This One’s for All the Little People Out There

 Among other advantages, taller people make more money than short people, with an additional inch of height adding about 2 percent to a young man’s income in the United States.

To right this wrong (disclosure: At 5-foot [mumble-mumble] inches, I would almost definitely stand to benefit from righting of said wrong) some have suggested, somewhat facetiously, a tax on height. Another more earnest new paper in the Utah Law Review considers “enacting a federal law that would flatly prohibit height-based employments decisions.”

I’m not sure banning height discrimination would actually have much effect in the United States. Economists argue that the salary advantage that height confers on workers is not determined by a conscious, explicit employer preference for tall people. Rather, tall people tend to possess other marketable characteristics, like self-esteem. One clever economic study found that earnings were actually closely correlated with men’s heights in adolescence — a formative period for self-esteem, when kids are trying out for confidence- and skill-building activities like sports teams. The takeaway: It matters little how tall men are now, when they’re working. What matters is how tall they were back in high school, when height may have conferred important social, psychological and athletic advantages.

In other words, for the most part American employers probably aren’t discriminating based on height. They’re “discriminating” based on qualities that tallness — or, more specifically, relative tallness in adolescence — seems to encourage.

The same cannot necessarily be said in China, where some businesses and universities have been known to enforce explicit height cutoffs for entry, at least in recent years. A Chinese professor I had in college once told our class that she decided to become a teacher primarily because she didn’t meet the height requirement for going into government work.