Taller people tend to be conservative

One should not get too excited by this study as the effect was small.  Height is only one influence behind conservatism. The authors below explain the finding as an effect of income but fail to ask WHY taller people have higher income. I think the answer lies with temperament.  Larger people and larger dogs tend to be more placid and less aggressive.  Why that is so is one for the neurologists.

But, whatever the reason, that placidity makes taller people  easier to work with and better suited to managerial positions.  And it also explains their politics.  It is Leftists who are the discontented people.  A tall placid man, by contrast, will be by that fact alone more contented.  It is people who are fired up by some grievance who become Leftists.  Taller people are harder to motivate in that way

I append the journal abstract to the article below


If you want to guess what political party someone supports, just take a look at their height. A new study has found taller individuals are more likely to back Conservative political positions, identify with a Conservative party and vote for Conservative politicians.

Researchers studying UK voters found that just a one-inch increase in height raises the person's support for the Conservative Party by 0.6 percent and their likelihood of voting for that party by 0.5 percent.

These findings may be linked to other studies that show taller individuals generally have a higher income than those who are short in stature.

After reviewing surveys from 9,700 people, which included the person's height, income and political views, the team found that not only are taller people more likely to support the Conservative Party and vote for Conservative candidates, they are also more likely to take a Conservative position.

These findings were observed in both men and women, however it was found to be twice as strong among men.

'If you take two people with nearly identical characteristics - except one is taller than the other - on average the taller person will be more politically conservative,' said Sara Watson, co-author of the study and assistant professor of political science at The Ohio State University.

Although these results may sound strange, Watson explained they do coincide with previous studies that show taller people generally earn more than those who are shorter – which suggests the two may be linked.

Watson said they conducted the study because, while political scientists have long theorized about an income-voting relationship, studies using real-world data have shown mixed results.  Some researchers find a link, while others see little or no effect.

'We were thinking about why there were so many seemingly contradictory findings,' she said.

During the study, Watson and her team pulled data from the 2006 British Household Panel Study, which includes self-reported height, income data and questions regarding the political views of a little over 9,700 adults.

After sifting through the data, researchers found that not only are taller people more likely to support the Conservative Party and vote for Conservative candidates, they are also more likely to take a Conservative position.

Researchers explored this further by investigating whether the effect of height on political beliefs could be explained through other channels, including race, education level, marital status and religion.  However, the team found that after all these factors their initial findings were found to be true.

The researchers also took into account potential explanations such as cognition and utilization of public health care. But no matter what was controlled in the study, the link between height and voting remained.

And although the relationship between height and political views were found in both men and women, the team discovered it was twice as strong among men.

For men, each additional inch of height increased their likely hood to support a conservative by 0.8 percent, whereas women it was just 0.4 percent.

In the second portion of the study, the team used height in an 'instrumental variable strategy', a way to estimate casual relationships, to further analyze the link between income and voting.

The team found that $665 was associated with each additional height and that a 10 percent increase in income raised the likelihood of voting Conservative by about 5.5 percent.

SOURCE

Height, Income and Voting

Raj Arunachalam and Sara Watson

Abstract

The claim that income drives political preferences is at the core of political economy theory, yet empirical estimates of income’s effect on political behavior range widely. Drawing on traditions in economic history and anthropology, we propose using height as a proxy for economic well-being. Using data from the British Household Panel Study, this article finds that taller individuals are more likely to support the Conservative Party, support conservative policies and vote Conservative; a one-inch increase in height increases support for Conservatives by 0.6 per cent. As an extension, the study employs height as an instrumental variable for income, and finds that each additional thousand pounds of annual income translates into a 2–3 percentage point increase in the probability of supporting the Conservatives, and that income drives political beliefs and voting in the same direction.

British Journal of Political Science, http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0007123416000211

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Meet the Salon Owner Fighting Eyebrow Threading Regulations

In 1985, Lata Jagtiani immigrated to New York City from India with a dream to be her own boss by opening her own salon. But because money was tight, Jagtiani made ends meet by working as a bookkeeper for various New York businesses before becoming a stay-at-home mom.

While raising her two children, Jagtiani continued to dream of opening her own business. The New York weather was tough on Jagtiani and her husband, so when they had the opportunity to relocate in 1995, they headed south.

The family of four had friends in Louisiana, so Jagtiani and her husband opened a T-shirt shop on Bourbon Street, New Orleans. Although the business took care of her family’s financial needs, Jagtiani had a skill she felt the city was lacking: threading.

As a young girl, Jagtiani’s older cousin taught her the ancient Indian art of threading, a technique used to precisely remove hair with the twisting of a thread.

In 2012, Jagtiani’s dream of being her own boss was fulfilled when she opened Threading Studio & Spa in Metairie, Louisiana.

But when Jagtiani opened her studio, she wasn’t aware of the local licensing laws put in place that would restrict her from doing her job.

Louisiana threaders began the battle against costly licensing in 2010 when the state added the practice of threading under the category of esthetics, a highly regulated and licensed trade in many states. This means anyone who practices threading must acquire an esthetician’s license or face thousands of dollars in fines and unemployment.

“I opened in 2012 and I didn’t know about the regulations. It [cost] me a lot. I didn’t know I needed a license to do anything but threading. The inspectors started coming in and asking me to get a license,” Jagtiani told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.

Jagtiani and former employees Ushaben Chudasama and Panna Shah are suing the Louisiana Board of Cosmetology for infringing upon their right to earn an honest living.

According to the Institute of Justice, a public interest law firm representing Jagtiani and her former employees, interpretation of the Louisiana Constitution, every citizen has the right to earn an honest living without “irrational government interference.”

Salim Furth, macroeconomics research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in an email:

What Louisiana ought to do instead is to elevate its basic treatment of economic rights. Whether in the right to work as a threader or the right to build on one’s own land, the state should not be able to infringe on citizens’ economic rights without proving that the government has an important interest that cannot be achieved through less intrusive means.

According to the Institute for Justice, requiring threaders to obtain an esthetician’s license “suddenly forc[ed] threaders to jump through several regulatory hoops in order to work and [made] it illegal to pursue their calling without a pointless esthetician’s license.”

“They don’t even teach threading over there. They were teaching waxing and facials, but I don’t want to do that. I want to do threading and that’s about it,” Lata Jagtiani says.

In order to receive a license, students must complete 750 hours in a cosmetology program, says the law firm. Jagtiani said these programs cost around $12,000 and take six to eight months to complete but do not teach students how to thread. “It was all science classes,” she said, disappointed in the irrelevance of her mandatory schooling.

Of the 750 hours required, approximately 250 hours “are for sanitation, health and cleanliness, and all of these other things that we must teach for people to run a healthy and clean shop,” said Stephen Young, director of the Louisiana State Board of Cosmetology and a defendant in the lawsuit, according to The Associated Press.

Paul Larkin, senior legal research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview: “I cannot imagine a legitimate reason for all of the unecessary training required by Louisiana. This is a classic instance of the government abusing its authority to injure the public by protecting a cartel.”

The Louisiana Board of Cosmetology also has a conflict of interest when it comes to the local regulations, Furth argued in his email to The Daily Signal:

Louisiana shows what happens when regulation is allowed to run amok. The chair of Louisiana’s Board of Cosmetology actually owns and operates her own beauty college, so [Frances Hand] has a personal financial interest in extending the reach of cosmetology to cover more workers. Giving a businesswoman the right to regulate her own industry is pure crony capitalism. Louisiana voters should demand that customers, not industry insiders, should be in charge of regulating (or deregulating) occupations in the state.

Meagan Forbes, the attorney at the Institute for Justice representing Jagtiani, said threading is a “simple technique that just involves a simple strand of thread—it’s not invasive. There’s no skin to skin contact even between the practitioner and customer.”

Jagtiani echoed Forbes’ statement that threading is noninvasive, therefore it shouldn’t be so highly regulated. “It’s safe. Very safe,” Jagtiani said.

Furth added to the fact that an unskilled threader does not pose any threat to society. “In full disclosure, I actually had my eyebrows threaded once, purely by accident. It stings if it’s done right; an incompetent threader would just end up with a mess of string on her own hands.”

“My customers were so happy. They don’t want me to close, they want to come back to me for threading. They are so happy with threading they don’t want to do waxing. I had so many clients, and now they are so miserable,” Jagtiani said.

SOURCE

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