At work, as in life, attractive women get a lot of the breaks. Studies have shown that they are more likely to be promoted than their plain-Jane colleagues. Because people tend to project positive traits onto them, such as sensitivity and poise, they may also be at an advantage in job interviews. The only downside to hotness is having to fend off ghastly male colleagues; or so many people think. But research by two Israelis suggests otherwise.

Bradley Ruffle at Ben-Gurion University and Ze’ev Shtudiner at Ariel University Centre looked at what happens when job hunters include photos with theircurricula vitae, as is the norm in much of Europe and Asia. The pair sent fictional applications to over 2,500 real-life vacancies. For each job, they sent two very similar resumes, one with a photo, one without. Subjects had previously been graded for their attractiveness.

For men, the results were as expected. Hunks were more likely to be called for an interview if they included a photo. Ugly men were better off not including one. However, for women this was reversed. Attractive females were less likely to be offered an interview if they included a mugshot. When applying directly to a company (rather than through an agency) an attractive woman would need to send out 11 CVs on average before getting an interview; an equally qualified plain one just seven.

At first, Mr. Ruffle considered what he calls the “dumb-blonde hypothesis” that people assume beautiful women to be stupid. However, the photos had also been rated on how intelligent people thought each subject looked; there was no correlation between perceived intellect and beauty.

So the cause of the discrimination must lie elsewhere. Human resources departments tend to be staffed mostly by women. Indeed, in the Israeli study, 93％ of those tasked with selecting whom to invite for an interview were female. The researchers’ unavoidable and unpalatable conclusion is that old-fashioned jealousy led the women to discriminate against pretty candidates.

So should attractive women simply attach photos that make them look dowdy? No. Better, says Mr. Ruffle, to discourage the practice of including a photo altogether. Companies might even consider the anonymous model used in the Belgian public sector, where CVs do not even include the candidate’s name.

In his Odyssey, Homer immortalized the idea of resisting temptation by having the protagonist tied to the mast of his ship, to hear yet not succumb to the beautiful, dangerous songs of the Sirens. Researchers have long been intrigued as to whether this ability to avoid, or defer, gratification is related to outcomes in life. The best-known test is the “marshmallow” experiment, in which children who could refrain from eating the confection for 15 minutes were given a second one. Children who could not wait tended to have lower incomes and poorer health as adults. New research suggests that kids who are unable to delay rewards are also more likely to become criminals later.

Recently, four researchers used data from a Swedish survey in which more than 13,000 children aged 13 were asked whether they would prefer to receive $140 now or $1,400 in five years’ time. About four-fifths of them said they were prepared to wait.

Unlike previous researchers, the authors were able to track all the children and account for their parental background and cognitive ability. They found that the 13-year-olds who wanted the smaller sum of money at once were 32％ more likely to be convicted of a crime during the next 18 years than those children who said they would rather wait for the bigger reward. Individuals who are impatient, they believe, prefer instant benefits and are therefore less likely to be deterred by potential punishments.

But those who fret that a person’s criminal path is set already as a teenager should not despair. The four researchers offer a remedy. When the respondents’ education was included in the analysis, they found that higher educational attainment was linked to a preference for delayed gratification.

Educational attainment and patience are related either because patience helps students to do better or because schooling makes people more likely to postpone rewards. Fortunately, there is evidence in support of the latter theory. Francisco Perez-Arce of the RAND Corporation, a think-tank, interviewed around 2,000 applicants for Mexican universities. The students had similar credentials but some obtained admission through a lottery to a university that did not charge tuition fees, whereas the rest had to apply elsewhere. As a result, a higher proportion of lottery-winners than losers went to college. After a year, Mr. Perez-Arce found, the lottery-winners were more patient than the losers. Since the process was random, he concluded that higher education can make people place more weight on the future.

London’s economy—more dependent than most regions on hospitality and tourism—suffered as a result of the restrictions imposed in November by the government to curb the spread of Covid-19. Yet the price of the average house in the capital was almost 10％ higher than a year earlier and topped the £500,000 level for the first time. One London borough—Kensington and Chelsea—had house price inflation of 28.6％, the sort of increase normally associated with a booming economy rather than one that contracted by 2.6％ on the month.

Going into the pandemic, demand for residential property was strong, in part due to competition among mortgage providers that was keeping the cost of home loans low. Also, the market then went into hibernation during the first lockdown, which coincided with the period when longer days and warmer weather normally lead to more people looking to move home. That pent-up demand was then unleashed as restrictions were lifted in the middle of last year.

The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, then gave house prices additionalpepby announcing in July that stamp duty on residential property purchases up to £500,000 would be temporarily scrapped until 31 March 2021. For those who beat the deadline, there are considerable savings to be made: £15,000 on a £500,000 purchase. That is likely to have proved quite an incentive, especially in regions where prices are higher. Inner London demand also seems to have been boosted by overseas investors seeking to buy before higher taxes for non-UK residents kick in.

There is some evidence that Covid-19 and an increase in working from home has resulted in people looking for bigger homes with a garden. The cost of the average detached home rose by 8.5％ in the year to November, while flats and maisonettes went up by 5.4％ over the same period.

Will the boom end in a crash, of the sort seen in the early 1990s? Probably not, provided the vaccine programme goes as planned and the economy starts to recover in the spring. Unlike in the early 1990s, interest rates are at rock-bottom levels and will stay there.

There are many reasons for the sorry state of commercial aviation in America. But I come to you as a technology columnist to tell you that technology, too, has failed you. People in Silicon Valley pride themselves on their capacity toupendtraditional industries. Uber defeated taxi cartels. Airbnb made getting a room cheaper and more accessible. Streaming services are undoing the cable business. Yet the airline industry has not just stubbornly resisted innovation to improve customer service—in many ways, technology has only fueled the industry’s race to the bottom.

“The airline industry has been on a steady downward trajectory when it comes to customer service for nearly 40 years.” said Henry H. Harteveldt. He noted that American carriers were improving on some metrics—on-time service is up, baggage loss is down and prices keep getting better. And what keeps deteriorating are comfort and quality of service for low-end passengers, he added.

Airlines keep tacking on separate fees for amenities we used to consider part of the flight. And customers keep going along with it. “Consumers have shown that they’re willing to put up with an awful lot, including lack of amenities, mediocre or worse customer service and more to save money,” Harteveldt said. “And the airline industry has evolved to meet that desire for cheap fares.” Part of the problem is how we buy tickets today. The whole system is mercilessly transactional. Customer service—that is, how the airline treats you—isn’t often part of the transaction. As a result, airlines have little incentive to reform themselves.

Can technology improve how airlines work? Some people have ideas for how that may happen. One of them is obvious and sensible: customer reviews. Last year Trip Advisor began rating airlines. Its new rankings, released this week, show that overall, airlines get an average rating of 3.7 out of 5 from customers. That is small potatoes, though. A bigger disruption would come from altering how we pay for airfares. In the same way that Netflix changed the DVD business by charging a monthly fee, some consultants argue that a membership fee could radically improve flying. Your only technological hope for better service is your smart-phone camera and the viral push of social networks.

A truly informed diner would choose a restaurant based on the quality of the menu and the chef’s experience. The discerning investor would decide which company to back after studying the business plan and meeting the founders. In reality, people often copy the choices of others. Diners pick the crowded restaurant over the empty one. Investors go with the company that already has multiple backers. Such bandwagon effects are not necessarily irrational. Often, the buyer knows less about a product than the seller; the collective wisdom of the crowd can correct for such “asymmetric information”.

Scholars are now asking whether herd behavior also prevails in labor markets. To find out, Kory Kroft of the University of Toronto devised an experiment in which they applied for 3,000 clerical, administrative, sales and customer-service jobs advertised online by submitting 12,000 fictitious CVs. The submissions were designed so that applicants with similar backgrounds, education and experience went for the same job. The only difference was how long the applicant had been jobless, a period that ranged from no time at all to as much as 36 months.

They found that the odds of an applicant being called back by an employer declined steadily as the duration of unemployment rose, from 7.4％ after one month without work down to 4-5％ at the eight-month mark, where the call-back rate stabilized.

These results, the authors say, cannot be because employers found some qualitative flaw in the longer-term unemployed that was hidden from outsiders, since the applicants were similar in other respects. Another explanation for long-term unemployment—that people make less effort to find work as their time out of the labor force lengthens—is also not applicable here.

A third possibility is that employers equate lengthening unemployment with atrophying skills and thus falling productivity. But this should be true whether the economy is booming or in recession. The decline in call-back rates was much more pronounced in cities with tight labour markets; call-back rates changed relatively little when higher unemployment prevailed locally. From this, the authors infer that employers are more likely to overlook a long period of unemployment if overall economic conditions are stacked against candidates.

These results strongly suggest that long-term unemployment is at least partly self-fulfilling. Like patrons who avoid restaurants purely because they are empty, employers were reluctant to hire someone other employers didn’t want.

Organizational psychologists Timothy Judge and Beth Livingston found that men who reported holding traditional views (that is, that women belong in the home, while men earn the money) earned more for doing the same kind of work as men who held more egalitarian views. The reverse was true for women, to a much smaller degree. The effect was most obvious, however, when researchers compared women’s salaries to those of men, while also taking into account their gender-role biases. Men with traditional attitudes made 71％ more than women with traditional attitudes, while egalitarian-minded men made just 7％ more than their female counterparts.

“What really surprised us was the magnitude of the difference,” says Judge. “We suspected that ’traditional’ gender-role attitudes would work against women. What surprised us was the degree to which that effect held, even when you start controlling for a variable that you think would make the effect go away, like how many kids you have, or what type of occupation.” When the researchers controlled for education, intelligence, occupation, hours worked and even what region they lived in the United States, Judge found that “none of those really made the effect go away.”

Why the gap persists, Judge thinks it might be have something to do with the different ways men and women sign onto new jobs. Women on the whole are less effective at negotiating salaries than men, and they tend to be less aggressive about asking for bigger salaries, or they accept employers’ offers without negotiating at all. And Judge suspects that tradition-bound women may be even worse at it than their more egalitarian counterparts: “I would suppose that egalitarian women are not as susceptible to settling for less in the negotiating process,” he says.

As for those money-making traditionally minded men, Judge theorizes that if they believe they are the family’s primary breadwinner, they may show greater dedication to career and are perhaps more aggressive than other men in terms of salary negotiation.

Another factor could be bias on the part of the employer. “We’re learning that more and more aspects of organizational psychology are operating somewhat subconsciously,” says Judge. “It may be that employers are more likely to take advantage of traditional gender-role women.” We can learn a lot about someone based on a very short acquaintance; perhaps employers make judgments about a prospective employee’s gender attitudes, on the basis of things like a more conservative style of dress or hairstyle and reserved manners, Judge says.

Judge thinks there’s hope for future generations of workers: “Older people do have more traditional views but each year the gap between those that hold traditional views, and those that believe men and women are equal is narrowing. One would be hopeful that for new entrants into the workforce, this won’t be as much an effect.”