Big governments, big people?
“You know,” Speaker John Boehner said last night, “I’ve always believed the bigger the government, the smaller the people.” That led Jonathan Cohn to tweet that the “Netherlands has 45% GDP from gov’tM spending and the world’s tallest people.”
What I’ve always believed is that the more data on your scatterplot, the better your chances of seeing a relationship. So I asked Dylan Matthews to work up a chart. He took the data from Wikipedia’s table listing the average male height in more than 60 countries and plotted each country’s height against the percent of GDP it collects in taxes. The result? A weakly, but noticeably, positive relationship between the size of government and the size of people. Bigger governments, in other words, mean bigger people.
Now, you may protest that this is taking Boehner a little too literally. You might also protest that what we’re seeing here isn’t a relationship between height and government, but height and development. In both cases, you would be right. Though if you do want to see a more aggressive argument for the relationship between government services and height, this New Yorker article is a good place to start.
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Ezra Klein
Ezra Klein is the editor of Wonkblog and a columnist at the Washington Post, as well as a contributor to MSNBC and Bloomberg. His work focuses on domestic and economic policymaking, as well as the political system that’s constantly screwing it up. He really likes graphs, and is on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. E-mail him here.
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Suzy Khimm covers the budget, economic policy, and financial regulatory reform. Before coming to Washington, she was based in Brazil and Southeast Asia, where she wrote for the Economist, Slate, and the Wall Street Journal Asia. Follow her on Twitter here, and email her here.
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