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Comment by scholia | Hacker News Reader

American men were third tallest in 1914 and 37th tallest in 2014.

The growth in the height of American men is the same as Mali, and similar to Burkina Faso. Senegal did better.

Shouldn't the world's richest nation be doing better?

PS There's a story that's easier to read at https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jul/26/tall-story-m...

The Guardian story says: "European countries now scoop the top 10 positions for height, with Dutch men and Latvian women the tallest for their sex. That, says Bentham (1), could be down to the introduction of a welfare state in many European countries."

(1) co-author of the research from Imperial College, London

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>The Guardian story says: "European countries now scoop the top 10 positions for height, with Dutch men and Latvian women the tallest for their sex. That, says Bentham (1), could be down to the introduction of a welfare state in many European countries."

That fails to consider the obvious explanation - you are comparing small EU countries with low ethnic diversity, uniform lifestyle and high standard of living with stringent immigration to a huge ethnically diverse country with a huge immigration flow.

The netherlands have stringent immigration rules? Better call that news hotline!

Anyway, uniform ethnicity does lead to extremes. If the entire world moved to Latvia then it follows that Latvian women would obviously be of average height.

Keep in mind that this is "increase in height over the past 100 years" which does not translate to "current standard of living." If a country already had a fairly high standard of living, one would expect that simply throwing more calories/protein into the mix wouldn't do much -- the population could be nearing its "peak height" already. If you're a poor country whose standard of living hasn't improved much over the last 100 years, your "average height increase" may look identical to those countries in the first category, but for very different reasons.

In addition, like one of the commenters mentioned, the US has seen tremendous immigration from countries (Top countries that people immigrate to the US from: Mexico, India, China, The Philippines, Cuba) that, on average, have been shorter than European and West African populations, also contributing to the change in average height.

If you look at some of the other "rich countries" in the list, they're smack dab in the middle of some other surprising countries. Sweden is between Vanuatu and Botswana, and Germany's increase in height is identical to North Korea's, for instance.

This is likely caused by Sweden and Germany being very open to immigration from other parts of the world. Sweden and Germany were very high on the list back in the day, but after relatively high streams of immigration during the late 1900's the average height has dropped.

I think one obvious factor is immigration from shorter on average countries like Mexico and Central America.

Most Hispanic immigrants to the US come from poor, often very indigenous parts of their countries. Those people are usually very short.

> Shouldn't the world's richest nation be doing better?

I think you'll find that the US is the 9th richest country in the world:

https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/richest-coun...

Us Brits are way lower, at #27 (and falling due to brexit no doubt).

The United States is far ahead if you measure by nominal GDP.

But GDP per capita is a pointless measure if you don't correct for the cost of living. The more interesting number is when you correct for how much you can actually do with the money earned. That's PPP (purchasing-power-parity), the measure in the article.

Note that that doesn't measure quality of life. Qatar may take the top spot in that ranking, but has large amounts of foreign workers employed under some not-so-nice conditions. Almost 90% of the population are foreign workers with temporary residence status: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Qatar

The US has a bunch of foreign workers employed under some not great conditions either(maybe not compared to Qatar?).

Qatar, Lux, Sing, Hong Kong, Brunei, are more like cities then countries. I doubt the UAE is counting their slaves in their GDP numbers. Norway and Kuwait are probably the only real countries in the list that are ahead of US.

I'll bet that if you look exclusively at descendants of 1914 Americans, they would be in the top 10, or at least close to it.

It's true that Americans of European ancestry are not growing taller at the same rate as their European cohorts. This could be partially due to childhood obesity. A diet rich in sugars leads to early puberty and counter-intuitively, decrease in overall height. "Precocious puberty leads to accelerated growth, accelerated bone maturation and ultimately reduced stature."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15073143

You make the assumption that being taller is better, even outside of social-perceptive advantages.

Otherwise you're making the assumption that Japan, because shorter, is somehow worse than a taller population country than Belgium.

You're ignoring genetics.

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