professor of economics at the university of texas and also her off beauty pace why attractive people are more successful professor and so good to have you on the show thank you very much for your time thank you for having me now it s been almost a decade since you published these groundbreaking book and there s been quite a lot of changes in this past decade beauty pageants are not as popular as they used to be. some voters in some western countries are no longer discriminating against ugly man running for president of prime minister so i wonder if people are as obsessed about the looks as they used to be when the you were writing your book it s very hard to say there s been very little studies where they have through the exactly the same thing let s say in the eighty s and right now one study for australia did exactly the same experiment in the mid eighty s and 2. 1000 and they found remarkably similar relationships between beauty and outcomes such as earnings in these 2 per