The Long and the Short of It

Is height a good measure of health? That is the basis of a UN study written about in Newsweek. The study shows that Americans have fallen from the tallest people in the world out of the top ten. The authors of the report and the Newsweek article assume that the only factor is child health care. In order to make the report more accurate, the authors only looked at native-born whites and blacks.

The Newsweek article picks up on this and uses it to bash Americans for not instituting socialized medicine.

There are a lot of problems with the report. A big one is the assumption that Americans should have the same genetic basis for height as the Europeans. Their basis for this is sort of a shrug, pointing out that Americans were taller than Europeans for a long time. The flaw here is that, outside of genetics, the biggest factor limiting height is nutrition.  Americans may well have reached their genetic maximum decades before Europeans.

There is some indication of this in the report itself. All of the countries with tallest populations are from northern Europe. Since white Americans are from a wide mixture of Europeans, you would expect us to be a bit shorter than the tallest. The opposite is true for American blacks. Most Africans brought as slaves came from a the area close to the so-called Slave Coast. I have no idea how this sub-group compares with Africans as a whole but it could account for differences.

A second flaw in the assumptions is that the lack of insurance equates to a sicker population. The biggest factor here is childhood vaccinations.  The American rate is as high as anyone's nearly 100% and is already highly subsidized.

The final problem with the report is contained in the report itself. If universal health care is the determining factor then you would expect the British to come in at the top of the list. After all, they were the first country to institute it and are often held up as the model for the US to emulate.

Instead they come in right after the US. Even with socialized medicine and the rest of the welfare state, they are still shorter than the US population, although not by much. What does that tell you about biases in the report?