New Yorker:

The first nineteen times that Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, ran for Congress, he won his seat with more than sixty per cent of the popular vote. That remarkable streak came to an end in 2012, the final election of his career, when he defeated his main rival, the independent Bill Bloomfield, by a comparatively small margin—fifty-four per cent to forty-six per cent. After serving nearly four decades in the House, during which he sponsored some six hundred pieces of legislation and chaired two powerful committees, Waxman came the closest he ever had to losing. But, according to a recent study in the journal Political Behavior, he was lucky in at least one respect. In the words of the study’s authors—Gabriel Lenz, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues—Waxman “suffers from considerable appearance disadvantage.” If the 2012 ballot had shown a photograph of his face, their research showed, it would have cost him ten percentage points, enough to tip the race in Bloomfield’s favor.

Social scientists and natural philosophers have long recognized the existence of a so-called beauty premium (or, in some cases, an ugliness penalty). Attractive lawyers and M.B.A. grads earn more in their careers than their average-looking brethren, and when comely C.E.O.s appear on television, their companies often see a bump in stock price. The effect may be due in part to the human tendency to equate appearance with character. In the eighteenth century, for instance, a face was believed to reflect its owner’s moral standing. “Virtue beautifies, and vice renders a man ugly,” Johann Kaspar Lavater, a respected theologian and physiognomist, wrote. Charles Darwin, in his autobiography, confessed that he was nearly barred from travelling aboard H.M.S. Beagle, because its captain, “an ardent disciple of Lavater . . . doubted whether anyone with my nose could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage.” In “Ugliness: A Cultural History,” the historian Gretchen Henderson describes the rise around then of “ugly clubs,” where homely bachelors could share their sour grapes and poke fun at the hegemony of beauty. Members of the Ugly Face Clubb, which operated in Liverpool, England, were accepted by vote, the main requirement being “something odd, remarkable, droll, or out of the way in his phiz.” One member had a “Flook Mouth.” Another had a “Monstrous Long Nose resembling a Speaking Trumpet.”

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