Updated Dec 26, 2007: Ganesh brilliantly connects this with Gladwell’s Warren Harding Error in his book Blink.

Today we got the latest issue of Economist dubbed as the special christmas double issue. The article with the biblical sounding “To those that have, shall be given” caught my attention.

The first para hooked me completely:

IMAGINE you have two candidates for a job. They are both of the same sex—and that sex is the one your own proclivities incline you to find attractive. Their CVs are equally good, and they both give good interview. You cannot help noticing, though, that one is pug-ugly and the other is handsome. Are you swayed by their appearance?

The article covers research on whether being beautiful/handsome is correlated with financial success relative to the not-so-beautiful/handsome category. The article presents several pieces of research with the focus mainly on Dr. Hamermesh’s research. He has proved with several studies that beautiful people are economically successful and even goes on to calculate what he calls a beauty premium – the premium beautiful/handsome people can expect to gain and also a penalty if one is ugly. He conducted his research in USA, Canada, UK and China. Before you jump into any conclusions, the researchers looked primarily at professions in which beauty wouldn’t be a requirement. I have plotted the data from the article into a table below for better readability:

Essentially, if you are a beautiful woman in China you can expect a whopping 10% premium! I guess it really pays to be beautiful and at the sametime, ugliness in women can set one back by a even bigger 31% in China.

The article also touches upon previous research that shows that across the animal kingdom (including humans) beauty is essentially a function of how symmetrical your body is which in turn indicates how good a set of genes you have, the health you have and take this – your intelligence level as well.

Do you agree with this research? Think about it and click the continue-reading link below if you want to know what my conclusions are?

After I finished reading the article, i was really bothered by the conclusions because i felt that there were some problems with this research but i could not put my finger on it. I had a few discussions with Priya Raju and she suggested that we look at the Forbes 400 to see if we could find any pattern. Well, a cursory look at the Forbes 400 for 2007 seemed to indicate that most of the rich people don’t seem to be particularly good looking. Could be because many of them are past their primes. So that was a dead-end.

Then i went back to look at the data given in the article again and I started noticing some problems – first of all a major part of the research was done in USA/Canada a region where there is a general premium on looking good. In China, they just covered Shanghai. Given that China’s population is 1.4B people, looking at Shanghai to divine China’s preferences seem to be woefully wrong. Next, the data from the UK reveals that there is only a 1% beauty premium which is next to nothing.

The other part that is incorrect is the tie between intelligence and genes. It has been proved beyond reasonable doubt that it is nurture that plays the major role in intelligence and not genes. So to say that beautiful people will mostly turn out to be more intelligent is flawed. Also, it seemed that Dr. Hamermesh’s research was more focused on financial success and we already know that intelligence and financial success are not that well correlated.

Still i was not happy. I did a google search and lo, behold an article in Slate magazine by Tim Harford covering a similar topic came up.

Harford pointed to a great piece of research [PDF] that investigated the connection between beauty and better salary. The researchers devised an artifical labor market in which the workers had to do solve mazes in a 15 minute interval. Success is determined by the number of mazes one can solve in that window. When the candidates were interviewed, they were asked to predict how many mazes they could solve and then after they executed the task, the results were compared. It turns out the beautiful people overestimated their success by a significant margin. It turns that beautiful people tend to be more self-confident which in turn forecasts better success which in turn gets the employers to pay a premium – Now that seems to be the solution to the Beauty Conundrum.

I am sure The Economist does not read this blog, but if you do, please Economist, consider counter-arguments and alternative viewpoints when you present provocative research as a fait accompli. I rest my case.

Notes:

After moving back to India, we were really starving for quality international news because we don’t get the New York Times or International Herald Tribune. Fortunately, we managed to convince our newspaper vendor to get us the Economist – we think it is one of the best magazines for covering international news across the globe in a pretty objective manner. Although it is quite expensive by Indian standards, it is well worth the price.