Is Height Discrimination Lindy?

I noticed a strange new trend that was happening while I was browsing Tik-Tok. It’s about men who get height surgery to gain 3-4 inches, or even more. I knew this surgery existed decades ago, but it was for very small people and the actual operation looked really brutal. What’s different about these videos are how professional and non-brutal. Almost like going to get a hair transplant or something.

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It isn’t cheap, it’s somewhere around $50,000 - $80,000 and It isn’t close to being mainstream yet. But it’s here now. While there are no concrete numbers on how many people are having this procedure, you’ll find various TikToks and IG posts popping up everywhere with this surgery. These are professional (mostly) men who have money and are usually in their 20s and 30s. Some are software engineers or lawyers. 

Major news websites are even covering it now like NBC, NYPost, The Guardian.

The Cosmetic Procedure Boom

It’s part of a larger trend of human augmentation to fit an ideal. For women it’s fillers, Botox, silicone and Brazilian butt lifts. For men there is Testosterone, hair transplants and now…this. They're rapidly improving the procedure, some doctors have proprietary methods / tools as well. As long as there is money and demand for it, the surgery will become more efficient over time

I’m not surprised it’s getting popular. America is not a poor country and it really likes to experiment on itself. The top 15% of people have a significant amount of expendable income. Look at all the new SUVs and Trucks on the road.

For clarification: I don’t think this procedure will ever become mainstream or even popular. It’s just too intense and expensive. I’m 5’10 and would never consider this ever. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me they did it.

Dating and Height

This operation looks very painful. Why would men do that? Because height matters in the United States. It isn’t the most important factor in a man, but it is a factor.

Take dating for example. I previously wrote about how dating has significantly changed in the past 10 years. Most couples meet online now. This is a new dynamic. A woman can filter her preferences by height (but you can’t filter your preference by weight). If you’re 5’6' you may never even see her on the app itself. She’s not there for you. At least in person you can dress a certain way, have charisma, courage or use happenstance to your advantage. This has led to Men lying about their height on dating apps and hoping for the best when they meet. There is research that backs up height bias in dating.

Surprisingly it even exists in this era where we are not supposed to discriminate against anyone.

Most concerns over inequality are due to racial, economic or gender based issues. It’s striking that height prejudice isn’t demonized today, possibly because criticizing women’s heightism may seem like sexism. I’m 5’10″ personally

Height and Career

Part of the job of the CEO is being the face of the company and optics are a big influence, especially if they “rose through the ranks.” In his 2005 bestselling book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell noted an fact about Fortune 500 leaders. “In the U.S. population, about 14.5 percent of all men are six feet or taller. Among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, that number is 58 percent. Even more striking, in the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are six foot two or taller. Among my CEO sample, almost a third were six foot two or taller.”

Any shorter man who rises up the corporate ladder also has to deal with the annoying Napoleon Complex stereotype as well. Which seems like an unfortunate way to slap a scientific label on short-shaming.

Donald Trump and Michael Bloomberg

Short-shaming became very obvious and was fully in the public arena in 2020. Donald Trump famously attacked Michael Bloomberg when Bloomberg ran as a Democrat. Donald Trump stands at 6’3” and Bloomberg is 5”7’.

The attacks were relentless and stood out in a time of extreme sensitivity and wokeness. There was no real pushback. Donald Trump is a master of nicknames and insults. But even Trump understands what you can say and what you can’t say. He knows he is allowed to make short jokes in public. By highlighting Bloomberg’s height, Trump is trying to say Bloomberg is not tall enough to be trusted to be President. That he won’t be respected and will be ridiculed because most CEOs and former Presidents were over 6 foot tall.

Michael Bloomberg is Jewish and Jewish people are genetically closest to other Mediterraneans like the southern Italians, Greeks, Turks, Cypriots and Lebanese. Indeed, if you travel to these countries you immediately notice the people tend to be look shorter on average than people from Sweden or Norway or Germany, the place where Donald Trump’s ancestors came from.

Does short-shaming exist in those cultures as well?

Is Short-Shaming Lindy?

There is a genetic issue between people that is causing the height bias. David Reich wrote a very famous book on population genetics a few years ago: He discovered that there are advantages to being short in height in a predominately agricultural society, & tall in a predominately hunting one.

There is a genetic split in Europe. The southern parts (Greece, Cyprus, Israel, Italy, Southern France, Anatolia, Lebanon) descended from the first farmers who brought agriculture mostly from Anatolia. The northern and central europeans descend mostly from a group of pastoralists called Yamnaya from modern day Ukraine.

This is no surprise to anyone who has eyes.

As Reich’s work shows, It was an evolutionary advantage to be tall in the pastoralist environment and it was an evolutionary advantage to be shorter in the agricultural environment. That means we should see the opposite of short-shaming in Mediterranean societies. We should see a culture that engages in Tall-Shaming. Expressions relating to a tall person being stupid, slow or other negative attributes.

That’s exactly what we see when we dig into the ancient texts from Rome and Greece and Judea (“David and Goliath”). We also see references from Julius Caesar, Roman and other Ancient Greek writers.

Short-shaming exists today in America because America is still culturally a northern European country. Which is also why we see this new limb lengthening surgery take off.

Similarly, we see tall-shaming expressions survive today in the living language and slang in Mediterranean countries since their descendants have been selected for shorter height due to agriculture.

Tall-Shaming and Designer Babies

In the rest of this Newsletter I will explore:

1) The hidden history of Ancient and Modern tall-shaming using ancient references and modern slang that still exist in Mediterranean countries.

2) The future of heightism with designer babies and choosing embryos. Are we going to keep selecting for height in America through technology? What about the risks of being tall such as increase in potential cancer?

Tall-Shaming in Mediterranean Countries

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