Does It Pay to be Beautiful?
Rich Hua stashed this in Business
Stashed in: Economics!, @jack, Beauty, New Yorker, JFK, Economics
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Nice picture of Jack Dorsey.
And yes, beautiful people make more money:
Researchers today are no less interested in how physical appearance shapes political and economic outcomes. Half a century after Kennedy debated Nixon, the economist Daniel Hamermesh, from the University of Texas, coined the portmanteau pulchrinomics, the economic study of beauty. Hamermesh and his colleagues have produced a large body of research that is fascinating, if disconcerting: the basic principle of pulchrinomics is that beauty drives economic success. In a 1994 study, Hamermesh and the economist Jeff Biddle examined the income of several thousand U.S. and Canadian workers. When the workers were interviewed, in the late nineteen-seventies, the interviewers recorded their earnings and surreptitiously rated the attractiveness of their faces. Workers who were judged more attractive than average earned a five per cent premium over those of average attractiveness, who in turn earned about ten per cent more than those who were judged less attractive than average. The effect was slightly greater for men than for women, and the attractive members of both genders tended to pursue professions that capitalized on their looks. (James Surowiecki wrote about Hamermesh’s research in 2012.)
8:14 AM Dec 24 2013