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The upper classes are getting shorter. Why? Because upward mobility is levelling out, to some extent, the social disadvantages of shortness. There's a curious phenomenon with height. Tall people tend to do better than short ones. They're more likely to earn more, to get the job, and if they're a bloke — and I say this without the slightest rancour I assure you — they're more likely to get the girl. But in a study which will have old fogies in gentlemen's clubs around the nation choking on their beers, social mobility has partly overcome the height thing, and the result is that the well-to-do have become shorter. The researchers took 10,000 people born in 1958, and compared the social class they were born into, with their social class as adults. The height difference in adulthood was greater when you categorised people according to their social class as children, and the explanation was largely upward mobility during life. People migrating to the upper classes were shorter than those already in them, and those heading downwards were taller than the people in the classes below. The result was a levelling out. Mind you, the height thing was still there. It was the taller-than-average people in the working classes who tended to move upwards, and the shorter-than-average people in the middle classes who went down. The serious policy issue in all this is that it emphasises that things like education are able to overcome inequalities in childhood, which may at first sight seem to be biological.
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