But the fact is also true beauty is only skin deep, If you do not have the required knowledge you cant do the work well and it will effect your performence and career also

Agreed, it is such a ridiculously hard issue to separate. I am guess you would need to do a twins study, where one of the twins lost physical appearance for an external reason at a young age. I don’t know if there is a data set available like that … or whether it is even moral …

I wonder how this compares for other given jobs? It would be interesting to test if the increase in productivity is related to the level of interaction with people in producing the final output. That is, are ugly people better or worse at the non-people part of their jobs than pretty ones. although this would have a huge selection effect to control for. ugly people probably don’t choose public facing jobs quite as readily as good looking people.

Sweet. I agree regarding the tenuous nature of evidence that they are genetically more intelligent – and it is one of those things where, even if it did exist, the fact that people use it as a signal given that the “distribution” for that type of person is better still leads to feedback loops which lead to discrimination on this basis being excessive. Which troubles me.

Evolutionary psychologists strongly believe in these types of differences, but then they say things like this:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201103/criminals-look-different-noncriminals

And you can understand that they don’t really understand how discrimination works – the fact that a very weak signal can lead to extremely strong segregation and discrimination.

And even when they talk about the beauty intelligence link they often simply use correlations:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201012/beautiful-people-really-are-more-intelligent

Even while saying that science should be reductionist:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200909/social-sciences-are-branches-biology-ii

It illustrates to me that, one of the things economics has realised while many other disciplines haven’t, in the unobjective nature of data – there should be reductionism, but testing hypothesis and interpreting data are so intertwined that it is nearly impossible to achieve true scientific fact.

Hold on a sec, I’m ranting. I’ll stop.

I’m not convinced that Cipriani’s paper show’s evidence that beautiful people are genetically more intelligent, if that’s what you’re suggesting. Even they only go so far as to say that it supports theoretical research on the benefits for self-esteem, socialisation etc of being tall and good looking. So, if by ‘smarter’ you mean ‘having greater cognitive ability’ then I agree; if you mean genetically more intelligent then I don’t think it goes that far. I don’t know enough about genetic selection to have any opinion on that topic so if a biologist wants to enlighten us then that would be great!

“I haven’t seen evidence to support (1) but the ‘productivity’ label would be appropriate for that effect, if it existed.”

This is what the paper you linked to was about right? It was about going through students and trying to identify a) if hotter students did better on tests and then 2) whether this was the result of discrimination or inherent ability.

The quote you took out was from the justification for looking at the issue, where they were mentioning another paper.

“(2) is taste discrimination by consumers, as I discussed. In this case it is consumers of education who have a taste for sexy lecturers”

Consumer discrimination is in the same sense that I discriminate against eating spinach – because I don’t have a preference for it, and I am the consumer of the resource, right?

There is an element of that in (2) but as you state there is also a postive externality associated with it, namely that grades (output) is higher as a direct result of discrimination. It is still “efficient” to discriminate in this case. Whether it is morally right is another question, another layer of analysis – but I still feel that it is relevant.

I don’t think we particularily disagree on this second point though, it is likely a matter of semantics – so I’ll concede it for sure on my basis. However, I don’t have access to the paper that discusses it – so I can’t state whether the paper that discussed the lecturer example framed the terms fairly or not.

I don’t have a problem with the paper separating the two effects, I just think it’s misleading to suggest that the ‘productivity’ effect is not also a result of discrimination on the basis of looks.

For one, this paper looks at relationship between students grades and attractiveness.

The other paper they quote (Hamermesh and Parker (H&P, 2005)) which covers what you are saying may have two reasons for stating what it states:

1) Beautiful people are better at the given job (lecturing) on average,
2) Beauty has an impact on output directly (you turn up to watch a hot lecturer, and you just happen to learn more 😉 )

Given that these exist beyond pure “taste discrimination” and that both of these may lead to some sort of unfair “signalling” that isn’t based upon observed ability, it is important to separate factors – which is why this paper is trying to understand if beautiful people get better grades (empirical fact) because they are smarter.