Left-Handers Continue to Rule the World

Because I am not left-handed, I have never taken much pleasure in the endless parade of studies, articles, and anecdotes about how left-handed people are better at everything than right-handed people. But that doesn’t mean the studies stop coming; here’s the latest, by the economists Christopher S. Ruebeck, Joseph E. Harrington, and Robert Moffitt. At least we righties can console ourselves with the knowledge that lefties still have a hard time finding a good pair of scissors.

Tall people, too, can continue to feel good about themselves — although as this paper by Anne Case and Christina Paxson argues, the relative success of tall people isn’t due to self-esteem or anything like that. It comes from the simple fact that, as Case and Paxson write, “taller people earn more because they are smarter.”