  The tension between the Hipparcos parallax of the Pleiades and other
independent distance estimates continues even after the new reduction of the
Hipparcos astrometric data and the development of a new geometric distance
measurement for the cluster. A short Pleiades distance from the Hipparcos
parallax predicts a number of stars in the solar neighborhood that are
sub-luminous at a given photospheric abundance. We test this hypothesis using
spectroscopic abundances for a subset of stars in the Hipparcos catalog, which
occupy the same region as the Pleiades in the color-magnitude diagram. We
derive stellar parameters for 170 nearby G and K type field dwarfs in the
Hipparcos catalog based on high-resolution spectra obtained using KPNO 4-m
echelle spectrograph. Our analysis shows that, when the Hipparcos parallaxes
are adopted, most of our sample stars follow empirical color-magnitude
relations. A small fraction of stars are too faint compared to main-sequence
fitting relations by $\Delta M_V \geq 0.3$ mag, but the differences are
marginal at a $2\sigma$ level partly due to relatively large parallax errors.
On the other hand, we find that photometric distances of stars showing
signatures of youth as determined from lithium absorption line strengths and
$R'_{\rm HK}$ chromospheric activity indices are consistent with the Hipparcos
parallaxes. Our result is contradictory to a suggestion that the Pleiades
distance from main-sequence fitting is significantly altered by stellar
activity and/or the young age of its stars, and provides an additional
supporting evidence for the long distance scale of the Pleiades.
