Does beauty make you smarter? - By Tim Harford - Slate Magazine

Something that I've been contemplating lately here in LALAland. Especially while getting a recent promotion which my friend Christy partially attributes to wearing suit jackets at work.

Does beauty make you smarter? - By Tim Harford - Slate Magazine: "Biden has been charging around apologizing to everybody, but what nobody really wants to admit is this: One of Sen. Obama's qualities is that he is handsome, and handsome politicians have a habit of getting elected. Economists have found evidence that voters prefer a pretty face in the United Kingdom, Australia, Finland, Germany, and the United States.

Researchers have to be careful when they observe simple correlations between subjective beauty and electoral success. Amy King and Andrew Leigh, who studied Australian elections, wondered whether the findings were driven by ageism or racism: Perhaps (mostly white) voters see a black face and believe the face's owner is both unattractive and unfit to govern. That sounds miserably plausible, but it is not driving the results: Restricting analysis only to white politicians, or those in a narrower age band, produces similar evidence of a beauty premium."