Academic Paper Correlates Economic Growth With Penis Length

By admin on July 19, 2012

An interesting paper showed up on Reddit EconPapers today. Its title: Male Organ and Economic Growth: Does Size Matter?

And the answer to that question seems to be yes.

Click here to see the raw data >

Tatu Westling of The University of Helsinki and the Helsinki Center of Economic Research (HECER) found two patterns.

1) “The size of male organ is found to have an inverse U-shaped relationship with the level of GDP in 1985.”

Here’s an excerpt from the discussion section explaining what could be behind this:

First, Boas et al. (2006) show that penile lengths and testosterone levels are related in infant boys. Furthermore, as indicated in Apicella et al. (2008) salivary testosterone levels have been shown to be positively associated with risk- taking behavior. Assuming these links hold it would suggest that male organ acts as a proxy for risk-taking. Given the inverted U-shaped pattern in 1985 GDP, a logical conclusion would then be that an intermediate level of risk-taking in population yields the highest level of economic development. Countries with particularly low or high levels of risk-taking would evidence lower GDPs.

Here’s the chart from the report:

gdp male organ penis

The problem, which Westling points out, is that this first finding “somewhat contradicts with the evidence of GDP development between 1960 and 1985,” which is the second conclusion.

2) “Economic development between 1960 and 1985 is negatively associated with the size of male organ.”

Here’s the chart:

gdp male organ penis

The discussion also considers a more “Freudian line of thought.” However, “this theoretizing is conspicuously masculine and omits the role of women altogether.”

So, why did Westling pursue this study?

He noticed that most studies trying to understand GDP growth “concentrate on economic, social and political factors” while abstaining “from biological and/or sexual considerations.”

His study does uncover a “robust statistical link.” But he doesn’t think that we should jump to any conclusions.

“Obviously the proposed ‘male organ hypothesis’ should be tested with more elaborate methods and data. Until then it remains an intriguing statistical artefact.”

You can download the whole paper here.