During the early 1980s, curators at Colonial Williamsburg measured the beds on display and discovered their lengths equalled or were longer than those found in modern furniture stores.
— Ancestry. com, Sept 2014
[T]taller people live better lives, at least on average. They evaluate their lives more favorably, and they are more likely to report a range of positive emotions such as enjoyment and happiness...These findings ...are almost entirely explained by the positive association between height and both income and education, both of which are positively linked to better lives.
— Angus Deaton, future Knight Bachelor and Nobel Prize-winning economist, summarizing his 2009 survey of 454,000 adults.1
The imaginary mailbag has been flooded lately by readers clamoring for more information about height.
Between 20 and 40 percent of height is determined by early nutrition minus disease, so human stature is an indicator of childhood living conditions across a population — providing inferences about economy, diet, and culture, environment and technology, in the past and today.
Tall people come into the world lottery-winners, with access to healthy food and medical care, benefits that help them realize their genetic growth potential. Hundreds of studies show taller people are better-educated, earn more, and live longer.2
Major League pitchers, for instance, have always been much taller than average people and taller than other ballplayers. That probably reflects the way the strongest, most physically mature kids are sent to the mound early on.
Consider lucky young stars I’ve cherry-picked like 6’4” surfer G. Cole, son of that literally most affluent and overly tanned small city, Newport Beach, California (where lives Michael Bluth, Bob Loblaw, and an 86-percent population of white people, many with David Hasselhoff’s twinkle) — G Cole, who paced the Orange Lutheran HS Lancers with a 96 mph fastball and .47 ERA.
Or Kershaw, the hulking 6’4” Westerner who as a high-schooler in Highland Park, Texas — where average household income was $211,000 — pitched an all-strikeout perfect playoff game (adding a grand slam).3
Nowadays there seems to be more of these tallest starting pitchers, at 6’4” and up, long guys who benefit more from gravity and release their pitches closer to the plate.
But it’s complicated:
You can’t really say much about such small cohorts, but I’d guess 2011 and 2021 are outliers.4
2011: Pitchers get taller over time — like everyone in the countries represented on opening day rosters today.5 But if high-altitude 2011 was visually stunning, it was also probably a September snow.
The 14 really tall guys, 6’6” and over, went 159-150, and half had losing records; the biggest stars in the group were in their thirties (Halladay, Sabathia, Carpenter, Lowe); and most of the rest were washed up in a few years.
2021: This looks like a non-trend the other way, but the research is out. Could taller pitchers have been more disadvantaged by injuries and the continuing decline in innings per start (5.8 to 4.8 between 2015-20), leaving some with too few innings to qualify? Like what happens to the misleadingly dainty 6’5” deGrom.
Fun fact: Of the three pitchers under 6’ in 1981, one was Ron Guidry, who led the league in WHIP, and one was Fernando Valenzuela, who won the Cy Young Award. Old Hoss Radbourn was only 5’9” and that didn’t stop him from winning 60 games one year on top of the 48 he won the year before.
NB: A 2010 SABR analysis found no correlation between height and pitching effectiveness. More recently, Fangraphs determined that height helped if a) you were exactly 6’4” b) throwing curveballs c) with a lot of spin d) in the late 2010s.
Steckel Over Haeckel
Skeletons analyzed by economist Richard Steckel (Oberlin ‘66) indicate that Northern European men in the late Middle Ages were only an inch shorter — about 5’ 8” on average — than their 20th-century descendants.
During the next few centuries — through Europe’s Renaissance and into the Spock-inspired Age of Reason, when people were rationalizing all the time — average height declined three inches. The Medieval Warm Period (900-1300 CE) once extended the growing season but now gave way to cooling temperatures (aka the Little Ice Age, with its especially severe Grindelwald Fluctuation)6 — while urbanization and global trade spread disease, inequality worsened, and war had the usual catastrophic effects on local health.7
The average European didn’t recover to the height of a 12th-century farrier for 800 years — not until the 1930s.
In the U.S. today a man in his stockings averages 5’9”. He’s one inch taller than the colonist who secured his freedom in the American Revolution and about the same height as U.S. fighters in the Civil War and World War II.8
For 200 years, Americans were the world’s tallest nation. Men in the colonies were 2-3 inches taller than men in Europe thanks to plentiful food. But the country’s growth outpaced its ability to provide a healthy diet (not enough meat), leading to height declines in the 19th century.9
The American height advantage persisted through World War II — German soldiers averaged about 5’7”, while the Japanese were closer to 5’4” on average — about the average height of American women today.10
More Fascinating Steckel
Steckel also pioneered research into nutrition and mortality among enslaved Americans. Malnourished babies of enslaved parents were “dreadfully small...among the smallest ever measured.” The average height of a four-and-a-half-year-old enslaved boy — a little under three feet — is one-fifth of the first percentile of current height standards. Enslaved girls reached the .5 percentile today on average. Both were five-to-six inches shorter than modern-day children.
Steckel argued that owners ensured productivity by providing regular rations of meat as enslaved youth began to work; as a result, these young people typically gained several inches in adolescence, reaching the 28th percentile of modern standards.
In contrast, skeletal remains of free Black congregants in a Philadelphia church indicated they had better health than even some affluent white populations.
Researchers say “the ratio between the intake of high-quality proteins from milk products, pork, meat and fish, and low-quality proteins from wheat” has been the best predictor of height.
Deaton is married to fellow Princeton economist Anne Case. Together their CVs go for 28 pages.
Where are the rankings of longest combined CVs for academic couples (six-page per-capita minimum)? I thought to check wedded Harvard economists Lawrence Katz and Claudia Katz. They are a 36-page couple! (Him=19/Her=17.)
For instance, this 2016 meta-analysis of 1,472 studies measuring 18.6 million people in 200 countries.
Called after five innings. There’s a video.
I lowered the cut-off to 110 innings in 1981, a strike year, because no team played more than 111 games.
From 1985-2019, men in the U.S. gained on average 1.2 centimeters (slightly under half an inch), an increase that ranked 146th of 200 countries during this period, acc to a huge study. American women gained .3 centimeters (one tenth of an inch) ranking them 168th. The U.S. has plateaued while many nations grow, dropping this country from 38th to 58th in average height. Researchers attribute the trend to suboptimal health care, poor eating habits, and economic inequality.
Men in the two countries that supply the most foreign-born players grew 5.1 centimeters (Dominican Republic) and 3.2 centimeters (Venezuela) during that time.
U.S. men remain taller than men in most of the “feeder” countries (only Canada is taller among countries contributing more than one player); in effect the population in shorter nations has more room to grow. And growth rates in a very big country like the U.S. will be more modest than in small countries — it’s like comparing American public education outcomes to, I don’t know, maybe Finland’s.
Giant volcanic eruptions across the Atlantic blocked sunlight for thousands of miles. Dagomar Degroot suggests environmental degradation resulting from Spain’s conquest of the Americas may have added to the cooling back in Europe.
Rivers there that had never frozen froze. An English contemporary wrote, “River of Severn and Wye [sic] were so hard frozen that people did pass on foot from side unto the other and played gambols and made fires to roast meat upon the ice.” Blizzards and ice storms ruined crops and spread famine, and one winter (1610-11) “occasioned the greatest shipwrecks that ever was known in England.”
Shakespeare wrote a play that year which opens on a ship as it is “swallow’d” in a storm summoned by a magician. Not long before, bad weather had nearly destroyed “the most significant ship to be built in the entire reign of James,” which shipwright Phineas Pett blamed on unfriendly supernatural powers.
Sea storms and shipwrecks also figure in The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Othello, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale.
I’ve semi-lifted from Steckel’s “fascinating, intriguing, amazing, and potentially enormously significant" research, as another economist once put it. Steckel taught at Ohio State for 47 years and was known on the boulevard as “Mr Thinks He Knows Everything About Orthogenetics.” (Not really.)
Footnote to footnote 7 One of four things clearly recalled from college (1979-1983) is Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) saying “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”
Haeckel argued that an embryo bodily “replays” the evolution of its species as it grows — e.g., a human embryo goes through fish, amphibian, and reptile stages in the womb. Modern science later found the notion absurd, but it influenced “education, criminology, psychoanalysis (Freud and Jung were devout recapitulationists), and racism,” per Stephen Jay Gould.
It’s not certain that college emphasized Haeckel was wrong. Gould recalled being taught recapitulationism in high school, “fifty years after it had been abandoned by science.”
Recorded trends for women were relatively scarce (historical measurements often come from the military) before insurers began publishing actuarial tables toward the end of the 19th century in the U.S.; their worry at the time was that people were too thin.
The U.S. population came into the 19th century like Norway and went out like Iran, growing more than 14-fold from 5.3 million to 76 million.
Women tend to grow or shrink at roughly the same rate as men (in weight as well). CDC figures show men reach their final average height, around 5’9½”, in their 30s, then shrink to 5’7” by their 80s. Women reach their final average height of 5’4” in their 30s, then shrink to a bit over 5’1” by their 80s.