition and such. But, if you have two people from the same population (in this case, countries), one being tall and the other one short, their stature is probably more attributable to their genes. You can't really say that one has had a healthier upbringing; they might have had an equally healthy upbringing, but they have different genes, which is (according to them) the biggest deciding factor for adult stature. If one of them is 5% taller, how can you know, without any more information, that that 5% isn't all because of genes? In fact, maybe the shorter person has had a healthy upbringing and, so to speak, achieved his full stature potential, while the taller person has had a relatively bad childhood and not really met his tallness potential with regards to his genetic make-up.
It's taking a symptom and turning to it as a goal.
Not everything that makes you taller is healthy. Eating a lot of poultry that had been stuffed in growth hormones has been proven to increase growth. We can theoretically push growth at all means, doing things that we know are unhealthy. There's no proof that a diet that will make you the tallest will necessarily be the healthiest for you.
Talking about "stature potential" is a bit misleading too. It implies that the more height you manage to get, the better. There's absolutely no scientific evidence to this. It's true that malnourishment will impede your growth, but that's just an extreme case.
Seems like current Japan - for instance - is very healthy, has the longest life expectancy, but they are on the short side compared to Europe or North America.
I'm much taller than average and I'm quite sure that this isn't an advantage at all, except for specific tasks or sports. A lot more often it's a problem and I don't feel one bit superior to shorter people. There's a lot of bias towards "taller is better" regardless of any other consideration. It stops just short of eugenics to achieve taller people.
> Talking about "stature potential" is a bit misleading too. It implies that the more height you manage to get, the better.
You're right. I didn't intend to imply that. Just because someone has achieved their "potential", ie. have grown as tall as one might expect them to based on their genes, does not necessarily mean that it was good that they did so. Maybe they would have been better off health-wise if they grew shorter than that; what height would be optimal (or: what percentage of their """""height potential""""") would be hard to guess, I reckon.
You still seem to imply that there is a maximum height potential, and getting closer to it, is better.
This just seems to be a very inaccurate model.
All accounts point to the fact that there is a whole range of heights that you can achieve while living a perfectly healthy lifestyle and nutrition, and that you can fail to reach this range, or exceed it, by excess or defect of some elements in your lifestyle and nutrition. You can even stay within this range while being unhealthy because height is by no means a perfect or even a good measure of health. It's a very loose measure only in rather extreme situations, and a decent measure for whole populations under some circumstances. It is a proven fact that you can unhealthily push someone's growth during childhood.
Completeness of nutrition is mostly a non-factor across the Western World when it comes to height. Exercise is a bigger factor as many kids slow down their metabolism by lack of exercise. Migration of Mexicans and Asians into the US is a bigger factor too. These people are healthy, they are just typically shorter. There is no problem at all with that in itself.
Albert Einstein was average Ashkenazi jewish at 5 ft 8~9. Nikola Tesla was your typical tall Balkan man (some accounts measured him at up to 6 ft 6). Does it matter? Should we be trying to push up the height of the jewish by eugenics? The whole "worry" is silly.
Malnourishment also leads to lower weight. Do we try to maximise weight? no, right? because we realise it's stupid and it's quite evident that excess of weight is not good, and it doesn't even look good in most cultures currently. In fact there's a cultural trend about being unnaturally "lean". People need to immediately stop mixing up their personal aesthetic preferences, however common, with real issues like science and health.
> You still seem to imply that there is a maximum height potential, and getting closer to it, is better.
Oh please. I spent that entire post explaining that that is not my intention. The problem is probably my use of the word "potential", which has positive connotations, generally. I intend it to mean just possibility. Clearly, there are a lot of cases where this potential can manifest themselves as opposite extremes, and where there is no clear objective goodness of falling on either end of the extremes. In other cases, it may be totally subjective. In other cases, yet, it may not matter. I think, given extreme circumstances, people in general have the potential in them for great evil. But clearly, that is not good or desirable. I should have clarified from the beginning my use of the word desirable. But it is you who chose to cling to it (if I'm right in that being the problematic word).
Stop projecting the issues# you have with the tallness-worship of our/some cultures onto me!
#by which I mean protests, intellectual arguments against the practice, etc. I don't mean to imply that you have some emotional issue with this kind of thing. See? I ran out of accurate words so I had to resort to a word with too much semantic baggage.
> I don't think you have read my post completely. I didn't imply anything from the usage of the word potential.
I meant my use of that word. I edited my post to make that clear. Or maybe you mean that you mentioning the my use of the word "potential" had no such interpretation (positive) of the "potential", in which case... my head hurts now.
> You still seem to miss the fact that someone can be taller as the direct result of unhealthy elements. Even illness.
By what criteria have I missed this fact? By not mentioning it, or by trying to contradict it? I said, and I quote myself since you don't seem to trust me: "Just because someone has achieved their "potential" [...], does not necessarily mean that it was good that they did so.". In that context, "bad" meant that the tallness was due to some unhealthy habits, since we were on the topic of nutrition and health and so on. Or that them being that tall was not good for them in their adult life, or both.
I am used to people assuming dishonesty in online debates. But not when I agree with them to begin with. If what you intend to do is to find some wording that betrays a (subconscious) bias towards tall people, please give it a rest and find someone else to take it out on.
"lost our height advantage". These kinds of articles always seem to boil down to "why has America fallen from grace/stopped being #1?".