Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful

If you are expecting an entertaining and humorous book accented with personalized, experiential case studies to back up empirical data, you will find yourself sorely mistaken. This is a book that poses a nearly rhetorical question and backs it up with empirical data added to detailed accompanying analyses that would give any economist or statistician a serious intellectual orgasm. In other words, it's for academics and their best friends.

Daniel Selim Hamermesh is a U.S. economist with the bona fides—from his extensive scientific background to financial grants from the NSF—to back up his research into the question of whether the beautiful have better lives than the rest of us—or are just luckier.

Well, duh!

If you live in the west and have lately looked at any magazine, watched any television, seen any movie, common sense would dictate that those who are better looking accrue the benefits of such a genetic roll of the dice. But what exactly those benefits are and if they are measurable is the point of Beauty Pays.

Across the board, the pretty, the handsome, the classically sexy are more likely to be employed at better salaries, work more productively and profitably for their companies, and negotiate to better results for themselves and others in business dealings—even with large, faceless institutions, as long as those faceless institutions are fronted by other humans. Not only all that, but those of above-average attractiveness get to marry other people with above-average attractiveness. Yippee?

And these benefits are directly related to Mr. Hamermesh’s queries into how universal versus cross-culturally diverse standards of beauty figure into his equations.

While the answers to the question of if beauty pays are pretty obvious, the hows are certainly interesting enough.

For this reviewer, whose business is fashion and who is surrounded by different kinds of and expressions of beauty on a daily basis, the answers to the question of whether beauty pays is so obvious as to be ridiculous.

But for an economist whose business is numbers and data, this book—as evinced by the numerous back cover blurbs by renowned economists and others in the field of science—will prove more than just eye candy.