Erotic capital and happiness

If you have a research paper that investigates the correlation between self-reported attractiveness and subjective wellbeing (or happiness), how do you ensure that it gets read by more people? If you're the author of this 2017 article published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility (sorry, I don't see an ungated version online), you refer to attractiveness as 'erotic capital'. For the record, the author was Felix Requena (University of Malaga).

The idea of referring to attractiveness as a form of capital isn't a crazy idea. In economics, capital is a factor of production that is used to produce other goods and services. Requena takes a Bourdieuian view of capital, but extends it:

Like social capital, erotic capital focuses on the benefits received by individuals who participate in groups and in the deliberate construction of sociability in order to create resources that generate relational and other benefits, such as power or influence...

People constantly use the different types of power available to them to obtain the resources they desire... According to their circumstances and particular assets, some use economic power, others use acquired skills and abilities (human capital), others their social relations (social capital), and others use erotic power (beauty or appeal). Like other types of capital, erotic capital serves as another way to influence the social environment.

In that case, attractiveness is a form of capital because it can be used to produce things of value to the person through the power to influence the social environment. Others may quibble as to whether this is simply an extension of human or social capital, or whether it sits between those two types of capital, but such definitional issues are not important. The real question that the article addresses is the relationship of erotic capital to happiness.

Requena uses data from the Spanish General Social Survey in 2013, which had a sample size of a bit more than 5000 people. Erotic capital is self-reported attractiveness on a 0-10 scale. Happiness is measured on a 0-6 scale. Controlling for gender, income (economic capital), education (human capital), and the size of a person's social network (social capital), he finds that:

For men and women, erotic capital ranked first (men: 0.104, women: 0.105), followed by social capital (men: 0.017, women: 0.018), human capital (men: 0.014, women: 0.014) and economic capital (men: 0.001, women: 0.0001). Contrary to what we predicted in H2, the analysis showed no significant differences in the importance of erotic capital for men and women.

In other words, erotic capital had the strongest correlation with happiness, of the four capitals included in the regression analysis. Of course, other than the correlation vs. causation issue, there is a problem of multicollinearity in this analysis. It has previously been established that more attractive people earn more (see for example here, or my book review of Daniel Hamermesh's excellent book Beauty Pays), and that attractiveness is related to educational choices (see here). So, it isn't clear that Requena's measure of erotic capital isn't also picking up some of the variation in happiness that is actually due to differences in economic capital or human capital. This article is far from the last word on attractiveness and happiness.

Finally, if you're reading the article, I would recommend ignoring all of the analysis related to self-reported importance of the different types of capital to success in life, and their relationship to happiness. I don't think it tells us what the author thinks it does, and it certainly doesn't contribute anything to our understanding of the relationship between attractiveness and happiness.