Are Americans Shrinking?

It’s well-known fact that Americans got taller over the course of the 20th century. Now that our empire is in decline, though, does that still hold true? Or is our physical stature waning along with our moral authority in the world? —Shrinking

You will be relieved to learn, Shrinking, that our physical stature is NOT waning along with our moral authority. Sure, both things are tanking at the same time, but that seems mostly to be a coincidence, like when you do an autopsy on a road-killed possum and discover that it also had late-stage syphilis. I hope this news assuages your patriotic concerns.

Anyway, there’s a reason the two trends probably aren’t that closely linked: Our height has been declining for longer than our ethical standing. Maybe a lot longer, depending on how you count—by one measure, our vertical superiority peaked in 1914, when American men and women were the world’s third- and fourth-tallest, respectively.

Granted, this mostly reflected our rapid economic development compared to the rest of the globe. Our ranking dropped into the teens by the 1960s as the larger world caught up, even though Americans’ height continued to increase in absolute terms.

For a while! Eventually, though, the height of U.S. young adults peaked, around 1990, and it’s been declining slightly ever since. That’s well before any widely acknowledged (domestically, anyway) ethical cratering on the nation’s part. You sometimes hear that our reduction in stature is due to an influx of immigration from shorter countries, but that’s a myth; the trend holds even when the sample is confined to native-born European Americans.

So what happened? A population health study from 2025 begins, “The U.S. healthcare and food-provisioning systems have failed to create an environment in which the human biological organism can flourish.” (As mic drop–worthy first lines go, by the way, this is probably as close to “Lolita, fire of my loins” or “Gregor Samsa awoke from a night of disturbing dreams” as a scientific paper is going to get.)

In other words, a broad reduction in individuals’ economic well-being led to poor nutrition and spotty prenatal care, resulting in shorter adults. Sign of a nation in decline? Fine—but remember, the U.K. had been in decline for two decades when they invented punk rock. Meanwhile, we were at peak hegemony and the best we could do was yacht rock. Perhaps a little suffering is good for the soul.

Questions? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.