A stunning – and yet in some ways completely intuitive – paper from Ellis Monk, Michael Esposito, and Hedwig Lee that explores the earnings gap between attractive and unattractive people, and discovers that it’s greater than the white–black income gap and the male–female one too:
“Physical attractiveness is an important axis of social stratification associated with educational attainment, marital patterns, earnings, and more… Notably, the magnitude of the earnings disparities along the perceived attractiveness continuum, net of controls, rivals and/or exceeds in magnitude the black-white race gap and, among African-Americans, the black-white race gap and the gender gap in earnings. The implications of these findings for current and future research on the labor market and social inequality are discussed.”