Average height is a clear indicator of the quality of life of a population. To verify this, you only need to stand at the door of a private school in a rich neighborhood and then at the entrance of a public school in a poor neighborhood. The height is “the mirror of the condition of society”, according to the classic definition of the British pediatrician James Tanner. The height of young people called up to join the ranks historically served to exhaustively monitor the height of citizens, but the end of compulsory military service in Spain in 2001 left the scientific community without this valuable record. A team of researchers has now squeezed individual data from national health surveys from the Ministry of Health and has obtained a devastating result: among men born in the 1990s, university students are three centimeters taller than those who only have primary school education. In women, this difference reaches two centimeters.
