December 19, 2007
Exogenous beauty
In response to this:
Economists have known for some time that better-looking people are paid more. This is probably due to a combination of discrimination against the ugly, the fact that some beautiful people have jobs where beauty is an obvious advantage, and the likelihood that better-looking people are more confident.
More recently, economists have discovered evidence that endogenous beauty (make-up, hair-styling) is as important as exogenous beauty (having Bond girl Eva Green’s eyes).
An irate reader writes:
Much as we all like exogenous and endogenous as exotic (cf. endotic) words, they do have to be used the right way round. You would have been better to use a nurture / nature comparison; more sexy than external / internal which is what you really meant.
Not so. Exogenous does not mean "external"; it means "generated outside". And to an economist, it means determined by factors outside the system under consideration. In other words, you can put on make-up but you can’t improve your genes. So, make-up is "endogenous beauty" even though it is applied to the outside of the skin. Of course, all this is economic jargon. But when did "Dear Economist" not use economic jargon? It’s the whole point of the column.
Is it, however, unfair to say that even the beauty that is said to be “exogenous” here, has some endogeneity as well?
What I mean is, a person’s beauty and income are allegedly positively correlated. But so are her parents’. And both wealth and beauty are transmitted (by genes and/or access to better opportunities for education).
Posted by: Tim | December 19th, 2007 at 10:40 am | Report this commentSo what I mean is, a person with wealthy is also more likely than average to be a person with beautiful parents. So - through this intergenerational effect, even your eyes are endogenous to your income - albeit very weakly, admittedly.
Maybe most beauty is exogenous.
The fact that beauty and income are correlated today does not mean that the same criteria applied yesterday. We could assume that income and factor Y are correlated and that beauty is a subgroup of Y.
I am saying that because following the same logic evolutionary analyst says that women prefer tall man. They based their analysis on observation at T time. But their conclusion does not match the reality check. If tall men had 5% higher chance of reproduction through history, we humans would measure 10 meters after millions of years of evolution.
On the opposite side, social intelligence has clearly been an evolutionary criteria. On what evidence? Look at the percentages of humans do not master language.
To come back to beauty, I do not know what Y is, but “social norms” could be a good contender.
Posted by: Christophe | December 19th, 2007 at 9:31 pm | Report this comment