Ageism and Lookism - orphans in the victimhood pantheon

From Beholding Inequality: Race, Gender, and Returns to Physical Attractiveness in the United States by Ellis P. Monk, Jr., Michael H. Esposito, and Hedwig Lee.  From the Abstract (emphasis added):

Physical attractiveness is an important axis of social stratification associated with educational attainment, marital patterns, earnings, and more. Still, relative to ethnoracial and gender stratification, physical attractiveness is relatively understudied. In particular, little is known about whether returns to physical attractiveness vary by race or significantly vary by race and gender combined. In this study, we use nationally representative data to examine whether (1) socially perceived physical attractiveness is unequally distributed across race/ethnicity and gender subgroups and (2) returns to physical attractiveness vary significantly across race/ethnicity and gender subgroups. 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.

 

A little more explicitly:

Click to enlarge.  

Black women, Hispanic men, and white men seem to receive the highest relative boost to income from good looks.  The effect size is between 5-10%.  

H/T Tyler Cowen.  Cowen has been contemplating looksism for some time and observes:

It is often the educated (and often left-wing) coastal elite that commits the most lookism and also enforces it through internal norms of dress, thinness, etc..  Yet they are so desperate to believe they are better people than competing white interest groups (amazing how unself-aware they are about how obvious this is) that they just don’t want to bring looksism to your attention.  Upon presentation, this will receive the “yes, that’s bad too” treatment, and then it won’t be talked about any more.  Looksism will continue unabated, and indeed it may intensify as some other isms decline.

There is an interesting disconnect between experienced reality and advocacy narratives. 

Advocacy/ideological concerns focus especially on racial discrimination and on gender discrimination.  And while those concerns remain valid, they are vestigial to even the recent past and are heavily punished where they can be clearly demonstrated to exist.

In contrast, the most obvious, extensive and explicit forms of discrimination - looks and age - are essentially acknowledged and passed over.  We accept it.  Why punditry turns a blind eye towards these evils which afflict everyone is an invitation to impute bad motives on an ideological out-group.  Regardless, it is striking how little attention mainstream media, academia and punditry pay to these two universal and material forms of discrimination.