A video by a content creator explaining the science of height in humans has been making the rounds online, based on a claim that sounds strange: the best way to determine if a country’s living standards are really increasing is not to look at its GDP, but to see how tall its people are. The video’s creator claims that height is “not just genetics,” and that, although your genes determine the tallest you could ever be, whether you actually reach that height is almost entirely dependent on what happens to your body in the first roughly 1,000 days of life, which is to say, from conception to age two. “Undernutrition or repeated infection in that window,” she says, “causes the body to stop investing in leg growth first, permanently shaving inches off adult height.”
It turns out there's an entire, well-established field of economics built around exactly this idea.
The science is real, and it has a Nobel Prize behind it
Economists call it the biological standard of living. The term isn't internet slang, it comes from the work of Robert Fogel, the American economic historian who shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences partly for showing that population height and life expectancy can reveal welfare trends that income data alone misses. Long before GDP existed as a concept, historians could, and still do , reconstruct how well-fed and healthy past societies were simply by measuring skeletons.
