It pays to be beautiful. Higher pay, increased chance of promotion, easier loans, more beautiful and intelligent partners, greater happiness – the benefits are significant. And Dan Hamermesh has done a nice job cataloguing these perks in his new book Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful.

In one United States study, an above-average looking man (rated 4 or 5 on a scale of 1 to 5) commanded a 4 per cent wage premium in the labour market. For an above-average looking woman, it was 8 per cent. Below-average women  (1 or 2 on the 5 point scale) experience a 4 per cent hit, while below-average looking men suffered a large 13 per cent penalty. In dollar terms, Hamermesh put the life-time earnings premium of being above-average as opposed to below-average at $230,000.

Hamermesh describes a raft of other benefits. Beautiful people are less likely to be booted off game shows. When applying for loans, beautiful people are more likely to succeed than other, less beautiful, but equally qualified applicants – and they then have higher default rates. Beautiful people are also more likely to be in jobs where presentation might matter – barristers are more attractive than back room tax lawyers – although it is difficult to confirm which way causation flows.

Having demonstrated the financial benefits, Hamermesh spends most of the book questioning whether beauty is productive. Are beautiful people paid more because they produce more for their employers, or is it employer bias? An if a beautiful person is worth more to an employer, is this socially productive or bias by customers?

In some cases, Hamermesh suggests that beauty is clearly productive, such as for prostitution or movie-acting. There is a clear consumer surplus from a more beautiful person. I would argue that the list is longer than Hamermesh suggests – someone might get as much consumer surplus from purchasing an item from an attractive sales attendant as from seeing an attractive actor. Or take his example of Maria Sharapova playing tennis – he suggests that sponsors benefit, but the quality of the tennis is no better. Tennis is a spectator sport, and despite the quality of tennis being no higher, there may be consumer surplus for the spectators if the participants are attractive.

Hamermesh’s discussion of whether beauty is productive (and how you might measure productivity) felt like a conversation between a group of academics at the lunch table. This makes for an enjoyable read where you can throw the theories back and forth and come up with your own rationalisations. But there were times where I wished that Hamermesh could have nailed an issue in more depth. One point where more detail would have benefited the book was in his discussion of whether beauty is correlated with other socially productive traits. Hamermesh referenced a couple of studies from which it might be claimed that there is no link between beauty and IQ, but they are unrepresentative of most investigations into the link between beauty and other traits, which tend to find a correlation. For example, Satoshi Kanazawa and Jody Kovar argued it was logical to expect a link between beauty and IQ and they catalogued a raft of studies that support this claim (Hamermesh notes that this is also peoples’ general perception).

By assuming that beauty is not correlated with other traits, Hamermesh restricted the range of conclusions he could draw as to why beauty might pay more. Correlation with productive traits would provide a more parsimonious explanation for many of the observations than always searching for the bias. Many of Hamermesh’s musings on productivity are going to be tested over the next few years, whether by himself or others, and it will be interesting to see what comes out of it.

Consideration of the evolutionary biology behind beauty might also have assisted the analysis (although Beauty Pays is not alone in that respect – I tend to believe that in relation to half the books I read). As noted in the paper by Kanazawa and Kovar, there is a good evolutionary reason for correlation in traits. If an above-average beauty attracts an above-average intelligence mate, their children will, on average, have higher than average intelligence and beauty. Beauty and intelligence will co-vary in the population. There are likely to be a range of other traits that also co-vary with beauty.

Further, when Hamermesh suggests there is no evolutionary basis for beauty (based on one study that found no link between beauty and medically assessed health, ignoring genetic quality or the ability to attract partners), he sidesteps the wealth of papers that consider how symmetry and perceptions of attractiveness are linked to perceptions of health. This was another area where a deeper review of the literature might have been interesting.

Having assessed that the beauty-disadvantaged suffer financial penalties for reasons not to do with their productivity, Hamermesh explores protection for the ugly. He suggests that the beauty-disadvantaged may become increasingly protected by regulation (it already is in some jurisdictions). Should there prohibitions against discriminating against the ugly? What of affirmative action? Hamermesh is not committal on this point, and provides an interesting discussion, but he makes a strong point that the justification for protections of race, gender and obesity often apply with similar strength to the issue of beauty-disadvantage.

Unfortunately for the beauty-disadvantaged, I am not sure that protections can fix the hand they were dealt. Hamermesh’s focus on the financial elements underplays what many consider the important benefits of beauty. Being more attractive and attracting multiple partners or a beautiful wife has benefits beyond her 8 per cent wage premium. For below-average men, their 17 per cent financial hit relative to the attractive will further damage their chances in the competition for mates. The beauty-disadvantaged are always going to struggle in some important non-financial elements of their life. I can only suggest that they enlist Hamermesh to fight for their cause.

There is another interesting topic in this month’s Cato Unbound, with Michael Shermer arguing in the lead essay that human nature is best represented by the libertarian political philosophy.

Shermer (rightly) spends most of the essay shooting down the blank slate vision of humans that underpins many policies on the left, and suggests that moderates on both the left and right should accept a “Realistic vision” of human nature. He then simply states that the libertarian philosophy best represents this vision. Unfortunately, Shermer provides no explanation about why that might be the case, and in particular, does not detail why libertarianism might better reflect human nature than conservatism.

In the first response to Shermer’s essay, Eliezer Yudkowsky puts Shermer’s argument as such:

[B]ecause variance in IQ seems to be around 50% genetic and 50% environmental, the Soviets were half right. And that this, in turn, makes libertarianism the wise, mature compromise path between liberalism and conservatism.

Yudkowsky’s response to this argument is spot on:

In every known culture, humans experience joy, sadness, disgust, anger, fear, and surprise. In every known culture, these emotions are indicated by the same facial expressions. …

Complex adaptations like “being a little selfish” and “not being willing to work without reward” are human universals. The strength might vary a bit from person to person, but everyone’s got the same machinery under the hood, we’re just painted different colors.

Which means that trying to raise perfect unselfish communists isn’t like reading Childcraft books to your kid, it’s like trying to read Childcraft books to your puppy.

The Soviets were not 50% right, they were entirely wrong. They weren’t quantitatively wrong about the amount of variance due to the environment, they were qualitatively wrong about what environmental manipulations could do in the face of built-in universal human machinery.

Shermer’s argument was a change from the line of reasoning that I have heard from him before, which is that if the left understood that capitalism is an emergent system like evolution, they would be more accepting of it. I find that argument even less convincing. My understanding of evolution provides one of the strongest challenges to my libertarian leanings – evolution is full of wasteful competition for relative status and what is good for the individual is often not good for the group.

The weakness of these arguments is probably reflected in the deeper rationale for Shermer’s libertarianism. As Yudkowsky questions, is human nature the real reason for Shermer’s libertarianism?

Would Michael Shermer change his mind and become a liberal, if these traits were shown to be 10% hereditary?

… Before you stake your argument on a point, ask yourself in advance what you would say if that point were decisively refuted. Would you relinquish your previous conclusion? Would you actually change your mind? If not, maybe that point isn’t really the key issue.

Yudkowsky’s answer to the question of why he is a libertarian is similar to mine:

When I ask myself this question, I think my actual political views would change primarily with my beliefs about how likely government interventions are in practice to do more harm than good. I think my libertarianism rests chiefly on the empirical proposition—a factual belief which is either false or true, depending on how the universe actually works—that 90% of the time you have a bright idea like “offer government mortgage guarantees so that more people can own houses,”someone will somehow manage to screw it up, or there’ll be side effects you didn’t think about, and most of the time you’ll end up doing more harm than good, and the next time won’t be much different from the last time.

A human nature thread could underlie some of this explanation, with the nature of individuals in government and bureaucracy shaping the outcomes from government intervention. However, an understanding of human nature, in itself, does not settle the case for libertarianism. It may provide some support, but it provides just as many challenges.

Over at the Evolutionary Psychology Blog, Robert Kurzban has posted a fairly harsh take-down of a paper by Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs.

The paper proposes that as sex is a scarce resource offered by women, it can be subject to economic analysis. From this, they come to some predictions such as men offering women other resources for sex.

Kurzban notes that the paper is a rehashing of work that dates back to Robert Trivers in 1972 and Don Symons in 1979. While I tend to agree with Kurzban’s assessment of the novelty of the paper (although I need to give the paper some more time), he then makes a more interesting point. Kurzban notes that the paper is novel as it cannot explain the coarsest patterns of human sexuality:

Unlike Parental Investment Theory and Sexual Strategies Theory, the “new” “theory” can’t explain the origin of the preferences nor any of their texture. For instance, Baumeister and Vohs discuss the value of female virginity, but one needs Parental Investment Theory to explain this male preference. They assert that having sex for the first time “signifies the commencement of adult sexual activity and therefore may be an especially important step and choice,” a non-explanation for the value that men place on female virginity. The issue of paternity certainty, of course, makes this crystal clear.

They also claim that their theory can explain the data on infidelity because “Female sexual infidelity involves giving away a precious resource that the husband wants for himself, whereas male sexuality has no inherent value.” (p. 348). However, their theory doesn’t say anything about sexual exclusivity; nothing in the model says that female sexuality is something men want to monopolize, only something that men want to consume. Again, one requires Parental Investment Theory to explain the proximate psychology.

Their theory can’t explain the most basic aspects of mate preferences, such as why sex with women of a particular age is favored over sex with the elderly, or any of the other preferences that have been well documented. In short, the theory is unable to accommodate existing findings, and “predicts” – really, post-dicts –  empirical patterns well explained by other theories.

Without the evolutionary biology underpinning the analysis, the economic model is at best predictive. In contrast, an evolutionary analysis can be more successfully predictive and incorporate an understanding of what is occurring. This is not just an issue in this paper, but applies to many areas in economics – right down to the basic question of what a person is seeking to achieve. As evolutionary biology seeps into the practice of economics, we will fill some of those gaps.

David Brooks has written an article on some of the poor trade-offs people make when they spend. In a nutshell, “as we spend more on something, what we gain in privacy and elegance we lose in spontaneous sociability.” Happiness research suggests that this trade-off does not maximise our happiness.

Jonah Lehrer picked up on this piece and raised some issues around what he describes as a paradox:

Our poor intuitions about the pursuit of happiness are a genuine paradox. Daniel Kahneman summarizes decades of happiness research this way: “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.” The problem, of course, is that we don’t spend our money in accordance with this psychological principle. Instead, we squander cash on positional goods, saving up for Rolex watches, Louis Vuitton luggage and Prada T-shirts.

…

A few years ago, the Swiss economists Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer outlined a human bias they called “the commuting paradox.” They found that, when people are choosing where to live, they consistently underestimated the pain of a long commute. As a result, they mistakenly believed that the McMansion in the suburbs, with its extra bedroom and sprawling lawn, will make them happier, even though it might force them to drive an additional forty-five minutes to work.

…..

I’m genuinely puzzled by our failure to spend money properly. In general, human intuition improves with experience – it gets better as we put in those 10,000 hours of practice, so to speak. And yet, this doesn’t appear to be true when it comes to our intuitions about the pursuit of happiness. … Either psychologists can’t measure happiness or human beings with disposable income are very confused.

The failure of our spending to lead to “happiness” is not a paradox. We did not evolve to be happy. Rather, feelings of happiness reinforce actions that increase our fitness. As a result, happiness adjusts to our current level of status, wealth or condition and relative status affects it. The McMansion in the suburbs may not maximise happiness, but it may be the best way to increase status and signal wealth (at least, that is what they believe). Perceptions of happiness might trigger the purchase, but once done, there is no benefit in further happiness unless it reinforces such actions in the future.

For example, happiness can disappear quickly where new options for increasing fitness arise. Lehrer refers to one example where people lost sight of life’s finer pleasures when shown cash:

The psychologists gathered 351 adult employees of the University, from custodial staff to senior administrators, for an online survey. The scientists primed the subjects by showing them a stack of Euro bills before asking them a bunch of questions which attempted to capture their “savoring ability.” Interestingly, the scientists found that people in the wealth condition – they’d been primed with all those Euros – had significantly lower savoring scores and were less likely to be delighted by the simple pleasures of ”sunny days, cold beers, and chocolate bars.” Furthermore, subjects who made more money in real life – the scientists asked all subjects for their monthly income – scored significantly lower on the savoring test.

Despite there being many reasons why we do not seem to maximise happiness, there is one part of this paradox that I find more interesting, and that is the particular forms of consumption and spending that we undertake. While it does not surprise me that people buy McMansions to increase status despite the costs to happiness, I am not sure that the McMansion is the best status or wealth signal available. Or take this paragraph from Geoffrey Miller’s wonderful book Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior:

You anticipate the minor mall adventure: the hunt for the right retail environment playing cohort-appropriate nostalgic pop, the perky submissiveness of sales staff, the quest for the virgin product, the self-restraint you show in resisting frivolous upgrades and accessories, the universe’s warm hug of validation when the debit card machine says “Approved,” and the masterly fulfillment of getting it home, turned on, and doing one’s bidding. The problem is, you’ve experienced all this hundreds of times before with other products, and millions of other people will experience it with the same product. The retail adventure seems unique in prospect but generic in retrospect. In a week, it won’t be worth talking about.

That conspicuous consumption makes us happy (or more accurately given the “paradox”, that we believe it will make us happy) seems logical – it is a signal of wealth. The good may also have some utility. But why this particular manifestation of conspicuous consumption occurs and why people don’t seek a more distinct form of consumption or status display is an interesting question. Miller captures the problem nicely:

As a self-display strategy, it is very inefficient to buy new, branded, mass-produced products from stores at the full manufacturer’s suggested retail price. The product comes into one’s life naked and mute, without any social context, memorable circumstances, or narrative value. Nothing about the purchase says anything about one’s traits, except one’s ability to afford the purchase. One can’t talk about the product as a distinctive object with a unique provenance. One can merely own it, use it, display it, and hope that someone appreciates its wealth display function. Almost every other way of acquiring and displaying human artifacts or experiences sends richer signals about one’s personal qualities – though it usually brings less revenue to the retailer and manufacturer.

It may be the case that wealth is the most important signal we can send, or that Miller’s assessment of inefficiency is wrong (always be careful of suggesting everyone is irrational), but my instinct is to agree with him. We did not evolve to be happy, but nor are we evolved to optimise our displays of status in a modern consumerist world.

* My previous review of Spent can be found here.

In the comments to my post last month on the Cato Unbound series New Girl Order: Are men in decline?, there was some suggestion that men were being disincentivised from working hard by the increasing income and resources of women.

Bryan Caplan took up a similar argument when he looked at what was happening through the lens of two markets – labour and mating. He concluded that:

Income and income potential still matter.  But women now focus more on looks, machismo, coolness, and other “alpha” traits.  Holding charisma constant, working harder just doesn’t attract women the way it used to.  The result: Less desirable men often give up on women altogether – further tilting the effective male/female ratio in favor of the remaining men.  And both kinds of men act like boys: The less desirable men have little to lose, and the more desirable men can get away with it.

When Caplan comes to this conclusion, he understates the strength of the effect of increasing female income on the low-status male. This is because there is an additional element of the mating and labour market relationship – labour market outcomes are a signal of quality for the mating market. Woman care not only about the resources from the man’s income, but also about the signal of quality that it provides. This means that high-income men remain attractive even if the woman has considerable resources. When a woman ceases to consider the low-status male as she now has enough resources to find a higher quality mate who won’t support her children, her new mate’s income will act as a signal of quality in the same way that looks or charisma might.

The following chart (data from Heard (2011)) of Australian marriage and de-facto rates by age and income shows how strong the benefits of high income remain. The high income 20-24 year old is 4 times more likely to be married or in a de facto relationship than someone from the low-income group. Over 40 per cent of the lowest income 40-44 year old males remain unpaired. While incentives for men at the bottom of the income scales may be declining, there is still plenty of incentive to work hard for most of the male population.

David Sloan Wilson has just written a book, The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time, where he catalogues the use of evolutionary theory to improve life in Binghamton.

I haven’t read it yet, but a review by Mark Oppenheimer foreshadows the content. He writes:

Mr. Wilson argues — more controversially than he lets on — that “human cultural diversity is like biological diversity.” … For Mr. Wilson the main thing to understand is not that culture trends toward sublimity, but that it evolves, rather than merely changing, and that its evolution is subject to rules like those that govern biological organisms.

Our cultural forms adapt, Mr. Wilson says. They are shaped by a kind of natural selection. And once we accept that cultural evolution can be interpreted in this mechanistic way, we are better positioned to interpret the evidence we get from surveys, Christmas-light canvassing and so forth.

…

The chess passage highlights Mr. Wilson’s central conceit, inspiring without being fully persuasive: that evolutionary theory is the academic’s proper lingua franca, the terminology and indeed the theoretical framework that allows everyone to talk, and to plot the improvement of humankind, across disciplines. With a reasonably scientific understanding of any habitat and the animals in it — students in Binghamton schools, Christmas revelers in assorted neighborhoods — a shrewd scientist can develop tools to help the animals survive and flourish.

The real test of Wilson’s project will be whether it works or not. However, the use of evolution as a tool to assess cultural change without using it to analyse the motivations and actions of biological humans seems to sell the potential of evolutionary theory short.

As opportunity is equalised, more of the variation in outcomes between people will be due to genetic factors. This may have the somewhat ironic result of reducing social mobility.

I generally take the view that assortment by genetic lottery is no more fair than assortment based on social factors such as being born to low socio-economic status parents. An alternative view is given by Garret Hardin in his famous article The Tragedy of the Commons, when he writes of the private property solution to the tragedy:

With real  estate and other material goods, the alternative we have chosen is the institution of private property coupled with legal inheritance. Is this system perfectly just? As a genetically trained biologist I deny that it is. It seems  to me that, if there are  to be differences in individual inheritance, legal possession should be perfectly correlated with biological inheritance-that those who are biologically more fit  to be the custodians of property and power should legally inherit more. But genetic recombination continually makes a mockery of the doctrine of “like father, like son” implicit in our laws of legal inheritance. An idiot can inherit millions, and a trust fund can keep his estate intact. We must admit that our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust-but we put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is  too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.

Hardin’s observation that genetic recombination can result in an idiot inheriting millions does not bother me, as the luck involved in everyday existence can have the same effect. While the correlation between income and genetic factors is strong, there is plenty of luck involved, particularly at the high-end of the tail.

However, his proposed alternative, inheritance by the biologically fit, is more problematic. How would we determine who is biologically fit? In the future, the ability to assess traits through genetic testing of the foetus may allow inheritance scales to be set. In the meantime, the correlation between parental and child traits are likely to offer a reasonable match, particularly with the degree of assortive mating that occurs. Further, the accumulation of capital itself is a better test than could otherwise be developed. Why test for the ability to be productive in an economy when you can simply observe it, with the result the reward?

More importantly, what of the incentive effects? Do you want the biologically fit to be given their “winnings” as an inheritance, or would you prefer that they have to work hard to receive it – as they would do if they received no inheritance? The value to society of the biologically fit comes from what they do with their endowed traits. Further, does their value come from prudent use of the capital they hold or from the hard work they undertake to amass it? I tend towards the latter.

* As a footnote, Hardin’s use of the term biologically fit is somewhat different to how the term might be used in biology (ability to survive and reproduce) – given Hardin’s views on population control, those who are biologically fit to hold property are probably not biologically fit in the strict sense at all.

In Herbert Simon’s 1978 Swedish Bank prize lecture (pdf), he stated the following:

The Economist has an amusing reductio ad absurdum in its regular Daily Charts section. At current fertility rates, The Economist predicts it will take 25 generations for Hong Kong’s population to drop from its current 3.25 million to just one – which by their calculations will occur in the year 2798. China and Japan will be down to their last woman around 3500 AD, with Canada holding out until almost 4500 AD.

If you browse through any official projections of population in developed countries, they tend to suggest that the current below replacement levels of fertility are here to stay. But would anyone argue that fertility rate in developed countries will not, at some point, increase?

Robin Hanson writes:

Consider: what elites did foragers worry most about? Foragers worried most about elite capacity for violence, and an inclination to use it. They also worried lots about unequal access to food and shelter, and to tools useful for all these things. So foragers enforced strong norms against giving orders or doing violence, and norms favoring sharing of food, shelter, and tools. In these senses foragers were egalitarian.

However, foragers worried far less about unequal capacities for art, music, conversation, charm, social popularity, or sex appeal. After all, in a forager world unequal capacities of these sort just couldn’t go anywhere near as horribly wrong as unequal violence or food. Because of this humans seem evolved to tolerate, and even celebrate, unequal abilities in art, popularity, or sex appeal.

As human populations are the descendants of those who survived AND were reproductively successful, I am not sure that Hanson is drawing a useful distinction. If men tolerated inequality in resources OR inequality in mating opportunities when they could do something about it, they would have lower than maximum fitness.

The other conflating factor is that these features – wealth, art, appearance, popularity and so on – are all signals to the opposite sex. Lack of tolerance of income inequality is likely to reflect the effect on reproductive success as much as the consequences for survival. Further, individuals are likely to be better across a spectrum of these traits, with more popular and attractive males also having higher income.

Assuming Hanson is correct in assuming that people worry more about resource scarcity than inequality in abilities in art, sex appeal or popularity, is this because abilities in art, sex appeal or popularity are more difficult to fake? In contrast, excess resources could be acquired through violence (although ability to successfully acquire resources through violence is also difficult to fake). Inequality in sex appeal or popularity can go wrong, but there are more limited means to rectify it. If the ugliest man in the tribe kills the most attractive, he is still the ugliest. The benefits to killing the attractive man would be because he has resources and the killing may raise status, not because it reduces sex appeal inequality.

One interesting piece of evidence about income versus reproductive inequality is about to emerge. As the excess of men in China and India pass through their reproductive prime in the next 20 years, what will trigger the more trouble – inequality in resources or inequality in mating opportunities? We should be able to contrast different regions in those two countries. There may be difficulty disentangling the two as income inequality and inequality in reproductive success are likely to be highly correlated, but the evidence is mounting that excess men are a recipe for trouble.