

The Myth of Wealthy Men and Beautiful Women - pmcpinto
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/07/the-myth-of-buying-beauty/374414/?single_page=true

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thaumasiotes
> “Women spend a lot more time trying to look good than men do,” McClintock
> said. “That creates a lot of mess in this data. If you don’t take that into
> account then you actually see there’s a lot of these guys who are partnered
> with women who are better looking than them, which is just because, on
> average, women are better looking. Men are partnering 'up' in
> attractiveness. And men earn more than women—we’ve got that 70-percent wage
> gap—so women marry 'up' in income. You’ve got to take these things into
> account before concluding that women are trading beauty for money.”

In other news, it turns out that after you control for height, tall men don't
earn any more than short men do.

~~~
gwern
Another study undermined by the fallacy of controlling for an intermediate
variable.

Fulltext:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/zn87fm4mmzkicjs/2014-mcclintock.pd...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/zn87fm4mmzkicjs/2014-mcclintock.pdf)
/ [http://sci-
hub.bz/3e46d909c73b1bf06a440eb0515c8c7b/mcclintoc...](http://sci-
hub.bz/3e46d909c73b1bf06a440eb0515c8c7b/mcclintock2014.pdf) "Beauty and
Status: The Illusion of Exchange in Partner Selection?", McClintock 2014

Table 3, pg 14: all the correlations are positive, but that also includes the
female attractiveness / male SES bivariate correlations, exactly as common
wisdom has it - beautiful women do tend to marry rich men.

(Arguments about matching vs exchange are causal arguments, and 'controlling'
is implicitly making some very strong and implausible assumptions.)

