Beauty in the Eye of the Accountants
In today’s newspaper there was a groundbreaking study showing ‘beautiful’ people have significant advantages over ‘ugly’ people. Better jobs, better chances for advancement, better salaries. Likelier to be happy, likelier to get bank loans with lower interest rates, likelier to marry a highly educated and equally attractive spouse. I double-checked to make certain it wasn’t a study funded by the Plastic Surgeons of America. Needless to say they’ll be inundated soon by unemployed college grads so wattle-neck deep in student loans already that another debt won’t matter much. A little liposuction might mean an extra 6 figures over a lifetime, so say the experts.
It came as a shock to me too that attractive folks have a leg up on us toads. Explains everything from TV commercials to beauty contests to presidential primaries. And here I thought brains and talent were my downfall all these years of unemployment, low wages and marginal socialization. If I’d only know …. A nip there, a tuck here, some botox occasionally, I might have had a chance. I coulda been a contender, not some chump sent packing to Palookaville’s South End. But back then our fearless researchers hadn’t defined beauty yet, which I had sadly been informed at an impressionable age, was in the eye of the beholder, not a scale or a matrix or a scientific formulation.
The study even calculated that beautiful people will make $230,000 more over a lifetime than those with ‘below average’ looks. I wish I hadn’t done it, but I took out a calculator and ran a study of my own, put my lifetime earnings up against the neighbors’, graphed out the disparities and concluded — scientifically — how really ugly I must be to make so radically much less. And … that’s assuming most of them are extremely good looking. If they’re not, I’m going to need a helluva lot more than some plastic surgery.
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Tags: Beautiful People Make More Money, Why Skeeter is Poor