Speaker 1:	Happy lunchtime and welcome to Research+Pizza, a lunchtime lecture series featuring research presentations by faculty from across the university. Here's your opportunity to hear about what your professors are doing beyond the classroom and ask them questions about their research. I would have said help yourself to the drinks and pizza but you've done that and they're all gone and so I hope you enjoyed the refreshments from our generous supporter, Austin's Pizza. We're only wanting the pizza and drinks to be on this floor and here in sort of the program area. There's big trashcans at the back that we ask you to use on your way out and there's recycling stations around here as well.
	We're recording today's program for a podcast so we would appreciate it if you have a question for Dr. Hamermesh, if you would raise your hand and let me come to you with the microphone so that we can capture it that way. Also, we're asking that you hold your questions until the end of his presentation, so let me tell you about today's presenter. Daniel Hamermesh has a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago and a PhD from Yale. He's taught at Princeton and at Michigan State and he's held visiting professorships at universities in the United States, Europe, Australia and Asia.
	He's the Sue Killam Professor in the Foundations of Economics in the College of Liberal Arts, a fellow of the econometric society, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and he's a past president of The Society of Labor Economists. He authored Labor Demand, the Economics of Work and Pay and a wide array of articles in labor economics and deleting general and specialized economics journals. His research concentrates on labor demand, time use, social insurance programs particularly unemployment insurance and unusual applications of labor economics to suicide, sleep and beauty.
	He is widely quoted in the major print media and has appeared on national television programs such as Good Morning America and the PBS Evening News Hour. Please welcome Dr. Daniel Hamermesh.
Daniel H.:	Let me close this, close that and find my thing here. There we go. Voila. Okay. I'm going to talk for a while and then you all can ask questions later on so do hold them but if you just can't remember what it's going to be, raise your hand, jump up and down and I'll call on you [inaudible 00:02:32]. This is the book which you can't appreciate how cool this cover is because in real life, the top part where it says, "Beauty Pays" is silver to match a mirror so my publishers thought that might help people buy more.
	I'm not so sure which way it goes if you get to look at yourself while you're buying the book, maybe that reduces your demand, I'm not sure but they thought it was pretty neat so they did it and the picture here is just that you can tell a composite of various features and various people's faces, it's no one person. I tried to identify parts of it and in the end, I couldn't at all. It was not my idea. What I'll do is talk about beauty and economic concept and I believe it's an economic concept and that's something I can talk about because it's scarce in economics. It's about scarcity.
	Why is it scarce? Because people pretty much agree on what's beautiful and what's not. Here are two guys, you can see them, who are considered really hot in the New Hebrides Islands in the 1920s and my guess is if you saw these guys walking down the street today on speedway, you'd run the other way and call the campus cops but they were considered hot in the 1920s in this location. Here's another guy, you all know who that is, right? I picked him because I asked my wife who is no longer a middle-aged woman, a 35-year-old secretary, an 18-year student, name the three best-looking guys in the world and George Clooney appeared on all three lists so these people ? most people think he's pretty hot, okay?
	Compare him to the next guy, okay? My guess is most of you would say George is better-looking than this guy, if you know who he is, Jiang Zemin, I think he is the too-ago president of China. It's too-ago now, okay? Just to show that it's not racial though and in fact, they're not universal but civilized world standards, here's an ad for Estee Lauder and my guess is most of the guys, if they aren't, they should be drooling here because I think all three of these ladies are really hot and you'll notice that they represent the three most widely dispersed races in the world, African origin, she's actually not just European, she's Northern European and the Asian woman on the right. You may have your own favorite, I have my own, but they would all be rated really high my guess is.
	Look, what I've shown you is I think we can agree, not perfectly, but to some extent on what's good-looking and what's not. Here's somebody else just to show we don't have a prejudice and favorite. Americans, whites, this is a woman who most of you would say is not good-looking as the three ladies in the advertisement. Anybody know who she is? You are a junkie, a political junkie, aren't you? Yeah, I can tell. That's who it is. She's the senior senator of Maryland, one of the best people in the Senate in my view but she's not too good-looking, okay?
	The question is, anything that I'm going to do empirically, that we do empirically in the social science is one has to somehow quantify it, okay? The problem is how do you quantify beauty? It's completely arbitrary. As you saw with Jason Jones, he was using, maybe has, five to one scale. You can do whatever you want but we'll pick one way of doing it and in fact, this is not my scale but it's been used by many people in the last 40 years. Classify people as strikingly handsome or beautiful, good-looking, average, quite plain or homely and notice in most of these studies, you are asked in your mind, adjust for differences by age. [inaudible 00:06:32] where it says average for age and sex.
	You're supposed to rate me five, four, three, two, one adjusting for the fact that I'm really old compared to you all and the answer is you can't. On these data here, older people despite that admonition are ranked lower than younger people. We all do that. We tend to think younger people are better-looking even when told not to think that. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I think it's a very good thing. it's biologically useful. I'm a biological dead-end. I have no reproductive value anymore, okay?
	I'll admit it, whereas you guys, all of you have some reproductive value there so therefore it's important that people think you look good. It enhances your reproductive possibilities so I think it's a perfectly natural human reaction. Notice a couple of other things, this is always the case. Women tend to be rated more extremely, notice, there are more women in the top two categories than men. There are also more women in the bottom two categories. No matter whether it's men or women doing the ratings, the women are rated no different than average but more in the extremes.
	The crucial point, and this is a study I did about 15 years ago where you had pictures of attorney graduates from a particular law school, there's tremendous agreement. We had these pictures all rated by four separate adults, we didn't know any of these people. On a five to one scale, among the women, almost 50% were rated identically on the five to one scale or three raters came and one was off by one number. Among the men, over half were rated identically or almost identically. In other words, there is tremendous agreement about what's good-looking and what's not.
	In fact, that thing you saw with Jason Jones, when I first found these data 20 years ago in a previous table, I actually did go out and rate people. I can assure you in that video you saw, he was not holding up numbers like in a speed skating or a figure skating event. That was all Photoshopped but we were out there talking about it. Okay. Look, if beauty matters as we think it might, why don't you make yourself more beautiful? I can look like George Clooney and being good-looking like George Clooney helps, why don't I do it?
	The answer is it's just very difficult. That's a study we did for Shanghai, China. Why? Because we had data on women spending on clothes and cosmetics and hair to make themselves better-looking. On how good-looking they were is rated by an interviewer and their wages so essentially, we're going to get the impact of spending another buck month on your wages. It's like an investment, right? It's like going to college except you spend a $1 if you're going to college and you will get an extra 20% or 15% $1 back when you go to work. You spend an extra $1 on your hair, your clothes or cosmetics and in fact, you get $0.4 back.
	This is a bad investment. This is the way I invest stock market. I buy high and I sell low. You don't want to do this so why do people do this then? It's not going to pay you off monetarily, why would you invest in yourself? Why do I buy silk ties for example which I love? It doesn't make me pretty. What's the reason for doing it? The answer is you feel good. Nothing wrong with that. I'm happy to spend money to feel good even though it might not enhance my wages.
	Anyway, over here, this is .04. What that says is for every $1, in this case, the one you spend, you get back $0.4 in higher wages. How about plastic surgery? Might that help you? Anybody see the movie Face/Off with John Travolta? The total reshaping of the guy's skeletal facial structure. That might help but there's a very nice paper by a Korean economist I know and she showed that for Korea at least, that kind of surgery did not pay off the extra beauty you got and the wages that engendered did not cover the cost of doing a surgery.
	Okay. There have been a number of studies since we did our first one on this and there were other studies before us but none did a general study of a whole economy. There had been a number of them looking at earnings in relation to duty adjusting for everything else like age, education, where you are, how long you've been working, all those other things that affect earnings and then parsing out the impact of differences [inaudible 00:11:23] each of the seven or eight different studies now of which ours is one and what this shows is, looking at the percentile of the person's beauty as affecting his earnings, there's the people who are average, here are the bad-lookers, here are the good-lookers.
	There's generally an upward sloping relationship. In other words, those who have better-looking all else equal, that's the economist favorite term, if you've had an economic, you know that. All else equal, better-looking people are being paid more and it's not small. Going here from the bottom, maybe the 10th or 8th percentile to the top third, we're talking a change for men of about 12% to 15% extra earnings per year. That's an extra couple of $100,000 over a lifetime. Small or large? This is not [inaudible 00:12:17], folks.
	Notice for women. If you look carefully, the line for women starts over here and goes up there. If you compare that to the one for men, you will know that the line for women is flatter than the one for men telling me that beauty matters more at least in terms of earnings for men and for women which my guess is, surprise, right? Okay. It surprised ? The first reports on our research 20 years ago appeared in the Wall Street Journal and they interviewed Naomi Wolf, maybe you heard of her. She is The Beauty Myth, and she said, "I don't care what they found. I know beauty matters more to women than to men."
	This was not an intellectual response and in fact, she's maybe right that it matters to them personally but in terms of earnings, there's no question. Our study has been replicated many times. The effects on earnings are larger for men than for women. Why? One reason is in the old days and to some extent still today, if you're a bad-looking guy, guy's work, you're stuck. I go into the labor force as a professor being bad-looking, I'm going to lose out.
	You're a bad-looking woman, what's your choice? What you can do ? What can you do if you know that by working, you're going to be discriminated against? What can you do? Stay home, okay? It should be the case since women can select out of the labor force more readily than men that women who do work are better-looking than women who don't work and lo and behold, this is looking at the probability of working against old data. I don't have more recent data. Above average-lookers, 66% were working, average 60%, below average, that's the bottom seven, 55% so very clearly, bad-looking women are less likely to be working.
	I gave an early version of this lecture three years ago at [Mei Yang University 00:14:25], okay? You can see where I'm going already? Okay. It was a huge crowd, about 500 students. In the afternoon, I gave a small talk to the department on a research paper. I was told I had caused a furor and the women students were very angry. Why were they angry? Because they inferred that I had said that women who stay home are ugly and therefore, I was saying the Mormon women were ugly. In fact, that's exactly the wrong causation. Rather, I was saying, "If you are ugly, it will make you stay home. You will choose to stay home." I'll leave that off.
	I had a cartoon, not a cartoon, a piece of art that I found in Fredericksburg framed on a garbage bag. For $20, you could buy something that said, "Housework makes you ugly". In fact, being ugly makes you do housework. Housework doesn't make you ugly, okay? A perfectly reasonable choice. Just think of the behavior. We're talking economics and incentives. All right. Let's look at some occupations where beauty may matter. How about professoring? You might say, "They're all bad-looking but that's certainly not true."
	Anyway, this is some super model saying, "God made me beautiful. If I weren't, I'd be a teacher." Okay, let's not look at that. That's about that. We're running out of time. This is a study I did here at UT. Actually, it was really cool because it was a term project by a student in a class of mine and she got these data then we did a lot more afterwards but this is a joint paper with a woman who was a senior at the time we worked on it. There are chances to do real research, indeed, we published this one, she eventually went and got I think a master's in accounting and is now a CPA in Dallas but this is our paper together.
	We got data or she got data on 94 professors. We had six students rate their beauty and then we related the teaching evaluations that you all do at the end of each term. We had them for 463 classes, there were 25,000 students in the classes and we held constant for other things that might affect teaching evaluation so what else might affect teaching evaluation? Pardon?
Participant:	[inaudible 00:16:50].
Daniel H.:	We don't know the grade. We could do that but we don't know individual evaluations. We knew the average for each class. Each observation is one course so what about the course, might make you be more or less generous with professor?
Participant:	It would be the difficulty or perceived difficulty of the course.
Daniel H.:	Okay. How will you measure that?
Participant:	On the teaching evaluations that ask-
Daniel H.:	Okay, that's a good one. We didn't do it. Darn it. Damn it. That matter, but it would matter if beautiful people give easier courses, right? Do they? We don't do anyway. It's a good thought.
Participant:	How well the professor explains the subject.
Daniel H.:	Again but that's another measure of the evaluation, right? I need something objective. How about size of class? Bigger classes, better or worse evaluations.
Participant:	Worse.
Daniel H.:	Worse unequivocally, okay? How about lower division, upper division? Where are the evaluations higher?
Participant:	Upper.
Daniel H.:	Upper. Of course because people are taking it ? want to be there whereas the students in my 500-person Econ 1 section mostly are there because they want to get into business school. I have no inherent ? some of them have an inherent interest but a lot of them don't. Anyway, we did this and we found that for every move in the 16th to the 84th percentile of looks, the average evaluation went up by .42. Now remember, it's a five to one scale. You all know that, right? Is that a big increase or a small increase? That's huge. It's immense and notice it's much bigger if I concentrate only on lower division classes than it is on upper division classes. Does that make sense? Would you expect that or not? If so, why? What's the answer?
	The lower division class I teach, they don't know if I know anything. All they can react to is my looks and the entertainment value. Maybe after a while, they'll feel how good I am explaining things and whether I know what I'm talking about but in the upper division class, they know full well if you're BS-ing them or not. I think that's a perfectly reasonable result to expect. What does it show about whether looks are productive? The reason we did this study was I was interested in finding out is it discrimination or does being good-looking actually produce something? How could you rationalize it as being productive?
	They pay more attention to better-looking people. That's the argument and indeed, the better-looking professors had better attendance, okay, but does that mean it's productive or are they staring, they're gawking at my good looks and not thinking about the class? Think about that one. The point is it's very hard to measure. Look at this here. This is another sort of attempt to tease out whether it's discrimination or whether it's just ? or it's productivity.
	This is a gameshow in which five contestants in the first round are asked questions. The one who answers the most questions gets to throw one person off the team, okay? Here's the average looks, the people on the round, here's the looks the person who's thrown off the team in that round. Next round, obviously the average is higher because they got rid of the ugly one, okay? Who gets thrown off in the next round generally? Somebody who's below average looks, and in the next round? In other words, each round, we're throwing off one of the less good-looking people.
	You might say, they're lousy question-answers but in fact, there's no relation between looks and numbers of questions answered so it's pure discrimination going on here. Okay, so if it's pure discrimination, why should a company pay for it? This is a study we did of Dutch advertising firms. Why Dutch advertising firms? Because we had the data. We had data on how much they sold, how big they were and we had data on each executive's looks which we had pictures, we had them rated by a bunch of Dutch people, male and female and we asked the question, "Given the size of the firm, if you have better-looking execs, how much more do you sell?"
	The answer here is going from the middle to the 84th percentile, while we did that, don't worry about that, average beauty ? average sales went up from ? by 14%. Taking the average firm and a firm at the 84th percentile, the latter is selling 14% more given number of employees it has. Big effect or small effect? That's huge. It's a huge increase. In fact, it's much bigger than the beauty cost. We also ask the question, take two firms each with two executives, with two executives who are equally good-looking, right, the average three and one with two executives, one really ugly and one gorgeous. Which firm is going to do better? The two with the average or the two with the very tremendous extremes?
	What do you think? Two average or the one good, one bad? Okay, it's not easy question. It was for me. I instantly said at my coauthor, we were sitting at 10:00 at night in his office. He said, "The two average", I said, the ugly and the gorgeous. We pushed the button, we bet five guilders by the way which was $2. We pushed the button and in an instant, I was proven right. The greater dispersion given the average, the better the company does. Why? What's the economics behind that? What would you do if you had a gorgeous worker and an ugly worker? What would you have them do if you're the boss?
Participant:	[inaudible 00:23:10] work hard.
Daniel H.:	Okay. He works where? What's he going to be doing? Behind the desk and the good-looker is out doing publicity, hustling clients, exactly right. We call that in economics comparative advantage, okay? If they're the same, you can't get them to do that. If they're much different, you assign each one to the task that he or she is better at so it appears to be that for ? even though it's maybe pure discrimination, companies do it because it pays. They can sell more. Who is discriminating here? Is it the employer here or is the employer merely an agent for the preferences of all of us to deal with better-looking people?
	That's a tough question. I think it's a problem of all of us but the employer looks like he or she is guilty. Here's a picture, this 15th century German art, okay, I saw last winter in Dusseldorf. What do you notice about this lady? Good-looking or bad-looking? By 20th century standards, she's not so hot. She's a little pudgy, right, but by 15th century German standards, I'm quite convinced she was considered really hot, okay? She was young, she has nice, blonde, flowing hair, a very good complexion and so on. How about the guy? What do you notice about him? He is beat up-looking and he's old. Why is she dealing with him? What does he got that she wants? A very nice gold necklace and what does she have that he wants? Her beauty and her reproductive capacity.
	What's going on in this picture here is an exchange. She is, not selling, not monetarily, but she is trading her looks for this guy's money and he is giving her money in exchange for her looks. Does this happen in the real world? A data for the US old data and for China more recently relating a wife's looks to the educational attainment of the husband she's found. Here is the US, average-looking wives and above average-looking wives, they get about the same educated husband but a below average-looking wife, somebody in the bottom, 1/7th is getting a husband who has one less year of schooling.
	What does that less year of schooling mean for the family's income? Less. About 12% less so she is unable to trade looks and she winds up with a worse educated husband. In China, nobody was rated below average in China. They're too nice, okay? I thought you all would like that but the average-looking women have husbands, this is Shanghai, only 19% of whom have a university degree. Here, 26% of the better-looking women do. It's exactly the same thing. Now, what if I were to do this in reverse and ask how does a guy's look relate to the education his wife has? Would I get the same thing?
	No, not at all and in fact, if you do it for both of these examples, you find much less of an effect that guys are trading their earnings capacity to a much greater extent for women's looks than is true vice-versa. Okay, that's a sad fact. What's going to happen as we get more and more equality of earnings between men and women which is happening? What am I going to start seeing here if I did this 30 years now? This would disappear, right, or get less important and I'd be more and more lucky to see good-looking guys, boy toys if you will, attracting high-earning women.
	In other words, as we get more and more equal, we'll find more and more examples like this in reverse I'm quite sure. Okay, do we have time? Five more minutes. We can talk about the stuff with the panel they had in the Jason Jones. Okay, here's a cartoon which I just saw this week. You got a job at Abercrombie & Fitch, yeppers. It's different from working at the factory saying, "My coworkers are all young, in shape and good-looking. Sometimes, I wonder how I got a job there." It's affirmative action for ugly people, okay? Just a very appropo cartoon.
	What I want to talk about is whether that makes any sense and I was sort of in today short-talking about it. I didn't quite make on the Daily Show. I didn't quite make myself clear, my feelings about this. I showed you earlier, it's very hard to change your looks, okay? That being the case, logically, it's very hard to argue logically that we shouldn't protect the ugly, the really bad-looking people. Would people be willing to say, "I'm ugly. Protect me."? Yeah. Why? Because there's money there. If I could sue and get a couple of $100,000, I'll be as ugly as you want me to be, okay? I've got to qualify. I don't think I'll qualify in the lowest 1% but it would sure be a good thing.
	There would be no problem assembling classes of people who wish to sue. That's not the issue. The issue is ought the government be spending its energy protecting this group? The African-American guy, remember the Daily Show we just saw? He was terrific, okay? He said, "I'm against all discrimination but we have to put limits. We only have a certain limited amount of energy to spend on this kind of thing." The question is, who do you want to spend your political energies on, the ugly or other groups? You may say the ugly, that's your business. I think other group is more important. That's a political opinion, it's not economics but the point is this kind of energy is limited.
	In fact, we do protect the ugly. A number of jurisdictions, DC, Santa Cruz, California, State of Michigan all have ordinance or laws outlawing discrimination based on appearance, okay? This is not just some academic discussion. I'm against that kind of thing but it's something which exists and I would be happy that it will become more widespread. Finally now, two minutes, why was Naomi Wolf really right? Okay, this is not in the book, this is some new research that I've done with a colleague, okay?
	We'll have to look at whether beautiful people are happier. What do you think? Yeah, you think so but I can give another story. It's terrible being so good-looking, people look at me all the time, give me a funny look, et cetera, et cetera. That's just wrong, okay? Better-looking people are happier, okay? Going from the 5th to the 80th percentile, that's basically those who are below average or ugly compared to those who are above average or gorgeous. We're talking an extra 10% in their response on happiness and we've done this for four different countries, a whole bunch of different sets of data, different ways of measuring beauty, different ways of measuring happiness.
	What's interesting is these numbers for men and women, the overall effect of looks on happiness are almost the same, right? 10%, 11%, it's about the same thing but they come about in different ways. For men, the direct effect, the fact that I'm good-looking, I walk down the street and I just feel happy because everybody looks at me and says, "What a gorgeous-looking guy." The direct effect is only 4%, less than half of the total. The rest comes from the fact that being a good-looking guy, I earn more, I get a better wife, bla-bla-bla.
	In other words, it's indirect. It's instrumental whereas for women, much more of the total and a much bigger effect comes out directly. A good-looking woman just feels happy because she is good-looking, not that it gets her anything specific, more earnings, a better earning husband. It does that but those are small contributors to her extra happiness. Most of it is the fact that women who are better-looking are just happier with life. Much different than for guys and in that sense, for me, this is nice because we're talking about research, this has solved something that worried me when I started working on this stuff in 1992, 20 years and I finally found the reason why the strange result we got on wages and earnings in fact is not so strange in how it can be rationalized with people's feelings.
	Anyway, that's all I had. Any kinds of questions you want about this? We have a good 20 minutes if you want and there's no more pizza.
Speaker 1:	Do raise your hand if you have a question because we are recording for the podcast and I'll bring the microphone to you and we'll get your question that way. Also, remember, the half sheets that you have that are the evaluation, please do fill those out.
Daniel H.:	Just one comment, okay? This format seems very much like last night's debate, okay, but there's one big difference. There's nobody else but me up here.
Participant:	I've noticed that in advertising, sometimes in non-western cultures, they tend to portray western models. For example, there's a Arabic newspaper that this library gets which especially for high-end products, it's always beautiful white men and women. I'm wondering if you've noticed that tends to happen in other cultures.
Daniel H.:	Yeah. Yeah, and I think the reason is partly that the real celebrities that these people see are often these western celebrities. George Clooney is known everywhere. You see even more of that in particularly, plastic surgery that's done I know in Korea tremendously. The removal of an epicanthic fold designed to make the women look more western. In a sense, this is more aping a western society. I'm quite sure that will change over time but it also shows the internationality of standards of beauty. These days, most of the industrialized world will agree, not perfectly but regardless of culture on who's good-looking and who isn't.
Participant:	As far as the direct effect on people of better-looking percentile versus the low, when people deal with those types of people, have you had any studies on the effect of the person dealing with them? Say, someone of average looks, they interact with someone that's better-looking versus someone that's worse-looking than them, have you done any studies on how they feel?
Daniel H.:	That's an excellent question. It's not a question that I, an economist, am going to answer, okay? It's not something I would look at, it's something a sociologist would look at and I don't think they have, okay? Another question is whether I as a good-looking employer are more or less likely to discriminate against a bad-looking worker than would a bad-looking employer. There's one study where people are asked what they would do but I've seen none that shows what people actually do and that's the kind of question I've looked at myself. I don't like seeing what people would do, I want to see what they do, not what they say, so the answer is no.
Participant:	In the beginning, you're talking about like how below average women choose to do houseworks so does it have something to do with like a marriage relationship or do you think like, either guys who are ? men looking for ? like average-looking couple has more healthy marriage relationship compared to both men and women are extremely attractive, the relationship-wise?
Daniel H.:	I wouldn't comment on the healthiness but I don't think this will affect the quality of the marriage per se because I don't see why a woman's ability to do housework, not whether she chooses to do it but her ability to do it is related to her looks. There are good housekeepers who are ugly and good ones who are gorgeous so I don't think it matters in terms of that relationship.
Participant:	In determining beauty, what role does weight play?
Daniel H.:	Okay. Great question. A number of the studies including one of mine, we had information on weight, okay? Let me back up first of all. The study I wanted to be involved in most was a study where they had pictures of naked women from the front here down, from the back here down and then the face and they had different people rate the woman. Each of these three, rate pictures, okay, and there was very little correlation between the rating of the face and the rating of the body. In other words, being heavy didn't affect the rating of the beauty.
	In my own research, in of our studies, we had information on weight, we also had information on height and we adjusted for both of those, those things mattered but they had no impact on the effect of beauty as we estimated so the answer is these are pretty close unless you're talking about really obese people. These are pretty close to independent.
Participant:	I saw a research about how in some country, beautiful women actually didn't get hired for a job because the HR is actually a woman so the jealousy affects so they don't hire them. Do you think that's one of the reasons that you make yourself pretty but it doesn't pay off?
Daniel H.:	No. I know that study. This is the one I was alluding to earlier. This is a study ? It's called an [Auden 00:37:28] study. You see job openings, you send pictures the same resume to a bunch of employers who think their looking at real job candidates but in fact, it's all a phony, okay? You ask them what they would do. This is not based on whom they actually hire, it's talk. I hate that kind of research. I don't believe a word of it, A, and B, in that particular study you're alluding to, that was only the very, very top group of women who were treated that or who would have been treated that way had it been a real study so I don't put much credence in that particular piece of research.
	I'm familiar with it. It's got me huge amount of attention as you're asking the question suggests but it ain't good research. Anymore? Question over there from the same fellow.
Participant:	A quick question going back to the first gentleman who was talking about like how lots of people from different nation trying to portrait the look of western, the white people. Do you think, what's the cause for the western ? People tend to think that white people are more attractive. Do you think-
Daniel H.:	No, I don't think they do. No, I don't think they think white ? westerners are more attractive, it's rather that western celebrities are in most cases, as are more familiar to them, okay, so it pays the company advertising to use a western celebrity. Now, that wouldn't have been true 50 years ago because an Asian wouldn't be used to looking at a western face and wouldn't think this is good-looking, this one is not but now, because of a near universality of standards of beauty, it's the case that it makes sense to use a well-known westerner.
	I'm quite convinced, as we become more internationalized and African or Asian faces become very familiar to us, celebrities, Jeremy Lin for example, is he going to start making money advertising? Of course he is. The fact he's Asian-American, ain't going to make a darn bit of difference. It's a celebrity. It's how well-known he is plus his looks. There's a very neat paper by two Korean economists that I just saw where they looked at female golfers, okay, and how money endorsements they got. Which female golfers get more endorsements? Ugly ones or good-looking ones?
	The good-looking ones and moreover, those who are good-looking tend to improve their scores more. The reason being, if you're bad-looking, there's no point in killing yourself improving yourself because you ain't going to make money out of any endorsements anyway, okay, but if you're good-looking and just so-so and you know you might do a lot better with both looks and high scores, in those data, the good-looking female golfers improved their scores over time. A perfectly rational response to the market where you're paid for your beauty in conjunction with your quality as a golfer which is objective.
Participant:	Have you done studies on the prevalence of the beauty effect across the streets such as like IT versus real estate?
Daniel H.:	This is like the guy's question about Google, right? Yeah. I have not done it by industry, but I've seen studies who had done them. Let's think of occupation because that's close enough. Professors. It mattered. Another study I have with economists, believe it or not, showed that better-looking economists regrettably are paid more, okay? Economists, attorneys, that's my own study. NFL quarterbacks who once were better-looking actually, the teams do better, okay? I guess they inspire the players to play better which is a scary thought when you think about it.
	What else? Politicians. I've seen studies for Germany, Finland, the US, Australia on politicians. Prostitutes. Better-looking prostitutes, I've seen that for Los Angeles, Chicago, Mexico and Ecuador, studies for all those places, better-looking prostitutes make more money. Another one, a former student of ours here in finance. The thing on escorts, okay? Better-looking escorts which are basically very high-paid prostitutes more or less. Also, you can go down occupation after occupation.
	There's a famous line which I got when I started this saying, "A beautiful face for radio", think about that one for a second. I'd be happy to put money that even in radio, it's going to matter. Does it matter in acting? People are always bringing up some sort of counterexample up. What's that guy? Gary Sinise, is that the guy? Steve Buscemi is my favorite example. That's the guy ? He's not good-looking but that's true in everything. We don't work on averages, we work ? we don't work in individuals, we look at averages and on average, these things go in that way so I go occupation across occupation and expect to find the same thing. (person sneezes) Gesundheit.
Participant:	[inaudible 00:42:54] better-looking women tend to have a higher income husband.
Daniel H.:	Yup.
Participant:	In my opinion, higher income husband, they tend to have better-looking women and then they prefer their wife to stay at home but [inaudible 00:43:11] below average women tend to stay at home. Can you explain the contradiction?
Daniel H.:	No. I don't think it's a contradiction because everything I'm talking about is always other things equal. Of course, if the woman's husband makes a lot of money and she's not that excited about working, she'll stay home but given the husband's income, if she is better-looking, she's more likely to work.
Participant:	Would you think that in any other occupation, the golf turn would hold?
Daniel H.:	Okay. We need an occupation where there are two parts to it, okay? One, where I get paid for productivity, the other, I get paid for doing extra things that are based upon my productivity and the main activity like golf score and some other characteristic of mine. Let me give you an example. Economic consulting, okay? I do a little bit of it. I testify in court. I don't do enough. I love doing it. It's really fun, tremendous challenge and really lucrative, okay? Now, if I were truly bad-looking, even if I were a superb economist, would they have me in court talking to a jury?
	Probably not but if I can reach some threshold of success as an economist and I'm decent-looking, these two things will create a synergy for my consulting practice so I think economics consulting is just like that anything that has these twofold activities, that synergy can be created, you'd find this effect.
Speaker 1:	With that, I think our lunch hour is over, so thank you Dr. Hamermesh.
Daniel H.:	Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:	Thank you all for coming. Our next program will be on November, the 13th when Art Markman from Psychology will talk about smart thinking. Please fill out your half sheet evaluation form here and just leave it on your chair or your table. We'll come around and get those and thanks for coming out. Have a good day.

RPP-Hamermesh 

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