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Having ‘Hot Parents’ Could Make You Substantially Richer, New Study Finds
By Adam Hardy MONEY RESEARCH COLLECTIVE
People with “hot” parents earn over $2,300 a year more than those with average-looking parents.
If time is money, well, then so is beauty. And that’s especially the case when it comes to… your parents?
In fact, yes. By having biologically “hot” parents, a new study finds, you’re estimated to earn substantially more money than people with regular ‘rents — and far more than those with below-average-looking ones.
Economic research has long linked one’s conventional attractiveness to success in the workplace. (Pretty people are often paid more, get better jobs and get promoted more quickly.) But a working paper published recently by the National Bureau of Economic Research, or NBER, takes that one step further by quantifying exactly how much it pays to be part of a comely clan.
“In monetary terms,” the researchers wrote, having parents who are considered conventionally attractive “amounts to over $2,300 per annum, or an extra $106,000 of income over an average working life.”
The advantages of attractive parents are twofold, explains report co-author and NBER researcher Daniel Hamermesh, who’s studied the connection between earnings and attractiveness for decades.
First, in what he calls “direct” benefits of having beautiful parents: You will likely be more attractive yourself and “that enables you to earn more,” he tells Money in an email. Second, your attractive parents are likely to have earned more money due to their attractiveness — and thus have more money to give to you. Cha-ching.
‘Hot parents, rich kid?’
Hamermesh and co-author Anwen Zhang made the discovery by first demonstrating that the beauty of one’s parents is, in fact, passed down to their kids. They analyzed four datasets from the U.S. and China, in which people were shown pictures or videos of parents and their kid(s) and asked to rate their attractiveness.
Their analysis found that parents whose attractiveness was rated 10 percentage points above average had biological children who were considered to be 4 percentage points more attractive than average. The researchers then matched those findings with household income data to determine exactly how lucrative those good looks were.
Despite the paper’s playful subtitle — “Hot Parents, Rich Kid?” — Hamermesh refers to the findings as “depressing” because they lead to the perpetuation of inequality. While attractive people and their offspring tend to earn more money than average-looking folks, he says the opposite is also true.
“If your parents are both in the lowest third of looks, you will earn about $2,300 per year less than someone whose parents are both average,” Hamermesh says.
And, of course, that income gap could expand to more than $4,600 per year — or over $200,000 in average lifetime earnings — when comparing incomes between people with above-average looking parents to those with below-average looking parents.
“This cross-generational impact accounts for a substantial part of inherited inequality,” he says. “It is disturbing to find yet another characteristic that reduces opportunity across generations.”
In other words, racial and social inequalities are embedded in society’s perception of who is and isn’t beautiful. And if you don’t fit the mold, it may literally cost your family thousands of dollars.
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Adam Hardy is Money's lead data journalist. He writes news and feature stories aimed at helping everyday people manage their finances. He joined Money full-time in 2021 but has covered personal finance and economic topics since 2018. Previously, he worked for Forbes Advisor, The Penny Hoarder and Creative Loafing. In addition to those outlets, Adam’s work has been featured in a variety of local, national and international publications, including the Asia Times, Business Insider, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Yahoo! Finance, Nasdaq and several others. Adam graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the University of South Florida, where he studied magazine journalism and sociology. As a first-generation college graduate from a low-income, single-parent household, Adam understands firsthand the financial barriers that plague low-income Americans. His reporting aims to illuminate these issues. Since joining Money, Adam has already written over 300 articles, including a cover story on financial surveillance, a profile of Director Rohit Chopra of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and an investigation into flexible spending accounts, which found that workers forfeit billions of dollars annually through the workplace plans. He has also led data analysis on some of Money’s marquee rankings, including Best Places to Live, Best Places to Travel and Best Hospitals. He regularly contributes data reporting for Best Colleges, Best Banks and other lists as well. Adam also holds a multimedia storytelling certificate from Poynter’s News University and a data journalism certificate from the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) at the University of Missouri. In 2017, he received an English teaching certification from the University of Cambridge, which he utilized during his time in Seoul, South Korea. There, he taught students of all ages, from 5 to 65, and worked with North Korean refugees who were resettling in the area. Now, Adam lives in Saint Petersburg, Florida, with his pup Bambi. He is a card-carrying shuffleboard club member.