ABSTRACT
The social forces associated with social aesthetics include the media, the economy, socio-political events such as migration and war, and globalization. These forces, at any given historical moment, affect social aesthetics. Formal media messages clearly influence the plentiful and equally salient informal messages sent us every day as societal members. This chapter concludes that most media presentations are unforgiving about physical appearance. The economy also affects us more broadly and more directly as when our socioeconomic status is strongly correlated with our appearance. The chapter considers the disparity in what people spend their money on, they find the depressing fact that, in the US, more money is spent on beauty than on education or social services. Less disastrously, apart from the interaction between migration and body size, economic forces can impel poor people to migrate for better work opportunities, thereby making interbreeding more likely and resulting in mixed-race offspring.
