Did you know ugly folks make less money than the beautiful people? One study has revealed that “an American worker who was among the bottom one-seventh in looks, as assessed by randomly chosen observers, earned 10 to 15 percent less per year than a similar worker whose looks were assessed in the top one-third — a lifetime difference, in a typical case, of about $230,000.” Daniel S. Hamermesh, a professor of economics at the University of Texas, Austin, proposes that to compensate these folks we should have affirmative action for ugly people:
Why this disparate treatment of looks in so many areas of life? It’s a matter of simple prejudice. Most of us, regardless of our professed attitudes, prefer as customers to buy from better-looking salespeople, as jurors to listen to better-looking attorneys, as voters to be led by better-looking politicians, as students to learn from better-looking professors. This is not a matter of evil employers’ refusing to hire the ugly: in our roles as workers, customers and potential lovers we are all responsible for these effects.
How could we remedy this injustice? With all the gains to being good-looking, you would think that more people would get plastic surgery or makeovers to improve their looks. Many of us do all those things, but as studies have shown, such refinements make only small differences in our beauty. All that spending may make us feel better, but it doesn’t help us much in getting a better job or a more desirable mate.
A more radical solution may be needed: why not offer legal protections to the ugly, as we do with racial, ethnic and religious minorities, women and handicapped individuals?
Hamermesh says that for purposes of administering a law, we could agree on who is truly ugly and limit the affirmative action to the worst-looking 1 or 2 percent of the population. But what exactly is the “worst-looking” 1 or 2 percent?
Obviously, there is a broad spectrum on the ugly scale with plain being on one end and carnie worker reject being on the other. Maximally homely—where I fit in—falls somewhere in the middle. To be honest, I wish I were even uglier than I am. (Contrary to what my fellow editors say, I do think that’s possible.) The reason isn’t because I want to get special treatment, but because being ugly has distinct advantages that beautiful people miss out on:
Ugly people are appreciated for their personality — Beautiful people never know if people like them for who they are or how they look. I know a number of beautiful women (including my wife) and, to be perfectly honest, I couldn’t tell you if they have pleasant personalities or not. Actually, I couldn’t tell you if they have a personalities at all. I get so caught up in their beauty that my brain can’t comprehend what they are saying when the speak (that’s why my wife thinks I don’t listen to her). If you’re ugly, though, and someone agrees to go out with you, chances are it’s because they like you for who you are. Unless, of course, you’re rich. Then you can be sure they like you because of your money.
Ugly people are funnier — Think of all the truly funny people you know. Chances are they are unattractive. That’s because ugly people can’t take themselves too seriously. As my dad used to tell me, “Son, if you can’t laugh at yourself, then you’re obviously not looking in the mirror.”
Ugly is cheap and easy — I don’t mean that ugly people are cheap and easy, but that ugliness is low maintenance. When you’re ugly you don’t have to worry about trivialities such as make-up, face lifts, unibrow plucking, or brushing your teeth. Since nothing you do is really going to matter you can just let yourself go. You can acquire a tidy nest egg saving the cash you won’t be spending on toothpaste and tweezers.
Ugly people are more successful — Beautiful people have everything handed to them. Ugly people, on the other hand, have to work harder to get what they want. Do you think there would be a Microsoft if Bill Gates looked like George Clooney? Would we have the iPad if Steve Jobs was as handsome as Ryan Gosling? Would we have First Thoughts if I had become a male model? Great innovations, inventions, and blog posts are always produced by some ugly geek who couldn’t get a date and had nothing better to do than improve the world. Our economy is fueled on ugly.
Ugly people are the majority — Forget the Democratic and Republican parties. Someday we ugly people will unite and become the biggest voting bloc in the country, we will take over and have all the pretty people be at our beck and call. All we need to do is organize I figure that we should just meet up and hold our first convention at the state fair since, from the looks of the crowd, we are already congregating there anyway.
Ugly is inevitable — Beauty fades but ugly is everlasting (or at least until death). If we live long enough we eventually all get ugly. Some of us fortunate ones just get there first and have time to get used to it.
August 30th, 2011 | 9:24 am
Joe, how does your theory work for people who are not only ugly but also stupid? Take Daniel S. Hamermesh for instance. We can presume he is ugly. Why else would he want affirmative action for ugly people? What else can one say about a person who looks at the affirmative action morass and says, “not only would I like to expand that, I would like to expand it based on an entirely subjective measure.” That person is deeply stupid.
Also, I would note that the program, if it were to pass, would have the opposite effect of that intended. There is a municipal tax program called “tax increment financing” that can only be used if the city makes a finding that the area to be improved is “blighted,” and “blighted” means whatever the local government says it means. Here in Denver the city council once declared portions of the Cherry Creek area (billionaire Phil Anschutz lives in Cherry Creek) “blighted.” Similarly, I presume that because of their disproportionate influence, only beautiful people will be declared ugly and thus reap the benefits of a program intended for people like you and me.
August 30th, 2011 | 9:47 am
Ugly is indeed relative. I recall a white good-looking lady who became an anthropologist and worked among primitive tribes in New Guinea. The tribesmen told her she was so pale she looked like a ghost and scared them. They advised that she get her skin darkened.
But then, I looked in a mirror.
August 30th, 2011 | 10:21 am
What else can one say about a person who looks at the affirmative action morass and says, “not only would I like to expand that, I would like to expand it based on an entirely subjective measure.” That person is deeply stupid.
Barry Arrington,
You are ignoring the fact that Hamermesh comes out against his own proposal in the last two paragraphs.
August 30th, 2011 | 10:36 am
While I do think the idea of giving protected status based on looks is bizarre (except in cases of disabilities), I don’t doubt that good looks are a significant advantage and that this can be demonstrated statistically. I would be lying if I claimed never to have been influenced by people’s good looks.
I do think it works the other way around in some cases. That is, sometimes the more positively you feel about a person, the better he or she begins to look.
August 30th, 2011 | 10:37 am
David Nickol, no he doesn’t.
August 30th, 2011 | 10:56 am
[...] A FACE ONLY A MOTHER COULD LOVE: “The Benefits of Being Ugly.” [...]
August 30th, 2011 | 11:17 am
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all you know on earth, and all you need to know.
Beauty is not “in the eye of the beholder,” but it is far less objective than our minds can regularly account for. Plain people have plenty of options to increase their attractiveness — through poise, posture, cosmetics, and yes, personality. Objectively, attractiveness is at best 50% physical (with some flexibility in that number between men and women).
On the other hand, the spectacularly ugly or deformed constitute a different category that is not comparable to the normal scale of human attractiveness. Think Elephant Man or Quasimodo or “Mask.” Maybe they hide themselves away, but I don’t know anybody like this in my life. Do you?
Socrates was notoriously ugly.
It is no surprise that our rights-obsessed, victimology culture would eventually attempt to declare the most obvious truth of life — that beauty is beautiful (and true) — is false and must be corrected. But given Keats’s dictum and Nietzsche’s observation, that is one lie even a denatured human being will never swallow.
Beauty is the substance of the purpose of life. It is in its essence “a refutation”! Now, the meaning of that refutation is of great controversy, but we small-l liberals are too squeamish to speak straightforwardly about such timeless matters.
Ugliness creates industry, as Joe Carter indicates cleverly above. Every soul possesses a kernel of irreducible, inalienable beauty. So long as we are intimately and pragmatically familiar with the first things — love, goodness, truth, justice, wisdom, and beauty — there is no danger misrepresenting beauty for more than it is. In a superficial culture like ours, however, the most damning tendency is to abuse the power of beauty, to feel bad about such an obvious injustice, and finally to over-correct for our instinctive rashness (hence the article, and the confusion).
Surfaces are all we have, and yet souls can never not recognize that beauty goes beyond “skin deep.” It is one of the essences of creation, undeniable, elevated, true. We are too maleducated and immature to speak plainly about what’s in front of our face, what our eyes cannot but register, the most provable truth in the universe. As the memorable advertisement, spoken by the angelic Kelly LeBrock in the 1980s, once requested: “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.” Pantene isn’t timeless, but Miss LeBrock’s plea — and her beauty — is.
August 30th, 2011 | 11:19 am
A truly forward-thinking approach to the tragedy of ugliness would be a pre-natal genetic test giving prospective parents the opportunity to abort their ugly babies and try again. Government might also do the rest of us a service by making it illegal for ugly people to procreate to begin with, but that approach, though obviously in the public interest, would likely run up against certain quaint notions of individual liberty.
There are already a lot of ugly people in Texas, as the author can attest, and it occurs to me that our nation could vote to relocate most of our ugliest people there, allowing a few of the moderately ugly to continue living in the other 49 states where they could fill those necessary service jobs we beautiful people so depend on.
With an entire state devoted to ugliness, you would necessarily raise the standard of living and quality of life of the majority as new class divisions arose between the merely ugly and the young-children-run-screaming-to-their-mothers-at-my-approach ugly.
Lady Bird Johnson once won praise for her efforts to beautify our nations highways. If we are ever to live up to the ideals of America the Beautiful, I think it’s time for a campaign to beautify the American citizenry.
August 30th, 2011 | 11:34 am
I am reminded of a television dramatization of one of Kurt Vonnegut’s works (Harrison Bergeron)in which no one was allowed to be any better than anyone else, and we got a brief glimpse of some ballet dancers attempting to dance with sandbags tied to them. Wikipedia gives a plot summary.
August 30th, 2011 | 11:37 am
Joe and Hamermesh are both right. All else being equal, who stands a better chance in the job market: a beautiful looking minority, or her truly ugly counterpart, both of whom want that job working as a hostess in an expensive restaurant? Of course Hamermesh is right! Missing in this take are the more substantive considerations of Joe’s analysis.
Probably the most important thing to remember about affirmative action is why we have wed ourselves to it. If affirmation action were measured on whether it truly helped the groups it targets, I doubt it could survive. After all, let’s say your child is a minority: do you want him getting into college on the basis of his race or on the basis of his academic merit?
We wed ourselves to affirmation action because by doing so we can assert that we aren’t racist, an accusation that’ll scare the living daylights out of many people. Hamermesh is absolutely right that ugly people are discriminated against (but of course we are all discriminated against by some people for something). But we will never have nationwide affirmative action for ugly people until we somehow get everyone scared to death of being called anti-ugly.
August 30th, 2011 | 11:53 am
I want to add one more sentence to my 11:37AM post:
And then God help the ugly people.
August 30th, 2011 | 12:31 pm
I deeply resemble these remarks.
August 30th, 2011 | 12:45 pm
Joe Carter and Douglas Johnson:
You both refer to “affirmative action,” but Hamermesh makes no mention of it at all. Making the ugliest 2% of the population a protected class, which I agree is a nutty idea, would not require employers to give preferential treatment to ugly people until they were somehow “equal” to good looking people. Being in a protected class merely gives a person the right to sue if they have reason to believe they have been unfairly discriminated against as a member of that class. Virtually every person is in at least one protected class, and most people who read this will be in several.
August 30th, 2011 | 12:52 pm
@Charlie
What gets measure gets improved. However, life is all about solving a Rubik’s Cube just off its shadow: there are many colors and many dimensions that we are always missing, but obviously that doesn’t keep us from waking up the next morning. Neverthless, policymakers MUST see the colors.
People are made of mind, body and spirit. At some point, you reach Pareto efficiency and then have to start making tradeoffs. If you select for a beautiful body, will you skip the other two? Are you and your doctor smart enough to select for all three?
Hell, even though I’d want to select my baby to ensure there’s no fatal genetic diseases, I can’t be sure that doing so will compromise anything else. To ensure it doesn’t, I’d have to do a lot of trial and error.
August 30th, 2011 | 12:53 pm
David Nickol You both refer to “affirmative action,” but Hamermesh makes no mention of it at all.
Are you sure you’re reading the same article that we are? If so, I think you must have missed this line: “We could even have affirmative-action programs for the ugly.”
August 30th, 2011 | 1:25 pm
If so, I think you must have missed this line
Joe Carter,
You’re right. I missed it. As Emily Litella used to say, “Never mind.”
By the way, I looked you up on Google images and you are not at all ugly. Of course, uniforms of any kind tend to make a man look better than he might otherwise, and this is particularly true of baseball uniforms.
August 30th, 2011 | 1:39 pm
Wait, let me quibble a little bit to save some face. You said, Hamermesh “proposes that to compensate these folks we should have affirmative action for ugly people.” Actually, Hamermesh says, “We could even have affirmative-action programs for the ugly.” Should and could are two different things (and could even implies something beyond could). And in any case, Hamermesh’s position is that society should not do the things he said could be done on behalf of the ugly, since it would necessarily dilute anti-discrimination efforts on behalf of those already in protected classes.
August 30th, 2011 | 1:49 pm
I agree that treating people more favorably on the basis of their looks is a outrageously unjust and immoral act.
Some very good looking people are nasty. “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”
August 30th, 2011 | 3:00 pm
On the other hand, has anyone ever heard that saying, “After 50 you have the face you deserve”?
August 30th, 2011 | 4:18 pm
A truly forward-thinking approach to the tragedy of ugliness would be a pre-natal genetic test giving prospective parents the opportunity to abort their ugly babies and try again.
Until the fashions change, at which point everyone has to have surgery or be killed.
August 30th, 2011 | 5:50 pm
While I don’t have the courage to say, like Joe, I wish my face were less attractive (and in the grand scheme of things, I think I’m pretty lucky re how my face looks) I am happy I lost my hair and that I shave my head.
August 30th, 2011 | 7:28 pm
[...] Quote of the day: Great innovations, inventions, and blog posts are always produced by some ugly geek who couldn’t get a date and had nothing better to do than improve the world. This entry was posted in Culture and anti-culture, Not anime. Bookmark the permalink. ← There and back [...]
August 30th, 2011 | 9:39 pm
Ideal! It would fix the jobs problem by requiring a bunch of government bureaucrats (who would have all the fun of being arrogant and bullying while simultaneously thinking what good they are doing) and by requiring more employers to overlook bad performance (to avoid being sued), it will require them to hire more people to get their work done.
August 31st, 2011 | 12:49 am
O don fatale, o don crudel
che in suo furor mi fece il ciel!
Tu che ci fai sì vane, altere,
ti maledico, ti maledico, o mia beltà!
September 2nd, 2011 | 8:59 am
I don’t doubt that good looks are a significant advantage and that this can be demonstrated statistically. I would be lying if I claimed never to have been influenced by people’s good looks.
But how much time, money, and effort do successful people put into fixing one’s defects, maximizing one’s attributes, and cultivating a more attractive self-presentation?
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