Tall People Make More Money But Higher IQs Matter More
It should come as no surprise that people are biased in favor of tall people and that this translates into economic advantages.
Short people may be short-changed when it comes to salary, status and respect, according to a University of Florida study that found tall people earn considerably more money throughout their lives.
"Height matters for career success," said Timothy Judge, a UF management professor whose research is scheduled to be published in the spring issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology. "These findings are troubling in that, with a few exceptions such as professional basketball, no one could argue that height is an essential ability required for job performance nor a bona fide occupational qualification."
Judge and Daniel Cable, a business professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel-Hill, analyzed the results of four large-scale research studies - three in the United States and one in Great Britain - which followed thousands of participants from childhood to adulthood, examining details of their work and personal lives.
Judge's study, which controlled for gender, weight and age, found that mere inches cost thousands of dollars. Each inch in height amounted to about $789 more a year in pay, the study found. So someone who is 7 inches taller - say 6 feet versus 5 feet 5 inches - would be expected to earn $5,525 more annually, he said.
"If you take this over the course of a 30-year career and compound it, we're talking about literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of earnings advantage that a tall person enjoys," Judge said.
The desire to assure that one's offspring will earn a higher income will serve as a powerful incentive for people to do genetic engineering on their eggs, sperm, and fetuses to ensure that their babies have the best possible chances in life. The prospects for boosting future average earnings potential are even greater from IQ boosts than from height boosts. A mere $5,525 annual salary increase is nothing compared to the differences in salary that would come if one could boost one's offspring's intelligence by, say, 20 IQ points.
Note that there is an important productivity difference between height enhancement and IQ enhancement: Height just makes some people more able to get jobs or close sales or otherwise beat other people when competing for the same existing resources but it probably doesn't increase overall productivity. By contrast, higher intelligence boosts one's ability to do mental work. Height differences, by contrast, are probably a net drain on productivitiy because to the extent that people judge each other by height they judge each other less by differences in real performance. The economy is made less efficient by judgements made on any basis other than real workplace productivity differences. By contrast, boosts in cognitive abilities will lead to dramatic increases in workforce productivity.
Will people genetically engineer their children in the future? Any poll taken today that attempts to measure public attitudes toward offspring genetic engineering probably overestimates eventual future general opposition to the practice. Once prospective parents are offered concrete specific options for providing their offspring with advantages in height, looks, or cognitive abilities the issue of genetic engineering will change from an abstract moral or philosophical question to one in which personal interests are considered and personal benefits and costs are weighed. Given the enormous potential benefits from offspring genetic engineering for health, physical abilities, and mental abilities my guess is that the desire to provide those benefits for one's own offspring will shift a lot of people's opinions toward support for genetic engineering of offspring.
Another factor that is going to play a big role in shifting opinion in favor of offspring genetic engineering is national interest and the competition between nations. The United States faces the very real problem that China has over 4 times as many people as the US and is growing rapidly. The Chinese are fairly bright folks on average and, as Intel chairman Andy Grove has recently argued, it is probable that the United States will lose leadership in software and other industries to China and other countries. What can the US do with a smaller population? Make it smarter. Of course, China will be able to do the same and the Chinese will have no moral qualms about doing so. Therefore the case for making the US population smarter will become even more compelling.
Economic globalization is bringing people all over the world into direct competition with each other. Competition is getting more fierce and people will become generally more willing to embrace new innovations in order to get advantages over their competitors. Fear and greed will both work to promote the widespread embrace of offspring brain genetic engineering.
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Heaven help the short-fat-dumb people?
