Do good looks get high school students good grades?
“Several studies in the literature have found that physical attractiveness is significantly related to labor market earnings for men and women. Thus, we were somewhat surprised to find that physical attractiveness was not the most important non-cognitive predictor of grades,” French said. “Instead grooming and personality were stronger predictors of academic success in high school for boys and girls, respectively.”
When you get beyond the classic lemonade example of capitalism, economics quickly reaches the Wittgensteinian point. Its where some extremely smart people are basically making things up as they go along based on a combination of rules weaved out of thin cloth, beliefs that border on religion and fantasies about how they imagine things are – fantasy economics is Ok as long as they’re good fantasies. In a scene from the movie A Beautiful Mind, Nash starts rattling off some probabilities as a few young women walk in. Maybe the only instance of economic history where pop culture tackles a question about labor, land, supply and demand where traditionally economists generally fear to tread. Things that are difficult to impossible to quantify – beauty, either male or female – have an effect on our economic lives. Contrary to the fantastical view that education, hard work and intelligence are the major factors. No, we learn that good grooming can affect our grades, which affects our college options, which affects our earnings and life style. One could understand the role of personality in earning power especially related to jobs that are sales/marketing oriented, but that is still an intangible difficult for economic models to account for.
* Physical attractiveness has a positive effect on GPA for both genders, but only when considered alone.
* For male students, grooming delivers the biggest overall effect on GPA.
* For female students, personality is positively related to GPA.
* The findings suggest that some degree of teacher bias is present in favor of, or against certain types of students.
* All else equal, Hispanics and African Americans have lower GPAs than whites and girls have higher GPAs than males.
Torture works sometimes — but it’s always wrong
But in the real world, the “ticking bomb” situation never arises. It is never the case that we know we can automatically avert mass slaughter by torturing someone. Reality is not that neat. Guilt and knowledge are not established in advance. Those whom we torture may or may not be planning nefarious deeds. As the British political scientist Henry Shue pointed out in his classic 1978 essay “Torture,” “Notice how unlike the circumstances of an actual choice about torture the philosopher’s example is. The proposed victim of our torture is not someone we suspect of planting the device: he is the perpetrator. He is not some pitiful psychotic making one last play for attention: He did plant the device. The wiring is not backwards, the mechanism is not jammed: the device will destroy the city if not deactivated.” Shue concludes that “The distance between the situations which must be concocted in order to have a plausible case of morally permissible torture and the situations which actually occur is, if anything, further reason why the existing prohibitions against torture should remain and should be strengthened by making torture an international crime.”
In round 10 or whatever we’re at now in the debate over torture, whether pain works or not is nothing more then a detractor. It turns the debate into whether you did insert your quarter and did you not in fact get your gum ball. If I’m tortured I’ll tell the torturer anything they want to hear. If that doesn’t work I’ll make stuff up and I have a pretty good tolerance for pain. The larger point is those doing the torture lose ground in the knowledge game. If you enjoy sadism, one can see where torture has its own rewards, but for the rest of us who do care about saving lives, the results of acting on things said under torture become a twisted broad game in which you spend a lot of moral capital, an entire nation’s in fact, trying to figure out whats real and what is not. I’m not the most imaginative person in the world and I can make up 5 terror plots in 5 minutes and do that every day. How much do you have in intelligence resources to verify every one of them. How much time and how many resources – manpower, hardware etc – has been wasted that could have been spent more productively. Torture produces intelligence nightmares – a multiple of variables where there was once a set. A set that most intelligence professionals can deal with. Remember factorials. Ones that you can do in your head run out quickly. Dick Cheney and other apostles of torture want us to believe they did the torture factorial to some large Nth degree and came out with all the variables and an answer to each. That thinking is more in line with medieval superstitions then genuine knowledge of and concern with national security. Then the torture advocates never bother with all the negatives consequences of torture. Maybe that’s yet another truth torture proponents would rather not deal with – for one, torture resulted in more recruitment of insurgents and attacks on coalition troops..
Never underestimate the value of quality undergarments, Bra deflects bullet aimed at woman
inkbluesky 