Studies show that people who are on the "good looking" side of the spectrum have distinct advantages over the rest of us. Taller men, men who are more "handsome" and have more "manly" features (e.g. chin, deep voice, etc.) consistently have advantages in negotiations for jobs, pay, status, etc. A casual search turns up a plethora of articles covering everything from getting interviews to pay to grades in school (here's one near the top, just as a starting point: http://www.businessinsider.com/beautiful-people-get-more-job...).
Being "good looking" is more about actually having physically "good looking" features than anything else you mentioned. What you mentioned are things the rest of us can do to try to compensate for a lack of physical attractiveness.
This is a nerdy thing to chime in, but: that doesn't establish a causal relationship. Attractive people might simply have more self confidence, which leads to more money and success with the opposite sex.
I know I've seen an interesting study that shows that at least part of the height income gap disappears if you account for teenage height. I.e. a man who was 5'4" as a teen and 5'10" as an adult is more similar in income to someone who was 5'4" all their life than someone who was 5'10" all their life. That's hard to explain in a model where beauty at the present moment is a larger determinant of income.
>This is a nerdy thing to chime in, but: that doesn't establish a causal relationship. Attractive people might simply have more self confidence, which leads to more money and success with the opposite sex.
It doesn't matter if it's causal or not, the fact that the correlation exists is enough to show "good looking people have it better".
"Beauty is only skin deep" — "Looks only go so far" — and the plethora of other cultural restrictions on "beauty".
As is always pertinent to this discussion:
Do we worship the Gods because they are beautiful, or are the Gods beautiful because we worship them?
We could generalize this to those interests that particularly come from reports of these demographics, and subdemographics. Or we could go abstract into architecture: Xer functions, functions which are more "readable" or have more "examples"; or classes which have more "features" consistently have advantages in negotiations for place in a codebase, frequency of reuse, event-state participation.
Being "good looking" is more about actually having physically "good looking" features than anything else you mentioned. What you mentioned are things the rest of us can do to try to compensate for a lack of physical attractiveness.