Look Up, He’s Tall And That’s Better

It’s your personal luck of the draw. Blame it on genetics and Gregor Mendel. Curse the name of Napolean if you will -but- research shows it’s no wonder "Grumpy" is the name of one of the seven dwarfs. Singer/song writer Randy Newman had a hit in the late 1970’s with a tune called “Short People” in which he suggested that “short people have no reason to live”.

That’s taking it a bit too far but maybe that’s in part why a study found that taller people are happier with their lives, while short folks are more miserable about the way things turned out for them. Actually the theory isn’t about short people being picked on by their taller peers but more about the possibility that better nutrition and good health generated better physical and cognitive growth in taller people

It was a pretty big study with researchers questioning more than 450,000 adults about their lives . In the process they discovered that U.S. residents above average height of 5 feet 9.2 inches for men and 5 feet 3.8 inches for women are happier about their lot in life.

Meanwhile, men who thought their lives were the "worst possible" were eight-tenths or nearly an inch shorter than the average male. And women who were unhappy with their lives were a half inch short than the average female, according to scientists at Princeton University.

They also discovered taller men were also better educated while height made no significant difference in this category for women. Men who failed to get a high school diploma were half an inch shorter than those who did and a full inch shorter than males who completed college.

The investigators compared the impact of height to other factors known to affect quality of life, including income. Each additional inch boosted happiness levels by the same amount as a 4.4 percent increase in family income for men and 3.8 percent pay raise for women.

As a reminder, here's Randy Newman.