Beauty and the Lives of Those Who Are Beautiful Are Topics with Broad Appeal

People magazine has circulation of over 3.5 million copies, more than The New Yorker and Newsweek combined. This book caters to this widespread interest in good looks while injecting economics into the analysis of the topic. Daniel Hamermesh has written half a dozen papers on the relationship between beauty and economic outcomes and these articles are the backbone of the book, which is organized into three main parts. The rst part is a discussion of the measurement of beauty whether there is a broad consensus on who is beautiful, the extent to which beauty varies across demographic groups, and the extent to which expenditure on cosmetics can improve one's looks. I was quite surprised that Hamermesh does not discuss (or use) the website hotornot.com for this part of the book. Hotornot.com allows anyone to post a photograph, and then within a few days, hundreds to thousands of people rate the beauty of the person in the photograph. In a world where such a website exists, it is unclear why the author bases his analysis on small-scale surveys conducted in the 1970s and early 1980s. The second part of the book examines the correlation between beauty and earnings and builds a case for a causal relationship. Hamermesh analyzes how this relationship varies across demographic groups and across industries, and tries to disentangle the relative role of the employers' and customers' preferences for beauty. This part of the book also contains an extensive, almost metaphysical discourse about whether higher salaries of the beautiful are due to lookism (i.e., discrimination against the ugly) or social productivity of beauty. The author writes that distinguishing these cases is like de ning pornography (I know it when I see it), but I am concerned that this analogy may not be so apt he argues, for instance, that prominently featuring better-looking tennis players is a clear example of socially unproductive lookism. 2 The third part of the book provides a wealth of evidence on how beauty a ects outcomes other than salaries being beautiful makes it easier to get a loan or join a group and (less surprisingly) to get a date or a better-educated and a better-looking spouse. This part of the book also presents an argument for legal protection for the ugly. The book presents a solid and clear exposition of how discrimination against