email: accase@princeton.edu - Anne Case - email: cpaxson@princeton.edu Paxson.
A new study by Anne Case and Christina Paxson of Princeton University published by the National Bureau of Economic Research reports, tall people are just smarter than their height-challenged peers. Click here for paper.
I generally support researchers efforts to find causes for the predicament that we often find ourselves in. Though a lot of people dismissed it, I found merit in the 2001 paper that correlated economic success to height in adolescence
(http://www.ssc.upenn.edu/~persico/research/Papers/short.pdf). But what I've read so far I find very discouraging. In 1994 Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray published "The Bell Curve" which concluded that genetic factors were responsible for making African Americans less intelligent, less successful and more prone to crime than white people. The research was highly ridiculed and the authors labeled as racists.
If a similar study made similar conclusions about any other minority group there would be fierce outrage from those groups and sympathy from many who are not in those groups. So when did it become perfectly acceptable to claim that short people are less intelligent than tall people. Do I now have to worry that my employer will think me unqualified for the technical job that I perform because of this study? Should short people give up on higher education and higher paying jobs and just accept their low status in society?
-Steven Goldsmith
Secretary/Treasurer, NOSSA
Editor, ShortSupport.org
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