Which inequalities matter?

Pity the borderline Asperger's investment banker who, despite his financial success, seems at a bit of a disadvantage in dating. Reddit posted the 1600 word email that the would-be suitor sent to the woman who dumped him after the first date; it's since shown up all kinds of places. But folks snickering at it seem an awful lot like a rich one-percenter laughing at a pleading email from a starving man.

If I can play armchair psychiatrist, the same Asperger tendencies that helped this poor guy in investment banking have killed him in dating.

If you're an egalitarian, what is appropriate policy? Is this guy better or worse off than the poor musician who dates easily? With whom would you rather trade places, taking both their positions and their characteristics? If we redistribute income because the investment banker's last dollar is worth less to him than it would be to the poor musician, think too about the marginal utility of the musician's last date relative to the banker's.

Discriminating against the ugly

A few years ago, Robin Hanson asked why we care so much about income inequality but so little about other forms of inequality: the beautiful get more friends and potential sexual partners, for example. From an ev bio perspective, inequality in opportunity to produce successful children and grandchildren is what matters most. Income inequality will contribute to that, but so too would inequality in physical attractiveness. If we redistribute resources from rich old ugly men to young poor attractive bohemian men, we may increase rather than reduce inequality. But do read Hanson's post for some potential reasons why some inequalities matter more politically than others.

Hanson pointed to a Washington Post oped that satirically called for beauty-based redistribution.

Now, the New York Post is taking beauty-based redistribution seriously.

In another, more synergistic universe, the site might have been a useful tool for labor economist Daniel S. Hamermesh, whose book Beauty Pays takes a more high-minded approach to the vagaries of looks. Specifically, it attempts to explain why attractive people make more money than unattractive people. A lot more money, in fact: $230,000 over the course of a lifetime, which holds true even in professions where looks wouldn’t seem to matter. Hamermesh found that fetching professors, for example, earn 6 percent more than their average-looking peers, while unattractive quarterbacks earn 12 percent less than their hunkier counterparts. Men, in fact, suffer the greater repulsiveness penalty in general: Unattractive women earn 3 percent less than average-looking women, while unattractive men’s take-home is reduced a whopping 22 percent.

But wait—how can something as subjective as beauty hold any value in an economic context? Therein lies the cold truth at the heart of these findings: A common standard of beauty does exist. Based on an attractiveness scale of one to five, most people surveyed will come to near agreement on a test subject’s looks, a finding that holds true across all cultures. And while extreme beauty and extreme ugliness are rare, 10 to 15 percent or so of the population falls into the “below-average attractiveness” category, where they will endure their pronounced asymmetries as long as they live. Beauty is not only scarce, it turns out, but unobtainable to those born without it: Studies show that homeliness is approximately as easy to change as race, which is to say, it’s not.

Knowing the extent to which people are economically penalized (or rewarded) for their looks raises the question: Should the ill-favored be protected? And if so, how? Hamermesh, in the Über-cautious fashion of an economist, predicts that the most unsightly people will eventually receive the same kinds of legal protection extended to Americans with disabilities. 

I have a hard time believing that this could ever be implemented; Hamermesh, in the article, points to some of the obvious problems. I'd expect that there'd be any number of entrepreneurs helping folks uglify themselves before going in for their government attractiveness rating.

I'd noted a couple weeks ago discrimination against the ugly at the ballot box by uninformed voters. Niclas Berggren found similar results in Finnish data a while back as well:

We study the role of beauty in politics using candidate photos that figured prominently in electoral campaigns. Our investigation is based on visual assessments of 1929 Finnish political candidates from 10,011 respondents (of which 3708 were Finnish). As Finland has a proportional electoral system, we are able to compare the electoral success of non-incumbent candidates representing the same party. An increase in our measure of beauty by one standard deviation is associated with an increase of 20% in the number of votes for the average non-incumbent parliamentary candidate. The relationship is unaffected by including education and occupation as control variables and withstands several other robustness checks.

Presumably then voters who cannot constrain themselves against preferring more attractive political candidates would be the ones choosing policies to limit the advantage of beauty.

Where's Diana Moon Glampers when you need her....

Academic hype

Is there anything that the healthists at Otago get up to that doesn't call for a press release? This time, Tony Blakely wrote an op-ed for the New Zealand Medical Journal. Press release! An op-ed!

I'm going to have to talk to Canterbury's publicity folks. I've had a couple op-eds in the NZMJ and another short piece but Canterbury's never reckoned an op-ed in the NZMJ warranted a presser. I don't think I've seen Canterbury media releases on anybody else's op-eds either though. The bar here's just a tad higher than that. Good thing too, or I'd be pushing the press guys for a media release for every blog post.

Blakely's on about health inequalities again. I'm with Tony on caring a lot about bad health outcomes for folks in the lower income deciles. But I've never cared about health inequalities per se; if I did, forcing healthy higher income folks to donate kidneys to poor folks on dialysis might start sounding like reasonable policy.

I'm also nervous about ascribing too many of the measured health differences across income cohorts to income differences. The same factors that give rise to income differences may themselves cause differences in health outcomes. Linda Gottfredson points to general intelligence as a fundamental underlying confound in the health-income literature: effects of income on health status are strongly attenuated when we correct for intelligence. That gives strong reason for differential targeting of health interventions for lower decile populations but also, as I've noted before, ought to make us reluctant to draw strong conclusions about the potential for reducing health inequalities through measures like heavy income redistribution. But that's Blakely's first recommended policy:

Ten next most important actions to reduce health inequities in Aotearoa New Zealand

1. Equitable and fair fiscal and social welfare policy, including progressive taxation, comprehensive and fair social policy, and ensuring that everyone has a minimum income for healthy living. Policy needs to be proportionate to need – what is termed proportionate universalism in the Marmot Review 9, or a balance of targeting and universalism.

As for the rest of the list, I'm a bit worried that Blakely's proposed  policies may work at cross-purposes. I'm not sure that "Aligning climate change, sustainability and pro-equity policies" ought be anywhere near a top-ten priority list for dealing with poor health outcomes among low-decile Kiwis. And country-wide bans on smoking and regulation of food salt content (priority 6!) probably are a bit broad, especially since the Cochrane Review's finding that reduced salt intake doesn't really help anything. If Blakely's push for higher incomes among lower deciles may be inconsistent with his preference for lower unemployment, depending on the specific policy proposed. Higher minimum wages won't do it, but wage subsidies might. It's not unreasonable to conclude that the Top 10 list (in the press release) reflects a few goals other than just improving health outcomes among low income folks.

But there's stuff to like too in Blakely's op-ed. We'd probably do well to shift resources by increasing the age of superannuation eligibility and redirect the resources towards interventions targeting low-decile child health. I could be convinced to push the button for that. The Ministry of Health's recent push to increase vaccination rates among Maori (here too) is probably one of the most cost-effective things it's done lately.

HT: Ed.co.nz, who always finds a way of getting me angry in the morning.

Assortative mating

I've argued before that people are Lancasterian goods and that we all get the best spouse we can afford given our particular bundles of characteristics.

Jeff Ely finds additional evidence:

I visited the Cowles Foundation at Yale for the winter of 2006, and taught a senior elective course. Seven fortunate students took my seminar in information economics. One impressive woman student — who organized the gay and lesbian social scene — asked whether the shallow view of Becker’s model was so unrealistic. Did babes match with hunks?

We brainstormed on data sources and settled on two new web sites: facebook.com and hotornot.com. Facebook allowed users to indicate with whom they were “in a relationship with”. Facebook was still new, and not yet open to all email addresses. So the student asked her friends at various campuses across America for their logins. And so began our stealth project. Hundreds of photos of matched men and women were downloaded, and then uploaded to HotOrNot, all on the sly. HotOrNot afforded us the average evaluation of about 200 women for every man, and 2000 men for every woman.

The result: Regressing straight men’s or women’s hotness on their partner’s hotness gave a highly significant fit, with a slope of about 0.7 — so that a man rising in hotness from 7 to 8 expects his partner to rise by 0.7 points. But sorting was far closer for gays and lesbians, with a slope for each of about 0.9. As Becker implied, beauty is income in this meat market, and the “richest” men match with the “richest” women.

The fit would be even better if you could adjust for the other Lancasterian characteristics.

I love the gonzo approach to this project. The human subjects review panels there must be more sane or have fewer teeth. Excellent either way.

And Robin Hanson would (and has) asked why we care so much about income inequality when this form of inequality may matter more....