Jun 25 2009, 10:00AM
Daily Chart: Tall People Have Better Lives
Via Catherine Rampell, I see there's some new research about the relationship between height and quality of life. The findings? Tall people enjoy a higher quality of life. Specifically, the Talls are richer and happier than the Shorts. (The paper in question has some cool charts, which I'll happily steal.) Here's happier:
And here's richer:
A while back Greg Mankiw suggested that maybe we should have a height tax -- not with the intention of enacting one (as was sometimes misunderstood) but with the intention of sussing out a moral intuition about the appropriate role of taxes. A height tax sounds horrible and absurd, but it would actually be pretty darn efficient: You would get the benefit of taxing something strongly correlated with a higher income, without the drawback of distorting incentives or decreasing effort. You can change how hard you work; you can't really change your height.
A while back Greg Mankiw suggested that maybe we should have a height tax -- not with the intention of enacting one (as was sometimes misunderstood) but with the intention of sussing out a moral intuition about the appropriate role of taxes. A height tax sounds horrible and absurd, but it would actually be pretty darn efficient: You would get the benefit of taxing something strongly correlated with a higher income, without the drawback of distorting incentives or decreasing effort. You can change how hard you work; you can't really change your height.I share Greg's moral intuition that a height tax would be, somehow, wrong. But the more I see data like this, the more I think it might be a good (if utterly impractical) idea.
Or you could realize that life isn't fair (and I say that as a disabled person), and you know, grow up.
well that sure harshed the ol' mellow. even an unfair life has room for impractical thoughts, no?
I'm glad your coming round on this question. Deaton's wife--Anne Case--has an even more convincing paper on the topic of why tall people are better off: http://papers.nber.org/papers/w12466
"You would get the benefit of taxing something strongly correlated with a higher income, without the drawback of distorting incentives or decreasing effort." If that's the test, a wealth tax would be good because it would not take away the incentive or effort to become wealthy the way taxing income discourages working. Or is that an impractical thought for which I need to apologize?
Some possible confounding variables:
* Race (Hispanics are much shorter and poorer, in the aggregate)
* Age (people lose height as they age past 50, people lose "family income" as they retire)
* Health problems (Turner's syndrome, developmental delays, poor nutrition in childhood)
OK, so why isn't the most interesting thing here to speculate as to why both the charts have a sudden flip of correlation at the extreme? Why does the best possible suddenly flip to below average height? Why do the lowest incomes suddenly flip back to taller than average?
Someone else found the bell curve.
Someone else found the bell curve.
napoleon complex?
What the happiness chart tells me isn't that being tall will make you happy, but that being short will make you miserable.
well, everything's relative!
Happy 6 foot tall woman here from a tall and extremely happy well-adjusted family.
However, Megan McCardle's taller than me, and she seems quite cranky most of the time.