Our latest podcast is called “Reasons to Not Be Ugly.” (You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above. You can also read the transcript, which includes credits for the music you’ll hear in the episode.)

This episode takes a look at the “beauty premium” and, conversely, the downside of ugly. Do cuter babies get more attention? Are good-looking students graded more charitably? How do ugly people fare in the marriage and labor markets?

Our guide is Daniel Hamermesh, an economist at the University of Texas and a frequent contributor to this blog. Hamermesh talks to Stephen Dubner about his voluminous research on the topic, including his book Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful . Hamermesh has also talked about beauty — and his own looks — on The Daily Show. You can probably guess how that worked out.

As Hamermesh tells us, bad looks can cost a person a couple hundred thousand dollars in lost wages over a lifetime. But, he says, there is one profession in which ugly people seem to do better:

HAMERMESH: Robbers … and it makes sense, because you can do better as an armed robber if you don’t have to shoot people you can just scare them by being ugly as hell.

You’ll hear from Erdal Tekin, an economist at Georgia State University and co-author, with Naci Mocan, of a paper called “Ugly Criminals” (abstract; PDF), which links a person’s looks to his propensity for crime. And economist Dave Berri, also a contributor to this blog, talks about how an NFL quarterback’s looks affect his payday.



Finally, you’ll hear cameos from radio hosts Robert Siegel (All Things Considered), Brooke Gladstone (On The Media), Jad Abumrad (Radiolab), and Kai Ryssdal (Marketplace), all of whom have more than just “faces for radio,” in our humble opinion.