This is a special post for quick takes by Tomás B.. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Tallness is zero sum. But I suspect beauty isn't. If everyone was more beautiful but the relative differences remained, I think people would be happier. Am I wrong in this? This has policy implications, as once genetic engineering gets better taxing height is likely wise to avoid red-queens races into unhealthy phenotypes. Taxing beauty seems very horrible to me. As beauty is quite beautiful.
It's not obvious to me that personal physical beauty (as opposed to say, beauty in music or mathematics or whatever) isn't negative sum. Obviously beauty in any form can be enjoyable, but we describe people as "enchantingly beautiful" when a desire to please or impress them distorts our thinking, and if this effect isn't purely positional it could be bad. Conventionally beautiful people are also more difficult to distinguish from one another.
There's also the meta-aesthetic consideration that I consider it ugly to pour concern into personal physical beauty, either as a producer or consumer, but it's unclear how widespread such a preference/taste is. (I would consider a world where everyone was uglier because they spent less time on it to be a much more beautiful world; but clearly many people disagree, for instance George Orwell in 1984 seems to find it distasteful and degrading that the Party encourages its members to have a functional, less dolled-up personal appearance.)
2Mateusz Bagiński
AFAIK, it is best (expected-outcomes-wise) to be short, but for "boring genetic reasons" (as opposed to (genetic or non-genetic) disease reasons), because fewer cells means smaller propensity to develop cancer and a bunch more stuff (holding everything else constant).