Ship in "beauty dis-advantaged girls" !

I enjoyed this story:

The mayor of an isolated town in Queensland, Australia, was vilified for making the following statement: “May I suggest that if there are five blokes to every girl, we should find out where there are beauty-disadvantaged women and ask them to proceed to Mt. Isa.”

He is simply recognizing that in the dating/marriage markets looks are one of the commodities traded; and there is substantial evidence, for example, here suggesting that uglier women marry men with less human capital, ie men who can earn less. That the mayor is asking ugly women to come to Mt. Isa is just an attempt to get them where their scarcity might allow them to mitigate their “disadvantage” and benefit from the surplus of single men.

Gains from trade of course, make sense, although the mayor’s statement is somewhat crude. Interestingly, the head of the Chamber of Commerce noted that, “There’s a lot of anger circulating among the community… there’s a lot of women voicing their opinions.”

I wonder if the women’s anger is at the mayor’s crudeness, or whether it is a standard response by monopolists who are threatened with competition??