Beauty Pays: Why attractive people are more successful
"God, what gorgeous staff I have," Jade Jagger, rock and rocks royalty once said. "I just can't understand people who have ugly people working for them." What Jagger doesn't realise, says economist Daniel S Hamermesh, is that the genetically underblessed have their own selling-point: they are cheaper. In a lifetime, he estimates, the homely will make $230,000 less than their comely cousins.
In Beauty Pays, Hamermesh, a professor at the University of Texas, sets out the links between economics and beauty, or "pulchronomics". Despite the cliché that beauty is in the eye of the beholder (or, perhaps, the beer-holder), Hamermesh says there is a consensus about what constitutes good looks. And it is not just the obvious careers where it pays to be a head-turner: attractive professors, he notes somewhat mournfully, receive better ratings from their students. In turn, employers pay beautiful employees more because they can boost company profits.
It is a voguish subject. Catherine Hakim's much-criticised Honey Money - published last month - called for women to exploit their "erotic capital" to climb the career ladder. Hamermesh, in contrast, is on the side of the aesthetic underdog: he suggests government intervention to compensate the ugly.
Beauty Pays' most interesting insights are the counter-intuitive ones: that men suffer a bigger looks-based pay gap than women, for example.
The book, though entertaining, has a notable flaw: it reduces beauty to a five-point rating system based on average marks given by viewers.
Though necessary for calculation, it seems an extreme oversimplification. Luckily, the husband knows what the economist does not: although Jade Jagger probably wouldn't agree, Hamermesh's wife of 44 years, he proudly declares, is a five.
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