What country has the tallest people? Who cares? I bring up this point to make a point. 20 years ago, the people in the USA were the tallest. Is that a big deal? Not really. What does height have to do with anything? It just turns out that now the USA ranks 9th in terms of average height. We have dropped 9 places in just 20 years. We are still number one in terms of weight. We have more fat people than any other country. How is that for a claim? In just 20 years, we went from the tallest to the fattest. Is that going forward or backward?
Several years ago when I was working on my personal genealogy, I came across the fact that I am a direct descendant of Pocahontas. As it turns out there are at least 750,000 people who can also make that claim. My point is that in one of the diaries of the people at Jamestown a person points out that only one European in 10 was as tall as the average Indian. In 1608, Native Americans were much taller than Europeans. I only make this point to show how even things like average height can change over time too. This brings up my real point and that is, "what else has changed?"
We know that the number of engineers graduated in the USA has been going down since 1986 while the population has increased. What affect do you think that will have on the future of the USA? What other changes do you think will take place driven by the above fact?
At one time we had the longest life expectancy in the world. Many would have assume that it was based on our high quality health care. Now we rank about 33 in the world and 100% of those who do better than us spend less. How about that? How about education? Remember when we had all those one room schools and small high schools. Now we have gotten rid of 99% of those one room school houses and consolidated the high schools until they are bigger than many colleges. What did we get for our efforts? We are not even in the top 25 when it comes to math. Maybe that is why there is so little concern about our $16 trillion dollar national debit. My guess is that 90% of our people could not tell you how many zeros to put behind the $16. Don't think so? Ask a few of your friends and see what they say. Now about SAT scores? Seems that they have been going down since about 1965. Do you have any idea why that is? Do you think it is because we do not pay teachers enough? Remember when 90% of our teachers went "Normal School" to become teachers. There was a normal school in almost every county, but now they have all been closed down.
I could go on and on about things that have changed, but I leave it to you to come up with some more. Just for the record, I checked the average height for male, female, black and white here in the USA. To my surprise, I found that white males are taller than black males. If you watch basketball or football, you would think that it is the other way around. I mention this because you can't just guess at what has changes, you have to do some home work and when you get the results, you have to take them seriously.
Just what country has the tallest people? You go find out.
