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Nice piece by @wilsonmking.bsky.social on a surprisingly unsolved question: Why are Indian kids so short? (Even more than India's development would imply.) It felt a bit voyeuristic to me though, like reading about myself or something.

An interesting read! My top guesses were parasite load and diet, especially protein consumption. I'm surprised to see we don't have better data on the latter. I wonder if the mid-day meal schemes - which often include eggs - would allow for regression discontinuities that isolate the diet effect?

Could you explain a bit more on the discontinuity? How would a mid-day meal allow you to see a discontinuity on height (since it develops slowly over years)? I'm probably misunderstanding

I was thinking about year of introduction of the mid-day meal. Height at say age 20 as a function of year, could well show a discontinuity at year of introduction of the mid-day meal scheme if diet is a major cause. Year of introduction also differs between states for some added information.

Hmmm. I guess it's not going to be a simple discontinuity because there will be a few years of students who get the mid-day meal for different numbers of years. If introduced in 2000 for all classes, then the oldest get for 1 year, the youngest get for 12...

but I imagine this could be modelled. And the comparison across states should be informative.