Slashdot Mirror
Tall People Earn More
ayahner writes "Tall people earn considerably more money throughout their lives than their shorter co-workers, with each inch adding about $789 a year in pay, according to a new study. If this is true, I should make a killing! At 6'7" I tower over other developers. It's mostly a distraction, as I can see over even the highest cubes and if I stand just in the right spot, I can receive satellite transmissions. Saves on the cell phone bill. I'm going to go ask for a raise right now, if I can figure out how to work the printer..."
Factor in the fact that women earn .75 to every dollar, and we are typically shorter, I have to wonder if this really is a male/female discrepancy versus a tall/short discrepancy.
Can I bum a sig?
They do. When I was six years old, I was put on human growth hormone, injected into my body every other day. It was actual growth hormone taken out of average human beings, and injected in those who needed it, like moi. However, it was discovered that some disease or another was being passed around through the human growth hormone - several people that were taking the injections for years died - and a federal judge ordered it to be stopped after I had taken it for about two years. By the time synthetic growth hormone was developed and "proven" to be "relatively" safe, it was too late. Most of my body's bones had already closed due to the onset of puberty, and I became 4'10" for the rest of my life. Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
This observation is as true today as it was in the 70's. I guess that dates me.
Now... the flip side of this is that many short intelligent men chose not to put up with this sort of bullshit. This provides an incentive for them to get out on their own and set up their own firms.
I know of at least 5 major companies in this city who are headed by short men who were driven out of the company they used to work for. In one case the president-owner of the newly formed company declared that he was going to put his former employer out of business and hire every one of their employees.
Well, this has not materialized. Nevertheless his former employer is no longer #1 in the industry and the new company is rapidly moving into that slot so perhaps it just hasn't happened yet.
Tall people can be both smug and complacent at times but the little guys can sometimes really kick ass too!
The median height for American white males is 69"(5'9") while 72"(6'0") is the 75th percentile. (NHANES III 1988-94)
Recent Presidents' heights:
G.W.Bush: 6' 0"
Clinton: 6' 2-1/2"
G.H.Bush: 6' 2"
Reagan : 6' 1"
Carter: 5' 9-1/2"
Ford: 6' 0"
Nixon: 6' 0"
Johnson: 6' 3"
Kennedy: 6' 0"
8 of the last 9 above the 75th percentile not even accounting for lower heights in the past.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
This has everything to do with how the human animal is hardwired for dominance/submission. Very similar to many animals. More dominant males tend to succeed better. Being taller is a dominance trait. It's not rocket science. It's biology. It drives a lot more human behavior than most people are aware of, or would be comfortable admitting.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Yes, obviously, this is the case. It's not like the researchers are jumping to the conclusion that it's wrong that tall people earn more, they leave that to the reader. But consider this: people who are exceptionally intelligent are much more likely to be tall, as well.
This all probably has to do with the fact that a person who is adequately physically satiated in his formative years (i.e. so as to have enough food/exercise/whatever to grow tall) is also much more likely to have had a well-fostered intellectual development as well.
So no, it's not a correlation in a void of inexplicable connected correlations, no. But nothing in human behavior is. This is likely one of those "research causes cancer in rats" conclusions.
And you think that those conclusions are somehow useless or invalid? If it's consistently provable, there's something TO it, whether it fits your "common sense" view of the world or not. That's what research is all about. If it turned out that twitching your left pinky finger frequently resulted in higher cancer rates, I would still think there was something true that we could learn from those results, even though my conception of left-pinky-action has nothing to do with my conception of cancer. If it happens consistently, there's probably a reason for it, and it would do you/us well to accept it =P.
-----[0_o]-----
We are not amused.
Back in the 1950's, my father (who is only a mere 6'3") was selected for a sales position over another applicant. He was later told by his manager that the deciding factor was that he was taller.
I put the 'fun' in fundamentalism