7 ms·

The economics of thinness

24 points by nindalf 4y ago

thedailymail 4y ago
https://archive.md/owhPe https://archive.md/owhPe
password11 4y ago
Paywalled, but > It is economically rational for ambitious women to try as hard as possible to be thin It is economically rational for all ambitious people to try as hard as possible to fit into the accepted standard of attractiveness, including weight. This is just a special case. Another point, I don't think most people find hyper-thinness attractive. In fact being underweight is far worse for your health (HR=~1.6) than overweight is (HR=~1.05). I hope notions of attractiveness in Western societies can normalize on just being healthy.
- runnerup 4y ago
  > I hope notions of attractiveness in Western societies can normalize on just being healthy. I believe this is happening, particularly noticeable for American women. "Fit/Athletic" is in, "skinny" is out. My wife has noticed that high-status/high-income American women tend to be much more athletic than high-status women in Europe and elsewhere, where they tend to be thin. In both cases, genetically inherited attractiveness also dominates (e.g. height for men, facial structure, etc). > Another point, I don't think most people find hyper-thinness attractive. Depends on the society. In Asia it's still by far the most popular aesthetic, especially for women.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - password11 4y ago
    Thanks for addressing my edit -- > Depends on the society. In Asia it's still by far the most popular aesthetic, especially for women. I guess I outed myself as an American. I'm not sure I want to compare attractiveness standards with other cultures. I'm ok to take a hedonistic view here: if adhering to super-thin attractiveness standards causes women suffering or shortens their lives (which it does) then the standards are bad and I hope people in those countries reevaluate their standards.
  - danjoredd 4y ago
    I think a lot of that has to do with perception in media as well. I remember as a kid, it seemed that almost every male protagonist in coming of age stories had a tomboy girlfriend who was very athletic. Recently I had a discussion with some friends on childhood TV crushes, and most of them mentioned characters that fit the "fit" tomboy archetype. Sure, it's anecdotal. Still, I wonder how much media people see in childhood influences what people view as attractive later in life?
  - stuckinhell 4y ago
    I'd like to add Fit/Athletic is only "in" for a certain class of affluent liberal white women.
    - runnerup 4y ago
      Pretty much any woman under 40 in the C-suite or Big-3 consulting regardless of their political orientation. Which is very relevant to an article discussing the ROI of body type.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    > Depends on the society. In Asia it's still by far the most popular aesthetic, especially for women. This would surprise me. Being fit and muscular is a sign that you are wealthy enough to spend time exercising and researching how to exercise, and/or have a trainer. Being able to control your diet is cool, but what is even cooler is being able to go for an 8K run and then eating whatever you want.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > I don't think most people find hyper-thinness attractive I remember hearing this years ago, and from my observations, it appears to generally be true in the US: Men prefer women heavier than women think they do, and women prefer men lighter than men think they do.
- anthuswilliams 4y ago
  The article seems pretty clearly to indicate that this is far from "just a special case". It cites data that show that the rewards to thin women relative to fat ones far outpace the differences in reward for men on their own axes of attractiveness.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- cm2012 4y ago
  Yep, and I believe the life expectancy change for just being overweight is very small, weight doesn't start really affecting expectancy until you hit the Obese mark.
- abdullahkhalids 4y ago
  The crucial statistics/claims in the article are the following > Myriad studies find that overweight or obese women are paid less than their thinner peers while there is little difference in wages between obese men and men in the medically defined “normal” range. > The upper estimates of the wage premium for a women being thin are so significant that she might find it almost as valuable to lose weight as she would to gain additional education. The wage premium for getting a master’s degree is around 18%, only 1.8 times the premium a fat women could, in theory, earn by losing around 65lbs—roughly the amount that a moderately obese women of average height would have to lose to be in the medically defined “normal” range. Which is used to support the conclusion that it is "economically rational for women to lose weight".
xyzzy4747 4y ago
Poor people may struggle to afford healthy foods. They may reach for processed or fast foods because they lack the time to prepare meals at home or have less time to exercise because low-wage jobs often involve working long shifts and can be less flexible than those performed by the “laptop class”. Or because low income is often a function of limited education, perhaps, so goes the thinking, that lack of education extends to a lack of knowledge about how to maintain a healthy weight. Interesting how the author never mentions IQ as a possibility. Not all people are mentally equal despite having access to the same information via the Internet (assuming they can read and write).
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  No publication is bold enough to suggest IQ is anything but a scam
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > Not all people are mentally equal despite having access to the same information This is true, but I see no reason to think that the distribution of intelligence changes much through the different income brackets.
  - qsort 4y ago
    I apologize in advance if what follows is written badly, but the topic is touchy and I have to write defensively. Assuming IQ measures what we call intelligence (which is a big assumption on which I have no particular position), it would stand to reason that high-IQ people would move up the income bracket scale at a higher rate than they would move down and vice-versa. If that is true, then the eigenvector of the transition matrix would skew towards the top bracket. I am not claiming that this is true, but only that the chain of reasoning holds, and therefore this qualifies as a self-consistent, falsifiable statement.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      > it would stand to reason that high-IQ people would move up the income bracket scale at a higher rate than they would move down and vice-versa. How does that stand to reason? We're both speculating here, but it seems to me for that to be true, we'd have to be living in a meritocracy of some sort. And we're not. Subjectively, I've known lots of people all up and down the income spectrum, and I've never noticed that wealthier people tend to be smarter or that poorer people tend to be dumber. Broadly, it seems to be the same mix no matter what. What does seem to be broadly true is that you can predict a person's wealth level based on their parent's wealth level.
sublinear 4y ago
I'm genuinely not trying to be a contrarian here, but I was a lot thinner when I was broke. I was younger too though. My overall health according to doctors, and attractiveness according to peers seems to be about the same. Wealth went up dramatically between 20 and 30 though. It seems like I'm just not wealthy enough for it to make a difference. I was pretty damn broke hah.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  My experience is much the same. I attributed it to reaching middle age rather than wealth, but if I'm perfectly honest, it probably has more to do with spending much more time sitting at a desk.
- robocat 4y ago
  > It seems like I'm just not wealthy enough for it to make a difference Perhaps money makes less difference than the stereotypes suggest (although must be non-linear since usually can’t go below zero and the median minimum required would be something livable?) From https://news.yahoo.com/short-kings-rise-grind-study-225908780.html https://news.yahoo.com/short-kings-rise-grind-study-22590878... The study shows that, on average, men who are 5 feet 6 inches need to make an additional $175,000 annually to be as desirable as men who are almost 6 feet
  - sublinear 4y ago
    Huh? The study is from 2006 and then the rest is just social media conjecture. According to the table, the ability for women 5'8" or taller to compensate for their apparent undesirability in the table is "not feasible"? What the hell? Wow this has to be describing another species. I'm over 6 feet tall and prefer women who are taller than average which just... makes sense? I rarely see couples with such a dramatic height difference.
    - robocat 4y ago
      Yeah- I agree - but it was the first link I found. I had read more reliable information saying something similar (although not the extreme numbers they came up with if I recall correctly). I have another conjecture based on my anecdotal experience: women get skinny to compete against other women and it is other women that actually care about extreme skinniness. Many men don’t seem to care that much for extreme skinniness and many other men often like more voluptuousness for their pornographic ideals. I would reference an article that seems to back up this idea, but the article was even more rubbishy than the link above!
toolz 4y ago
> Because being very obese comes with elevated health risks, some might argue it is not a problem that there are incentives for women to lose weight. But this relies on two wobbly pillars of logic. > First, that people’s weight really is within their control. And second, that shame is an effective motivator. This first point is absurd and I keep seeing it pop up in more respectable contexts and I don't understand the purpose here of ignoring widely understood and deeply established facts about weight gain and weight loss. It is physically impossible to gain organic mass if you don't consume a calorie surplus. Likewise it is physically impossible to maintain organic mass if you consume at a calorie deficit. Is it common for people to be force-fed as an adult? If not, then am I being obtuse by suggesting these things are absolutely within an adults control?
- goalieca 4y ago
  Many people I know consider themselves victims when it comes to food consumption.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    I am fortunate that I am not forced to buy chips, ice cream, ranch dressing, cookies, bagels, and other crap from the grocery store. Stick to the edge of the grocery store and walk out with only produce and dairy, and lentils if you can make it to that aisle without being distracted.
    - bena 4y ago
      You can get plenty obese without touching "chips, ice cream, ranch dressing, cookies, bagels, and other crap". Hell, your username is a reference to one of the worst things you can drink that is considered "healthy". Fruit juice is essentially sugar in a cup. Yeah, it comes from a fruit, but it's closer to eating an orchard, not a orange. And let's not ignore the fact that your diet could be nothing but your "crap" and you could still lose weight. Because the most important number is the number of calories you are consuming compared to the number you expend. Not to mention, I doubt your diet consists solely of milky lentils and carrots.
robocat 4y ago
Another confounding factor is that people who compete to win games of money tend to also compete to win games of attractiveness. The skills to push yourself for financial gains seem to cross over to the skills to control eating and push fitness regimes.
prirun 4y ago
I am still friends with my high-school computer science teacher, who is now probably 75 or so. In the last 18 months he has lost 70 lbs, from 240 to 170. How? He is diabetic and got a continuous glucose monitor. Before every meal, he'd check his sugar. If it was 150 or higher, he skipped that meal. If it was lower than 150, he'd eat, but half his usual portion and he tried to limit carbs. No exercise program. He lost 70 lbs in 18 months, has extremely cut his insulin use (with his doctor's blessing), and his goal is to get off all his diabetes medicine, again with his doctor's blessing. She said he will need to keep insulin on him in case his sugar spikes over 280, which can happen in diabetics no matter what they are eating, so she says. Just posting this as a possible aid to people who do not believe they can lose weight.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- xracy 4y ago
  The plural of Anecdote is not "data". Different peoples metabolisms and hormones are different. All of those mean that your High School Teacher's scenario, is really only advice for your high school teacher to lose weight. Other people's mileage will likely vary greatly.
tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago
In general, the answer for all people who are ambitious is "yes". 1. Weight biases in hiring and raises. 2. Social biases in friendship formation and retention. 3. More energy when healthy and physically fit, aiding productivity.
foogazi 4y ago
Lots of good takes in the comments. I need to lose 20 - 30 pounds, and my info is a bit outdated. What resources do you recommend to read?

24 points by nindalf 4y ago

https://archive.md/owhPe https://archive.md/owhPe

Paywalled, but > It is economically rational for ambitious women to try as hard as possible to be thin It is economically rational for all ambitious people to try as hard as possible to fit into the accepted standard of attractiveness, including weight. This is just a special case. Another point, I don't think most people find hyper-thinness attractive. In fact being underweight is far worse for your health (HR=~1.6) than overweight is (HR=~1.05). I hope notions of attractiveness in Western societies can normalize on just being healthy.

runnerup 4y ago
> I hope notions of attractiveness in Western societies can normalize on just being healthy. I believe this is happening, particularly noticeable for American women. "Fit/Athletic" is in, "skinny" is out. My wife has noticed that high-status/high-income American women tend to be much more athletic than high-status women in Europe and elsewhere, where they tend to be thin. In both cases, genetically inherited attractiveness also dominates (e.g. height for men, facial structure, etc). > Another point, I don't think most people find hyper-thinness attractive. Depends on the society. In Asia it's still by far the most popular aesthetic, especially for women.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- password11 4y ago
  Thanks for addressing my edit -- > Depends on the society. In Asia it's still by far the most popular aesthetic, especially for women. I guess I outed myself as an American. I'm not sure I want to compare attractiveness standards with other cultures. I'm ok to take a hedonistic view here: if adhering to super-thin attractiveness standards causes women suffering or shortens their lives (which it does) then the standards are bad and I hope people in those countries reevaluate their standards.
- danjoredd 4y ago
  I think a lot of that has to do with perception in media as well. I remember as a kid, it seemed that almost every male protagonist in coming of age stories had a tomboy girlfriend who was very athletic. Recently I had a discussion with some friends on childhood TV crushes, and most of them mentioned characters that fit the "fit" tomboy archetype. Sure, it's anecdotal. Still, I wonder how much media people see in childhood influences what people view as attractive later in life?
- stuckinhell 4y ago
  I'd like to add Fit/Athletic is only "in" for a certain class of affluent liberal white women.
  - runnerup 4y ago
    Pretty much any woman under 40 in the C-suite or Big-3 consulting regardless of their political orientation. Which is very relevant to an article discussing the ROI of body type.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  > Depends on the society. In Asia it's still by far the most popular aesthetic, especially for women. This would surprise me. Being fit and muscular is a sign that you are wealthy enough to spend time exercising and researching how to exercise, and/or have a trainer. Being able to control your diet is cool, but what is even cooler is being able to go for an 8K run and then eating whatever you want.
JohnFen 4y ago
> I don't think most people find hyper-thinness attractive I remember hearing this years ago, and from my observations, it appears to generally be true in the US: Men prefer women heavier than women think they do, and women prefer men lighter than men think they do.
anthuswilliams 4y ago
The article seems pretty clearly to indicate that this is far from "just a special case". It cites data that show that the rewards to thin women relative to fat ones far outpace the differences in reward for men on their own axes of attractiveness.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
cm2012 4y ago
Yep, and I believe the life expectancy change for just being overweight is very small, weight doesn't start really affecting expectancy until you hit the Obese mark.
abdullahkhalids 4y ago
The crucial statistics/claims in the article are the following > Myriad studies find that overweight or obese women are paid less than their thinner peers while there is little difference in wages between obese men and men in the medically defined “normal” range. > The upper estimates of the wage premium for a women being thin are so significant that she might find it almost as valuable to lose weight as she would to gain additional education. The wage premium for getting a master’s degree is around 18%, only 1.8 times the premium a fat women could, in theory, earn by losing around 65lbs—roughly the amount that a moderately obese women of average height would have to lose to be in the medically defined “normal” range. Which is used to support the conclusion that it is "economically rational for women to lose weight".

xyzzy4747 4y ago

Poor people may struggle to afford healthy foods. They may reach for processed or fast foods because they lack the time to prepare meals at home or have less time to exercise because low-wage jobs often involve working long shifts and can be less flexible than those performed by the “laptop class”. Or because low income is often a function of limited education, perhaps, so goes the thinking, that lack of education extends to a lack of knowledge about how to maintain a healthy weight. Interesting how the author never mentions IQ as a possibility. Not all people are mentally equal despite having access to the same information via the Internet (assuming they can read and write).

nonethewiser 4y ago
No publication is bold enough to suggest IQ is anything but a scam
JohnFen 4y ago
> Not all people are mentally equal despite having access to the same information This is true, but I see no reason to think that the distribution of intelligence changes much through the different income brackets.
- qsort 4y ago
  I apologize in advance if what follows is written badly, but the topic is touchy and I have to write defensively. Assuming IQ measures what we call intelligence (which is a big assumption on which I have no particular position), it would stand to reason that high-IQ people would move up the income bracket scale at a higher rate than they would move down and vice-versa. If that is true, then the eigenvector of the transition matrix would skew towards the top bracket. I am not claiming that this is true, but only that the chain of reasoning holds, and therefore this qualifies as a self-consistent, falsifiable statement.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    > it would stand to reason that high-IQ people would move up the income bracket scale at a higher rate than they would move down and vice-versa. How does that stand to reason? We're both speculating here, but it seems to me for that to be true, we'd have to be living in a meritocracy of some sort. And we're not. Subjectively, I've known lots of people all up and down the income spectrum, and I've never noticed that wealthier people tend to be smarter or that poorer people tend to be dumber. Broadly, it seems to be the same mix no matter what. What does seem to be broadly true is that you can predict a person's wealth level based on their parent's wealth level.

sublinear 4y ago

I'm genuinely not trying to be a contrarian here, but I was a lot thinner when I was broke. I was younger too though. My overall health according to doctors, and attractiveness according to peers seems to be about the same. Wealth went up dramatically between 20 and 30 though. It seems like I'm just not wealthy enough for it to make a difference. I was pretty damn broke hah.

JohnFen 4y ago
My experience is much the same. I attributed it to reaching middle age rather than wealth, but if I'm perfectly honest, it probably has more to do with spending much more time sitting at a desk.
robocat 4y ago
> It seems like I'm just not wealthy enough for it to make a difference Perhaps money makes less difference than the stereotypes suggest (although must be non-linear since usually can’t go below zero and the median minimum required would be something livable?) From https://news.yahoo.com/short-kings-rise-grind-study-225908780.html https://news.yahoo.com/short-kings-rise-grind-study-22590878... The study shows that, on average, men who are 5 feet 6 inches need to make an additional $175,000 annually to be as desirable as men who are almost 6 feet
- sublinear 4y ago
  Huh? The study is from 2006 and then the rest is just social media conjecture. According to the table, the ability for women 5'8" or taller to compensate for their apparent undesirability in the table is "not feasible"? What the hell? Wow this has to be describing another species. I'm over 6 feet tall and prefer women who are taller than average which just... makes sense? I rarely see couples with such a dramatic height difference.
  - robocat 4y ago
    Yeah- I agree - but it was the first link I found. I had read more reliable information saying something similar (although not the extreme numbers they came up with if I recall correctly). I have another conjecture based on my anecdotal experience: women get skinny to compete against other women and it is other women that actually care about extreme skinniness. Many men don’t seem to care that much for extreme skinniness and many other men often like more voluptuousness for their pornographic ideals. I would reference an article that seems to back up this idea, but the article was even more rubbishy than the link above!

toolz 4y ago

> Because being very obese comes with elevated health risks, some might argue it is not a problem that there are incentives for women to lose weight. But this relies on two wobbly pillars of logic. > First, that people’s weight really is within their control. And second, that shame is an effective motivator. This first point is absurd and I keep seeing it pop up in more respectable contexts and I don't understand the purpose here of ignoring widely understood and deeply established facts about weight gain and weight loss. It is physically impossible to gain organic mass if you don't consume a calorie surplus. Likewise it is physically impossible to maintain organic mass if you consume at a calorie deficit. Is it common for people to be force-fed as an adult? If not, then am I being obtuse by suggesting these things are absolutely within an adults control?

goalieca 4y ago
Many people I know consider themselves victims when it comes to food consumption.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  I am fortunate that I am not forced to buy chips, ice cream, ranch dressing, cookies, bagels, and other crap from the grocery store. Stick to the edge of the grocery store and walk out with only produce and dairy, and lentils if you can make it to that aisle without being distracted.
  - bena 4y ago
    You can get plenty obese without touching "chips, ice cream, ranch dressing, cookies, bagels, and other crap". Hell, your username is a reference to one of the worst things you can drink that is considered "healthy". Fruit juice is essentially sugar in a cup. Yeah, it comes from a fruit, but it's closer to eating an orchard, not a orange. And let's not ignore the fact that your diet could be nothing but your "crap" and you could still lose weight. Because the most important number is the number of calories you are consuming compared to the number you expend. Not to mention, I doubt your diet consists solely of milky lentils and carrots.

robocat 4y ago

Another confounding factor is that people who compete to win games of money tend to also compete to win games of attractiveness. The skills to push yourself for financial gains seem to cross over to the skills to control eating and push fitness regimes.

prirun 4y ago

I am still friends with my high-school computer science teacher, who is now probably 75 or so. In the last 18 months he has lost 70 lbs, from 240 to 170. How? He is diabetic and got a continuous glucose monitor. Before every meal, he'd check his sugar. If it was 150 or higher, he skipped that meal. If it was lower than 150, he'd eat, but half his usual portion and he tried to limit carbs. No exercise program. He lost 70 lbs in 18 months, has extremely cut his insulin use (with his doctor's blessing), and his goal is to get off all his diabetes medicine, again with his doctor's blessing. She said he will need to keep insulin on him in case his sugar spikes over 280, which can happen in diabetics no matter what they are eating, so she says. Just posting this as a possible aid to people who do not believe they can lose weight.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
xracy 4y ago
The plural of Anecdote is not "data". Different peoples metabolisms and hormones are different. All of those mean that your High School Teacher's scenario, is really only advice for your high school teacher to lose weight. Other people's mileage will likely vary greatly.

tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago

In general, the answer for all people who are ambitious is "yes". 1. Weight biases in hiring and raises. 2. Social biases in friendship formation and retention. 3. More energy when healthy and physically fit, aiding productivity.

foogazi 4y ago

Lots of good takes in the comments. I need to lose 20 - 30 pounds, and my info is a bit outdated. What resources do you recommend to read?