This is the best summary I could come up with:

At least, not until we tried to use the National Health Interview Survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to figure out which professions boast the tallest workers.

We saw similar results in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a separate, gold-standard CDC data set that deputizes trained personnel to measure people’s height, weight and other dimensions according to a 91-page-manual.

We prefer towering politicians — we last picked a president of below-average height for his era, William McKinley, in 1896 — and studies of people such as hiring managers often find that they believe a taller salesman, for example, will impress customers.

The Hungary-born, Midwest-raised Komlos spent much of his adult life buried deep in the archives, assembling centuries of human-height data using everything from colonial-era newspaper reports of the physical stature of runaway indentured servants and enslaved people to Austro-Hungarian military records.

We dragged Komlos out of a happy retirement in central North Carolina (which he claims to spend reading Washington Post data columns) and asked him what the unholy heck was going on.

“The beginning of the Reagan administration is a watershed moment in the economic history of the U.S.,” he told us, pointing to his book, “Foundations of Real-World Economics.” “It was the end of the New Deal philosophy and a turn toward the idea that the market can deliver a good life.”

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we’re still talking about fractions of an inch

Just to set expectations here, it’s <0.5", or somewhere in the neighborhood of a centimeter.

Evidence is mixed, but doctors analyzing almost 130,000 kids in California recently found that “childhood obesity is associated with earlier puberty in both boys and girls,” and Komlos and others have found that those children then experience a smaller growth spurt than their peers.

So it’s mostly because we’re getting fatter, not because of your snippet about people going hungry. If anything, poor people are eating too much, so the issue likely has more to do with nutrition than quantity.

But obesity might take a back seat to nutrition in making us shorter, Greenspan said. Changes in school lunches — “Now if kids are lucky enough to get a lunch at school, it is processed stuff that will last a full year if it stays on the shelf”

The larger issue seems to be income:

increasing inequality will push our average height ever lower even if average incomes and economic growth remain steady.

I don’t think this is true, I think the real issue is individual, not comparative, purchasing power. Me doubling my salary doesn’t impact you, provided prices stay the same, so as long as people make the same or more money after inflation, I don’t think wealth inequality is particularly relevant.

I think the wording there was sloppy, but fortunately this part is very clear:

People with a bachelor’s degree or higher have lost little, if any, height. The loss among those who never attended college has been much sharper, especially among women. (Again, this is for Whites, the group for which we have the best data.)

…

If you’re given the resources you need to reach your full potential height, you’re also getting the resources you need to succeed in school and beyond.

My read is that poorer people ate worse food in the '80s than they did previously, whereas wealthier people didn’t change nutrition habits. I’m guessing this had more to do with stagflation than anything, though I do recall fast food being very culturally relevant in my childhood (I was born in the 80s), a lot moreso than today.

Here’s my hypothesis:

• more dual-income families, meaning less time for preparing nutritious meals
• more prevalence of fast food, due to cultural shifts (may be interesting to look into)
• more “food deserts” as costs of living in cities increased and demand for nutritious food decreased (mix of the above)
• people were more mobile than ever - more cars means easier to get fast food and less need to walk; trend started in the 50s and cities rapidly converted to become car centric

However, I don’t have solid evidence for it.

it’s so we can fit in cattle class on shitty airlines.

Because of high junkfood consumption and tiktok trends