Narcissism & wages

Metrosexuality pays. This new paper estimates that men who spend an extra 10 minutes a day grooming - shaving, showering, brushing their hair - get 6% higher weekly wages; the paper attempts to control for the possibility that better-paid men spend more time grooming anyway, and for obvious other influences upon wages.
This adds to the now-large literature which shows that good looks raise wages.
The standard view is that there are three possible reasons for this:
1. Customers prefer to deal with good-lookers. Students, for example, rate better-looking professors as better teachers, suggesting many academics are in the wrong job.
2. Good looks make people more confident, which increases productivity.
3. Good looks or good grooming send favourable signals to potential employers; if a man can’t be bothered to shave, an employer might wonder, what else can’t he be bothered to do?
I suspect, however, that there might be a fourth possibility.
Put it this way. If I were to spend more time grooming, it wouldn’t improve my appearance. You can’t polish a turd, and the only way I could spend 10 minutes brushing my hair would be by counting the nine minutes and fifty five seconds I‘d spend looking for it.
Spending more time on my appearance would, then, be pure narcissism.
But maybe narcissism pays.  Maybe people with a high sense of self-worth, who exaggerate their achievements and lack empathy with others do well in office politics. These sort of people would then both get higher pay and, because of their vanity, spend more time on their appearance. There’ll then be a positive correlation between grooming and wages.

Comments

[pommygranate]

Chris

what pays is an overbearing sense of your own self-importance, an indifference to spending time with your family, a love of political power-plays and an ability to seemingly speak fluently and intelligently without actually saying anything remotely coherent (a talent not to be sneezed at).

i speak from experience.

[Matt Munro]

Intersting that the marginal effect is larger for men. A lot of organisations enforce a dress code for men but not women, the (deeply sexist) argument being that women know what is/is not appropriate for the work environment. Having seen some of the crimes against fashion (usually perpetuated by men) on "dress down friday" I think they have a point.
I can see a couple of flaws with this research, one is the question of direction of effect. As one moves up an organisation/profession, appearance becomes increasingly important, as social interractions become more frequent, more public and more significant as determinants of earnings for the individual and the organisation. So perhaps higher earners spend more time grooming because they recognise that appearance has become more imporant. In other words extra grooming is an effect of higher earnings, rather than a cause.
An alternative explanation is that earnings tend to increase with age, and the older you are, the more time you potentially need to spend making yourself presentable !
Only have time to read the abstract so not sure if the above were controlled for in the research.

[reason]

It is a direct result of an economy where the fundamental valuable skill is salesmanship rather than craftmanship. That won't turn around until inequality disappears unfortunately.

[dearieme]

"You can’t polish a turd": oh yes you can. Take lactulose and they emerge ready sheened.