I am trying to sell my house at the moment in a particularly hot local housing market. The market isn’t the only thing that is hot. So is my agent. It turns out that her attractiveness could be very good news in terms of the price the house is sold for, but bad news in terms of how long it is on the market.
Tag: beauty (Page 1 of 2)
This week on Animal Kingdom, observe while the finely plumed CEO spreads his majestic tail in an attempt to attract a mate. This decorative display may be effective, but doing so requires aggressive investment policies. Is the effort worth exposing himself, and his shareholders, to so much risk? If we are quiet, we just might find out.
Several years ago I was chatting on an online dating site with a man who claimed to have a graduate degree. When I asked him what his degree was he revealed that in reality he had spent six years in community college repeatedly starting, but failing to complete, programs. His comment was, “I could have been a doctor by now!” To which I responded, “Good bye.”
What do Asian men and African American women have in common? Both are searching for love in very competitive marriage markets and, according to market forecasters, individuals in these groups are driving the growth in global demand for skin lightening creams.
Coincidence? I think not.
Women care about height and for many short men who are looking for a wife that means either settling for one who is less attractive or not finding one at all. There is a silver lining though: a short man who is able to establish himself economically could very well find that later in life he has a younger wife than his taller friends.
Employers may punish women who are obese with lower wages, but not all women are paying a penalty. Single women who are obese earn higher wages because they invest more in unobservable job skills. Why? Because heavy women have to plan on never having a husband to help pay the bills.
Try this as an exercise. Give yourself an honest score on a scale of one to ten that represents where you believe you sit in the distribution of physical appearance for your gender. So, for example, if you feel you are better looking than 70% of all men/women but not as good looking as the top 30% then you perceive yourself to be a 7. Now go onto an online dating site and do a search for people the same gender and age as yourself and take a look at the pictures of people who advertising themselves on that market. My guess is that if you look at 30 or more pictures and try to place yourself in that distribution in terms of physical appearance you will find that you had initially placed yourself much higher than you would have on this particular market.
Have you ever seen the French film Trop Belle Pour Toi? It’s the story of a married car dealer who has an affair with his very ordinary secretary. Doesn’t sound widely fascinating, I know, but the premise behind the film is that the wife is so beautiful that the husband (Gerard Depardue) constantly feels that he doesn’t deserve her. It is his sense of inadequacy that drives him into the arms of a significantly less attractive woman. She is happy to have him because while he is not exactly handsome, he is Gerard Depardue after all, and who could resist that man?
In December I raised the question: Can watching the market for sex toys predict a recession? In that post I suggested the increased demand for lubricants in 2009 might reflect the need for a cheap means to feel good in hard economic times and that, if this is the case, then perhaps lubricant sales figures could be used as a leading indicator of recessions. I said that that time that the real test of the validity of a lubricant leading indicator would be to observe if sales went limp in the recovery.