Wales has been branded Britain’s ‘ugliest’ place by a controversial expert on the economics of beauty.
US boffin Daniel Hamermesh claimed ugly people “migrate to places like Wales” when they want to settle down. Meanwhile, he said, London and the southeast of England “attract the good-looking” and “repel the bad-looking.”
Professor Hamermesh is an expert on pulchronomics – the financial impact of attractiveness – at the University of Texas. And given the awkward subject matter, he’s used to being criticised for what he has to say.
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But his comments about Wales, home of hotties like Catherine Zeta-Jones, 55, and Ioan Grufudd, 51, have certainly raised eyebrows.
He admitted: “People find it offensive. They say you shouldn’t be working on it. It’s like talking about income or your sex life. We don’t want to talk about it too much.”
But he added: “We’re thinking about it all the time. We do it constantly when we are walking down the street.”
The egghead insisted he is studying an important topic, given the huge impact looks have on the average person. Research has shown that attractive people earn more, are less likely to be convicted of crimes and even live longer.
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Prof. Hamermesh said: “During a life we suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. The outrageous fortune in this case is that some people are born and grow up to be pretty bad-looking.”
He claimed attractive people earn £145,000 more in a lifetime than their ugly pals. A beautiful woman is paid 4% more on average, while a handsome man makes three per cent more.
The academic has analysed data from the 1958 National Child Development study, which followed the lives of 17,415 people born in England, Scotland and Wales in a single week of March 1958.
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Teachers were asked to rate the children for attractiveness on a sliding scale when they reached the ages of seven and 11. They were then contacted with follow-up surveys about their general life satisfaction at ages 33, 41, 46 and 51.
Writing in the National Bureau of Economic Research, researchers said: “The Southeast attracted good-looking people, while less good-looking people moved elsewhere in the UK.”
The uglier people were more likely to be living in Scotland and Wales, they discovered. They also found the best-looking were most likely to have been economically successful.
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