Height, health, and inequality: the distribution of adult heights in India.

This paper explores the relationship between adult heights and the distribution of income across populations of individuals. There is a long literature that examines the relationship between mean adult heights and living standards. If adult height is set by the balance between food intake and charges to disease in early childhood, it is informative about economic and epidemio­ logical conditions in childhood. Because taller populations are better off, more productive, and live longer, the relationship between child­ hood conditions and adult height has become an important focus in the study of the relationship between health and wealth. Here, I follow one of the tributaries of this main stream. A rela­ tionship between income and height at the indi­ vidual level has implications for the effects of income inequality on the distribution of heights. These relationships parallel, but are somewhat more concrete than, the various relationships between income inequality and health that have been debated in the economic and epidemio­ logical literatures (Richard G. Wilkinson 1996; Deaton 2003). If height is an increasing but concave func­ tion of income, average height will be nega­ tively related to income inequality (Richard Steckel 1995). Income inequality will also have implications for the dispersion of height, so that inequality in height might serve as an indicator of inequality of income in the absence of data on the latter, just as mean height might serve as an indicator of mean income (Aravinda M. Guntupalli and Joerg Baten 2006; Alexander Moradi and Baten 2005). Differences in height between subpopulations, such as lords and vassals, or highlanders and lowlanders, may also provide information on the distribution of Height, Health, and Inequality: The Distribution of Adult Heights in India