Beautiful People Are More Successful. Here’s Why.
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Via Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful:
Using these large random samples of women and men, we can compare their earnings to the ratings of their looks. Compared to the average group (people rated as 3 on the 5 to 1 scale), below-average looking women (rated 2 or 1 on the scale) earn 3 percent less, while below-average looking men earn 22 percent less. Above-average looking women (rated 4 or 5 on the scale) earn 4 percent more than the average-looking, while above- average looking men earn 3 percent more. There is a premium for good looks, a penalty for bad looks. Except for the penalty for the 11 percent of men whose looks are rated as below-average, these differences in earnings are not large; but they are in the directions that you would expect.
And:
For a forty-year-old man the impact of good looks on earnings is about the same as that of an additional five years of work experience, and also about the same as that of working in a unionized workplace. The effects of beauty on earnings are not immense, but they are certainly substantial. When viewed in the context of an entire working life, they seem even larger. In 2010, the average worker earned about $20 per hour. Averaging male and female workers, someone employed 2,000 hours per year over a work life of forty years would earn $1.60 million. But with below-average looks the worker would earn only $1.46 million, while with above- average looks, lifetime earnings would be $1.69 million. A 3 or 4 percent premium for good-looking workers doesn’t seem that big; but placed into a lifelong framework, $230,000 extra earnings for being good-looking instead of bad-looking no longer seems small.
Interesting to note:
Interestingly, the premium for beauty is greater if you are smarter, as is the penalty for being unattractive.
Beautiful politicians do better:
While the effect of beauty in the German election was substantial, in a study of a large number of Finnish elections the impacts of differences in beauty were extremely large for non-incumbent candidates. Going from the 50th the 84th percentile of looks (as rated by a very large panel of raters) would increase a candidate’s number of votes relative to the average in a constituency by over 15 percent, even after adjustment for age, gender, and assessors’ ratings of the candidates’ competence and trustworthiness. In Taiwan the effects of differences in candidates’ beauty were similarly large, especially among independent candidates, whose success did not depend on any help they may have received from political parties and may have been more tied to their looks.
So we are biased toward good-looking people and discriminate against ugly people? Oddly that’s not where the bulk of the benefits come from. Beautiful people are more self-confident and have better verbal skills and this is where much of the advantage lies:
The main conclusion of the study was that the majority of the effect of beauty was not due to preference-based discrimination. Instead, much of the impact of beauty was through the channel of greater self-confidence on the workers’ part and better verbal skills. The translation of these measures to the real-world analog of labor productivity may not be perfect; but the study does suggest that employers’ treatment of bad-looking workers is not entirely unproductive socially.
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