‘I look down on him,” says the John Cleese figure, “because I am upper class.” The three of them – Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett – are lined in descending height order. “I look up to him,” says Barker, “because I am middle class; but I look down on him, because he is lower class,” looking at Corbett, who says: “I know my place.”
This timeless morsel captures what the data shows: height is highly correlated with socioeconomic position. In the Whitehall study, a long-term investigation of the health of British civil servants, it was found the higher people are, the higher they go. People at each rung on the employment ladder are taller, on average, than those below them, and shorter than those of higher status. It’s possible that being taller gets you promoted. More likely, the social circumstances of early childhood, including good nutrition, are linked not only to height, but to educational and social success. Height, then, is both an outcome of conditions in childhood and an indicator – by which I mean that shorter height is a likely reflection of adverse conditions that will affect other aspects of children’s development: cognitive, linguistic, emotional.
