Beauty and success

Just came across an interesting little piece on the correlation between beauty and professional success: Beauty and the Geek— Maybe good looks do make you smarter.

According to Tim Harford, author of the piece, the most common explanations of why pretty people do better at work are either that bosses seem to like to surround themselves with beautiful people or that we all seem to confuse beauty for other useful qualities (like honesty, intelligence and so forth). The article suggests that, perhaps, beautiful people ARE better at their jobs for reasons as simple as having been treated with more attention by their teachers when they were students.

I’m directing attention to the article not because it’s particularly well written or shockingly ground-breaking in its conclusions, but simply because I find the topic quite interesting. Also, the author made a sneaky reference to Kant and I simply couldn’t help myself.