ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
Human beauty illustrates the economic impact of heritable physical traits.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Abstract
Intergenerational transmission of inequality is a central question in the social sciences. We use one trait, beauty, to infer how much parents' physical characteristics transmit inequality across generations. Analyses of a large-scale longitudinal dataset in the United States, and a much smaller dataset of Chinese parents and children, show that increases in parents' looks are associated with increases in their child's looks. A large dataset of U.S. siblings shows a positive correlation of their beauty. The appropriate weighted average from the three samples shows that a one SD increase in ratings of both parents' looks is associated with a 0.25 SD increase in their child's. Coupling these estimates with those from large literatures measuring the impact of beauty on earnings and the intergenerational elasticity of income suggests that a one SD difference in parents' looks is correlated with a 0.074 SD difference in their adult child's earnings, about U.S. $2,170 annually.
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