Reply to Wapo - Why are Americans getting shorter?

Forum Index » Off-Topic

Reply to "Wapo - Why are Americans getting shorter? "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]One of the failures of modern sociologists or journalists at papers like WaPo and NYT is the rush to typecast all white people as if they were cut from the same template, aka one large homogenous generic "white people" bloc.

In reality, white people are extremely diverse in origins and backgrounds. To give you an example, in the election of 1960, Kennedy's Catholic faith was a major issue. America as divided into Catholics and Protestants and while by 1960 they were living nicely with each other, there were still strong biases and prejudices against marrying outside the faith. Even my parents in their middle class American childhoods of the 1950s, were aware that people were Catholics or Protestants and you generally didn't date the opposite faith. There were suburbs of NYC known as for the Irish Catholics and other suburbs known for Wasps and others for Jews and so on. In America prior to the 60s, people really did stay within their general demographic niche, so while a Lutheran Scandinavian could marry a German Protestant or English Protestant, it wasn't so common to marry an Irish Catholic or Italian Catholic, and so on. But you did have Irish-Italian mixing. And German Catholics could intermarry with Polish Catholics, as they did in the midwest.

It was really the boomer generation that crossed the ethnic and religious divides in meaningfully large numbers. And boomer children were starting to be born in the 1970s and onward. And I would not be surprised if this is a factor behind the slight reductions in average heights.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics