A new academic paper claims to have identified a correlation between the body-mass index of post-Soviet officials and political corruption. Some people find it amusing, yet this kind of research is not only misguided, but also harmful.
Last month, an academic journal, Economics of Transition and Institutional Change, published an article “Obesity of politicians and corruption in post‐Soviet countries”. The article claims to identify a useful relationship between the body-mass index of politicians in post-Soviet states and political corruption. It uses a computer vision algorithm to identify the BMI of cabinet ministers in 15 post-Soviet states from 2017, measuring 299 frontal face images and then relating the results to conventional measures of corruption.
The paper, by Pavlo Blavatskyy, a faculty member of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Chair at the University of Montpellier, concludes that “physical characteristics of politicians such as their body-mass index can be used as proxy variables for political corruption when the latter are not available, for instance at a very local level”.
