I think my original point should've been something more like, I'm not sure why high earners would avoid marriage to people they're interested in altogether as opposed to seeking out marriages with pre nups instead.
It’s thrown out in cases where it would be as invalid as any other contract (pressuring someone to sign, misleading etc). As long as you have lawyer presents to advise for him and also for her (it’s on the up-and-up) you can absolutely arrange it however you want (it won’t and can’t affect things like alimony or child support) but prenups are generally used for protecting large assets, inheritances, etc.
The couples in my family had a prenup, but it was specifically waiving away the “voting rights” (worth $0) part of a family business (ie to prevent a vengeful ex-wife from refusing to agree on things like selling the business or expanding), it explicitly didn’t apply to financial assets. I don’t know, my dad is a tax attorney on Palm Beach so he does all this stuff for his livelihood; maybe it’s from him seeing uber-wealthy bitterly fight over trivial $$$ for spite where being overly concerned with “recouping” $50,000 after a 20 year marriage to the point of pessimism is just setting yourself up to find any financial “hit” as an attack. I guess the trade-off is that your spouse is less likely to see bleeding you dry as a “win.”
I’m mostly just confused why attitudes towards prenups seem to be less “guarded” for the upper-middle class (who has more $$ to potentially lose) than for the average person. I guess because the divorce rate for white upper-middle class is like 13% (versus the national avg of 50%) so the relaxed forecasting accounts for that?
Physical coercion, or whatever would invalidate any other kind of contract. Just discuss it before you get engaged because it will likely impact her decision to work or stay home if you have kids. If you’re worried about being fleeced in a divorce just look up the actual state laws (not anecdotal stories online) on how assets are divided, alimony and child support are recorded in census data as well.
If prenups were invalidated left and right wealthier people wouldn’t be paying lawyers charging $500+/hr to draft them.
Andrew Sullivan talks about how education and status don’t really come into play in homosexual relationships…romantic heterosexual relationships seem to be much more about status than other types of relationships at least among people that have status or aspire to higher status.
This was fun! I think while the West this is all mostly informal, the more formalised marriage pools in China for instance has rules that are far more rigid
Also, if someone here could provide some insight into how this dynamic might play out in arranged marriages on the Indian subcontinent, I would be grateful.
Opposition to inter-caste (and of course inter-religious) marriage is extremely strong across India, and it doesn't vary much between groups. Inter-caste marriage is more or less similarly strongly opposed by "high" castes and "low" ones; by Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Jains; by educated people and less educated people; by young people and older generations. The one place where you see a difference is that 1) Buddhists are much more open to it than members of other religions, and 2) Southerners are much more open to it than people in the north.
I'm guessing in the last case that it's a legacy of left-wing politics in the South during the last century that consciously sought to de-emphasize the salience of caste. I also think members of the southern nationalities have a strong ethno-national consciousness (especially Tamils), and maybe that trades off against the importance of caste somewhat: if you think of your identity primarily in ethnoracial and linguistic terms then maybe caste is correspondingly less important.
In India, one way sub-castes (jatis) compete for higher social status is by abandoning 'bride-price' for 'dowry'. However, female Education became a proxy for 'dowry' (which is illegal) and represented better epigenetic outcomes for progeny. 'Educationally Forward Castes' retained notional hypergamy such that the bride had one degree lower educational attainment (and was younger).
Now that women are getting good jobs or starting their own businesses things have loosened up a bit. The problem is that young people can see that the kids of 'mixed' marriages have trouble getting arranged marriages. Look at Rahul. Already 53 years old and still living with Mummy.
> I know many rich male Google programmers, but I have never seen any of them marry a stunning black girl from the ghetto
Mail order brides are (or used to) be a thing. When I think of the kind of men that resort to this, my first intuition is a high-income but a romantically unsuccessful man.
Alternatively, sugar daddy/trophy wife dynamic is fairly popular.
I'm certain examples of marrying down in this way exist, but that's not the point. Scott's offering here was an intuition to correspond with the evidence he presented earlier. Evidence suggests that people don't usually marry across classes. This tracks with my understanding of Rich Male Google Programmers, which is that they probably find mail order brides morally objectionable.
I wonder how much the idea of men marrying down is morally objectionable vs. socially objectionable, and how much it varies by political spectrum. I could see a significant left-right divide here.
You are not the only one seeing a left-right divide, though maybe not exactly the kind of divide you envision.
'Over the past several decades, women’s educational attainment has far outpaced that of men’s; “Women in the United States have earned more bachelor’s degrees than men every year since the mid-1980s,” writes Derek Thompson in the Atlantic.'
' “American colleges and universities now enroll roughly six women for every four men. This is the largest female-male gender gap in the history of higher education, and it’s getting wider.” '
'The education divide between men and women has become more politically relevant because of the stronger connection between educational attainment and political behavior. In recent elections, college graduates have become a much more loyal Democratic constituency. And on a range of issues, college-educated Americans are more liberal than those without a Bachelor’s degree.'
'There are a number of reasons why a college education may lead one to adopt more liberal views, but one oft-overlooked is how obtaining a college degree affects your social life. Having a college degree increases the likelihood you’ll live in or near a city, and that you’ll work and become friends with other college graduates, who are more likely to be left-of-center than those without a college degree. The political context one lives in exerts a powerful effect on their own views. As Harvard political scientist Pippa Norris noted recently in an interview with the New York Times: “If you live in a community which is more liberal, there’s a self-reinforcing ratcheting effect.”'
What happened to mail-order brides? Did they stop being a thing? Did anyone ever check what percent of mail-order relationships succeeded/continued by some definition?
Duckduckgoing "Mail Order Brides" to see if there was an answer to this question just turned up a dozen sites to get mail order brides, so I assume the industry is still going.
That being said, if I had to guess at any decline in the popularity of the service, the growth of SE Asian economies would presumably be the factor? Thailand was always the country you would hear about with MOBs, but it's not too poor these days and maybe Thai women just have better choices? Or they can just wait for wealthy expats to pick them up directly?
I've travelled around SE Asia and saw many WM AF couples, but it's hard to tell if they are going for marriage or just vacation flings. Conversely, in Korea I saw surprisingly many AM WF couples.
The Asian male is high-status in Korea, being the dominant group--Korea is a rich country after all. I'd be curious what the pattern is in China, or in Japan, though they might not have enough foreigners to observe. (AM-APF [anime pillow female] would presumably be only the lowest-status AMs.)
I live in Tokyo but I think selection effects are so strong I can't tell you anything useful. I can think of maybe ten WM AF relationships among my friends and coworkers. The non Japanese women who are in relationships are with foreign men. I do know one couple that's a Japanese man and a Japanese/Brazilian woman. Also a Japanese/American woman and an American man.
The other thing would be what I see when I'm walking around, but honestly it's mostly Japanese couples or foreign couples.
I thnk Caucasians are about 1% of the Japan population. My wife told me before we married that I should get a job paying better than my poor researcher's stipend, presuming rightly that there were disadvantages to being married to a white guy, despite American culture having some lingering cachet.
Thanks anyway. That's basically what I figured--Japan would be mostly Japanese, with the small pool of foreigners dating each other. Maybe you get the occasional westaboo, but the culture is so conformist most would be endogamous.
SE Asia is number 1 (Philippines and Vietnam), but Thailand is much further down the list, and indeed the Thai economy has strongly outperformed the Philippines in particular, so you're probably on to something.
Next is Latin America (Mexico, DR, Colombia, Brazil). I have to wonder if the Mexicans are often marrying Mexican-Americans.
The most surprising one to me is that Russia and Ukraine only have a middling rank. These seem like popular choices, for obvious reasons, and Ukraine in particular remains very poor. Though I suppose they also have Western Europe as a potential destination that's much closer to home.
The Philippines and Vietnam both have very large population (each have about 100 million). They also have a young population. The median age in the Philippines is 24.5 and 32.5 in Vietnam. Russia has a large population, but a higher median age (39.6).
The Philippines also has the advantage of being English speaking.
Good point -- and Russia and Ukraine also have an unusually small cohort in their 20s, due largely to the post-Soviet fertility crash. This might help explain why we're more familiar with cases from prior decades, i.e. women born behind the Iron Curtain (see also the comment below from nickiter).
I've known three men married to "MOBs" and all three women came from Eastern Europe. The marriages happened in the early 80s, so perhaps that's specific to the time period?
(Unrelated but interesting to me; all three remained married ~40 years later at the time I knew them, and seemed at least stable if not happy.)
I know no studies, and I see a problem (as in husband-earning less): if you ask: nobody does "mail order", only others do. "We met on okc and it clicked" / "I was traveling/working there and then I saw her face, now ... " / "She worked as an au-pair nearby when we met". (Also: What woman ever goes to a beach - maybe it's the third world - to be picked up by younger men?). Nowadays, "mail order brides" are on-line and do have a lot of agency, thus not much need for an agency! - In times bygone, I did okc and looked specifically at some low-gdp/head-places. (India was a big white spot then, sad to say.) Not a bad strategy.
As a middle-aged single man, I see lots of internet advertising (e.g. on Facebook) for what are basically mail-order brides - mostly from Eastern Europe (I'm British) rather than South-East Asia. I'm guessing that you're either too young to be their target market, or the algorithms know that you are partnered.
There used to be lots from Ukraine before the Special Military Operation.
About 15 years ago, one of my readers with a Ph.D. grew dissatisfied that his children didn't appear likely to provide him with grandchildren, so as part of his make-your-own-grandchildren plan, he moved to Kiev and quickly found a lovely wife who presented him with a baby. Of course, lately Putin is shooting missiles at Kiev ...
I knew at entrepreneur who did this. He met his wife in a business context in Ukraine. I always wondered if he chose that country for supply due to more than purely economic factors.
Wait, he wasn't going to get grandchildren so he had another kid? That escalated fast (unless the implication is that American grandfathering is about the same level of commitment as Ukrainian fathering)
Well, I think I get it. Looking ahead towards the remainder of his life, rather than hanging out with old people and doing old people things, he'd rather focus on children and return to family-centered life again. Finding a new wife and having kids again is much more demanding than being a grandparent. But if being a grandparent seems to be off the table, it might be the best option he sees.
Several years ago there was a big scandal in the news about Russian mail-order brides, with a lot of talking heads openly wondering (not without justification) where the difference lay between this and prostitution. We haven't heard too much about it since then. But I did some digging, and apparently it's become a big (if quiet!) industry in the Czech Republic. People in the know call them Czech Mates.
But you really have to beware of scammers. All too often you'll try to order one, and they take your money, and no one ever comes. You try to get information on your order and they just tell you the Czech's in the mail...
True. Thing is, we tend to think about marriage as the traditional "until death do you part" variety. Even if that's not always the case in practice, it's typically seen as the ideal to strive for. IIRC a lot of the scandal with Russian brides was that in many cases the brides weren't even pretending they were making any attempt to live up to that ideal.
(Please don't quote me on that, though; it's been several years and I could be wrong on the details.)
Had a HS teacher in the late 1990s who was kind of funny and charming, but also pretty gross and unkempt for his otherwise attractiveness level (and a creeper on the HS girls in a way some seemed to like/tolerate). Think an average or slightly above average ~45yo guy who took zero care of himself. Also chewed tobacco. He would go with a buddy trolling in eastern Europe and the former Soviet states looking specifically for a bride for many years.
One time he actually came back with this smoking hot blonde 19 year old from the former Soviet union. They got married, had twins, were together about 3 years, and then she fled back home and ransomed his children back to him. He was heartbroken but did it, and I always wondered if this was actually a long term scam the whole time.
~5 years ago I knew a union baggage handler who was pretty similar, maybe late 40s, probably slightly below average looking, decent shape but took zero care of his appearance and would come across in a US context as very low class. He took a trip to Kazakhstan and came back with a woman who was way more together/intelligent/attractive/young than he would have been able to pull off in the US context. As far as I know they are happily married with no kids, he got her a job, and they have moved within the US a few times.
From my experience, it was (and still is) a thing, but maybe not to the point of being clear in statistics. It comes with certain correlations, which is also why I agree with your anecdotal evidence that wealthy googlers do not marry hot ghetto or rednecks girls:
- older male - younger wife (in itself an example of trading wealth for look. This also means a lot of second marriage or mariage-like arrangement. I guess statistics for second marriage should show the effect more clearly, if it's real...
- male need a specific background. In particular, he should be able to manage this socially, meaning either non conventional social circle, no social circle, or dominant enough he will not suffer any social penalty. Googler or tech guy may be a good example. CEO too. Mid-level salesman, not really.
- bride must come from a culture different enough the social issues are kind of bypassed. This also somewhat bypass character/hobby/interrests compatibility issue, class difference are less obvious and less penalizing the more the culture are far appart. This again means a certain type of male, one with interest in different cultures, the kind of traveller who want to experience local things. Or someone with extremely bland global taste you will find everywhere (blockbuster and fast foods)
- contrary to the same culture situation where class is class, different cultures or races come with a certain intrinsic class, probably a mix between countries average wealth and some remains of the colonial era. Global tourism tends to muddle this thought...
This makes me think that it's not only because of relative weatlh that the stereotypical MO bride comes from eastern Europe or SE asia. In a way, it's a dichotomic choice: either assortive mating or cultures as far away as possible. In particular, culture without strong awareness of the other culture classes.
Skip to 3:30 on this 2014 video and listen to the CEO of OKcupid (who apparently didn't have a comb or a hoodie at the time) talk about how everyone on his dating website is a little bit racist.
That effect is real (and also note that black women tend to be more averse to dating white men than Latin or Asian women are).
But note that Haiti shows up as a reasonably large K-1 visa source, particularly relative to its size. DR ranks even higher (#5 per the link I posted elsewhere) but I think its population only averages around 50% African DNA.
There are very poor foreign black women within a short flight of the US, it's not necessary to go all the way to Africa.
All that said, I'm not sure that cultural distance is REALLY a plus as you suggest. What's a real-world example of a country that is poor but culturally too similar to the US for mail-order brides to work? The countries culturally most similar to the US are not poor, which isn't a coincidence: culture and economics are tightly interwoven.
You certainly don't want a woman who's too culturally distant -- say, a hunter-gatherer from Papua New Guinea. I also think that shared Christianity, or even cultural Christianity, is probably a positive in international marriages. I've only known one white guy married to a woman born in India, and it so happened that her family was part of India's small Christian minority.
You have a point with hunter gatherer ;) My point of view is that class-blindness counts, and explain that within a country or culture, assortive mating is much stronger, hence the google programmer not marrying rednecks or ghetto. But a Phillipino, Columbian or Letton girl, yes. Younger, hotter, poorer...
But I guess there could be too much distance, even for short term attraction. That and the fact that from the documentary I saw, Papua new guinea HG girls are not likely to fit the definition of what most western male would find hot. By the way, i'm from Europe and in a tech field. My anecdotal but first hand experience is that indeed, hypergamy is real and when it happen, it show the correlation mentioned above quite strongly: different native language, different cultures and wider age gap (older male) for the hypergamy situation (which is not so uncommon, maybe 1/4 or 1/5) and strong assortivity in the more common situation.
Those couples do not necessarily last....but neither do assortive classic ones. I could not tell which ones last longer, except maybe that it seems to last longer in my tech world than outside, if I split my friends and colleagues into tech / non-tech groups.
It's well know that in USA, black women have least SMV, because they look relatively masculine to women of other races (prognathism and black skin are considered masculine traits)
Also, African males wouldn't like white men looking for mail order brides, unlike Eastern European males.
They mostly just transformed into dating websites where people can correspond directly and have more plausible deniability to say it's no different from match.com
How recently were they common and accepted/? I tend to think of them as back in the California gold rush, where there was a very wide region with lots of men and very few women. And these men came from somewhere, so there were much larger areas with few men compared to the number of women.
There's a whole show called 90-Day Fiance (with its various spin-offs) that manages to come up with endless content.
With the Internet and the proliferation of smartphones in poor countries, it's probably easier to do than ever -- you can do video calls, you can use apps to help translate if her English skills are lacking, and you can potentially disintermediate the expensive services that facilitate these things (while also opening the door to more fraud).
I'd guess though that in most of these arrangements, while there's a large gap in incomes, she's basically middle-class by her country's standards: a relatively educated city-dweller with potentially pretty good English skills.
I don't think the archetypical "guy with a mail order bride" was ever actually per-se wealthy. The most common type of man involved, in my experience, is a middle-aged, not-very-educated man who's fairly well along in a reasonably-well-paying blue-collar career - or, to put it in cruder terms, "Rich for West Virginia."
Such a man might have an annual income approaching or over six figures, typically owns a reasonably nice house already, and - because the cost of living in his area is low - he might well have as much as several hundred thousand dollars in the bank, even if he isn't particularly thrifty. He has no plans to "go back to school" or change careers out of his male-dominated field - as a result, he's missed out on meeting a spouse via college or the workplace, where the vast majority of relationships form. He lives in a rural area that's already has a male-tilted population, so he meets very few unmarried women. Due to his blue-collar career field, he'll likely face no serious blowback for having a "mail order bride."
At this point, the money's burning a hole in his pocket - he can't move because his well-paying blue-collar job depends on living somewhere rural, and there's only so much a middle-aged man can spend on his truck and booze (stereotypically). These men are the same reason that fully-kitted F150s are some of the fastest-selling cars over $100k, and they're also in large part the reason that Americans "on average" own so many guns - I've seen blogs from guys like this who buy another $1500 gun with every $4000 paycheck. The mail-order bride thing usually only happens after these guys have had as much fun with trucks & guns as it's possible to have in one lifetime.
If you sign up to tinder or another dating service as a 20-30 year old guy in a large western city, you often find that most of your matches are women from developing countries who want visas. (Or at least my group of average engineer/programmer/scientist and not super muscular / attractive / rich friends did). Few local or western women matched with us except for prostitutes and the women from the developing countries had nothing on their profiles indicating they didn't live in your city - they just sprung it on you when chatting.
I wonder who rich male Google programmers *do* marry. Are they the only nerd men rich enough to get the elusive nerd women? SJW types and that's why Silicon Valley outside of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk leans so far left? Non-SJW types and that's why the the media hates Silicon Valley? I feel like the answers to many otherwise hidden sociological questions are related to this.
Data point of 1: I'm a male Googler, and found myself a female Googler. Compatibility was great.
Data point of >1: Friends and colleagues making good money in tech find themselves high-education/high-status partners in similar fields like tech or econ.
So many of the tech workers are immigrants, that in aggregate they would need to be separated. Indian and Chinese immigrants have their own demographics separate from native Americans. Amongst themselves, there are probably less to no income differences, since all needed to pass the immigration bar.
A typical marriage for a tech guy is probably a nurse/teacher/doctor/lawyer.
I was engaged to a veterinarian, so interpret that how you want.
What we want is a smart woman who *could* have been a doctor, but chose not to. Sometimes this involves actually getting a credential and not using it. Or rather, not using it in a career, but as a signal. Yes, I realise this is a waste of societal resources and a bit sexist.
Apparently Pakistanis feel the same way. Pakistan has a huge number of female MDs but very few practicing female physicians. An MD in Pakistan functions as an MRS degree.
I wonder that too. I know two guys fitting that description. Both are Burners who are either married or in long-term relationships with current or former sex workers. Not quite like Aella (although one has met her) but still very much middle class people.
Wow, interesting. I guess they place less value on fidelity etc.; do they have kids? I'd guess they'd be poly. I also wonder, are they nerdy sex workers? I always wondered if 'sex worker to nerds' was an actual niche; seems like you would decrease your risk of violence, though it would not fall to zero. They might be into weirder stuff though.
Hmm. I don't know if they have nerdy clientele; I can ask the one that's still seeing clients. That one is in a theoretically open relationship, although the man is demisexual and so doesn't even want anything other than his partner. The other one...she's in a mono relationship as far as I know; she's not a sex worker anymore.
Not "mail order" but there was a trend (maybe still going on?) of US men visiting the Philippines and marrying women from there. I have a cousin who married such a woman, and have known a few other men who were thinking about it.
While it's a real thing, I suspect that it's rare enough to not influence any statistical numbers of the full population.
When I worked at Google in 2009, one of my (rich) programmer team mates had 3 Chinese ex wives, and was in the process of travelling over to get his 4th. They had several children.
I expect most guys who do this don't talk about it as openly as he did.
Mail order brides and trophy wives are "popular" in the sense that everyone has heard of them and you might know of a couple cases but as a percentage of all marriages they're a small enough percentage to not change the statistics a lot.
In addition there's a generational aspect as well. The percentage of males without partners among Gen Z and young Millennials is pretty astounding compared to previous generations.
Yeah in this decade, seems like the data should at least include cohabitating couples, since one of the question is do men wanna live together with women with different class/culture.
"After all, on average, the average man has 50th percentile educational rank among men; the average woman has 50th percentile educational rank among women, therefore the average husband and wife would share the same educational rank."
Isn't this misstating the problem? More than 50% of the college population now is women. If every college educated woman wants a college educated man there's simply not enough to go around.
From what I understand the imbalance is so bad on certain campuses that the dating situation has been completely distorted compared to previous generations, i.e. female college students chasing eligible males who are presented with an array of potential partners.
"...seems to have produced a change in the preferences of individuals, in the social norms that are internalized or imposed upon them by their social environment."
Or it may be that college educated women are settling in the belief that marrying down is better than not marrying at all. In that scenario is it unreasonable to hypothesize that such unions may be less stable than ones where one partner didn't lower their expectations?
"Women’s rising share of education isn’t directly damaging the marriage market. Women’s rising share of income might be, with one study suggesting it’s responsible for 23% of the decline in US marriages."
This would seem to be contradictory. Income correlates with education--how many times have we heard how much more college grads make over a lifetime?
Not all kinds of education are equal, and men -- for some mysterious reason -- seem more likely to choose the kind of education that leads to greater expected income, e.g. STEM.
"This would seem to be contradictory. Income correlates with education--how many times have we heard how much more college grads make over a lifetime??
Not necessarily, if women with college degrees make less than men with college degrees. It could still be true that men with college degrees make more than men without, and women with college degrees make more than women without, and so the overall numbers would still support increased income for having a college degree.
Yes, but they are not the same thing. If women were getting useless degrees and never joining the workforce, then education - on its own - wouldn't be leading to marriage problems. That's Scott's point. As a proxy for income, education may have some effect, but it's easier and better to just use income directly since that's the thing that apparently actually makes a difference. Apparently, both men and women are okay with a marriage where the woman is more highly education, but not where the woman makes more money.
The problem as I see it is that a four year degree is increasingly viewed as primarily some kind of glorified job training program, a ticket to a lifetime of high earnings. If women are increasing their share of the income pie is there any real doubt that the primary vehicle is higher education? In how many of these mixed couples where the woman earns more than the man is the woman a college grad? I would hypothesize that it's virtually all of them.
And again are college married women marrying down because society's perceptions have changed or simply because they have no choice?
Anecdote isn't data but my personal experience matches this very well. I (34m) am less educated (3 years of university) but higher earning (finance) than my wife (32f, 6 years of university, veterinary surgeon). In the last comparable year where we were both working full time before she went on maternity I earned 50% more than her, since her return to work 3 days a week and a promotion for me I earn 3 times more.
Furthermore of the 3 girls that my wife shared a house with for her last 2 years of vet school 2 are married, both to less well educated but higher earning husbands.
The Veterinary sector is probably a slightly extreme example as it is quite poorly paid (at least in the UK) relative to the required education.
On the class points my background matches my wife's pretty closely and that's part of the reason why our relationship works. My previous long term girlfriend, who I met at university, came from a pretty different background and while that was fine when dating as we got more serious that difference became a bigger issue and led to the relationship ending. With my wife our expectations and views are well aligned.
"The Veterinary sector is probably a slightly extreme example as it is quite poorly paid (at least in the UK) relative to the required education"
I think it's a part of a pattern. Jobs that are high-education but relatively low-paying tend to be female dominated while jobs that are low-education but relatively high-paying (mechanics, miners, electricians, etc) tend to be male-dominated.
But that is at least partly downstream of the dating market. It is rational for men to choose careers which maximise their earnings relative to the educational requirements at the exclusion of pretty much everything else.
I don't know how much of that has to do with the dating market. Those have been male dominated careers for a long time, before any percentage of women to speak of would have been educated at all. I would say it's certainly about maximizing earnings relative to educational requirements, but how much of that has to do with dating rather than just wanting more money for all the other reasons people want money is unclear.
Women like money as much as men, the fact that there is a strong correlation between gender and the education requirement/salary ratio for professions suggests there's something more going on.
Specifically that women can obtain access to money without having to pursue a high earning career via marriage while men not only can't obtain access to money they reduce their chance of getting married if they don't maximise their earnings.
As for why some professions have switched from male dominated to female dominated while others haven't I think the common factor is jobs which don't appeal to women, either because they require "male brain" like engineering or are physically demanding/unpleasant like building or agriculture.
Because men are motivated by money rather than prestige those jobs have had to maintain attractive wages to fill posts, while jobs which appeal to women, have seen relative wages plummet as the supply has exceeded demand.
People-oriented jobs are not obviously high-leverage, which explains why they would be lower paying. And females are more people oriented even from infancy.
Also, I am suprised to hear that men are more interested in money than prestige, as the precise opposite is a common view.
Not too different from me. I've got maybe 1.5 years of university vs. my wife's 5 years (BS in speech language pathology and a special ed certificate), but I make more than 3X what she does. I'm 46m, she's 44f. I work in digital analytics. Education, and maybe special ed in particular, suffers from some of the same issues where the pay is much lower than the work ought to get.
Re class, tough to say; her dad sold seed corn, so maybe kind of low-status in the "farmer" field, but also well-educated. My dad was a professor at a large private university, but not one of the top-tier schools. Roughly even on class, though I might have a slight edge by being from a medium-sized city with a large university while she grew up in a small mid-western farm town.
I know it's not on the topic, but expectations and views aligning plays a big part too. I'm LDS, and most of the time, LDS people marry other LDS people. I think that weighs higher than class or income for my particular population. There might be a similar thing happening with politics or other strong "culture" identifiers among couples that could play a similar role to the role religion plays in my experience.
Class is always a tricky one to judge at scale but it's one of those "I know it when I see it" things, do you have major "culture" differences with someone of the same race and nationality? Then you are from different classes. A warehouse supervisor in Liverpool and an associate professor at Oxford earn about the same but we instinctively know they will have very little in common.
For all encompassing faiths I think it can replace class as a factor, the way poorest and richest member of an Orthodox Jewish synagogue have a "culture gap" far smaller than you would expect from their relative wealth. However as a someone with a Christmas and Easter Church of England religious background that wasn't a factor for me.
To go back to dating my wife comes from a similar background from me, upper middle class English, but another factor is how she earns her money, bluntly I feel proud talking about my wife the veterinary surgeon to acquaintances, in a way that I wouldn't feel talking about an equally well paying but stereotypically lower class position, like beauty salon owner. Yes it's snobbish and irrational but it's very common. I think "job prestige" weighting applies in both directions, I'm pretty sure most upper middle class women would prefer a associate professor to a warehouse supervisor, finances being equal, but I think it is much stronger for women's jobs then for men.
For better or worse men are still seen as primary breadwinners and the amount of bread is what really matters, for women having an "appropriate" job carries more weight. Which in turn partly explains why many prestigious but female coded jobs are so badly paid. The supply exceeds demand.
I was wondering the same thing. I'm disappointed that none of the studies cited here seemed to control for religion, politics, or other lifestyle choices independent from income.
I know this is a tangent but I'm amazed to hear that vets are poorly paid in the USA! Vets are notoriously expensive here in Aus, much like dentists (though all the money is in looking after rich city people's pets and I've heard there's a big shortage of vets for farm animals in rural regions)
UK not USA but vets fees are regarded as high in Britain, though the NHS is probably a factor as most people lack any understanding of the costs of healthcare.
But very little of that cost makes it through to salaries for vets, insurance, compliance enforced overheads and medicines both eat up most of the cost to the customer.
I think this discussion might be missing a crucial point. For almost all of the period in Western culture during which monogamy has been the only recognized form of marriage, near-universal opposite-sex marriage has *also* been the norm. If your metric is any rank-ordered variable, that imposes a fairly low mathematical limit on how much net female hypergamy there can be.
The phenomenon we're talking about was enormously more important in the times and places (much of human history, I think) in which monogamy wasn't the norm. There's no way to understand a finding like this, for example, except as describing a society in which the norm was extreme polygamy with extreme hypergamy: roughly, one where around 85 percent of women and around 5 percent of men produced at least one child who survived to reproductive age.
Relatedly: if there's a genetic component to male homosexuality, which there probably is, its persistence has to be explained in the same way as the persistence of genes for sickle-cell anemia. There has to be some positive effect on fitness which equilibrates with the obvious negative one at some allele frequency greater than zero.
If you're going to speculate about what positive effects might have manifested under prehistoric conditions, you have to assume the kind of reproductive environment demonstrated in this study. I can think of a few possibilities, but at any rate the question seems less mysterious than it would be in an environment of near-total opposite-sex monogamy.
I'm not sure that's it. Providers for whose children?
What you have to envision, I think, is a social structure in which most non-elite men are deprived of access to women, but non-elite men who are homosexual have significantly more access: enough to offset the fact that they take advantage of it less often.
I can see that working through two channels. Homosexual men might provide services to the households of elite men which are exclusively non-sexual. Or if the sexual interests of some elite men aren't entirely binary, those services might be partly sexual as well.
I think someone actually worked the second version out and called it the "Tartuffe hypothesis", after the Moliere play in which a rich man schemes to get his daughter married to a young man in whom he's clearly interested himself.
Yeah, but it has to work at the level of the selfish gene. Benefits spread across the tribe won't help unless they're differentially directed to those members of the tribe who share the gay alleles, and that constrains the kind of story you can tell.
Maybe. You would also have to explain why a lot of childless males sacrifice for the tribe at large (is it just a result of coercion or do they think it improves their fitness?). Is there even a robust mechanism to tell which individuals we're genetically related to? How would one explain fathers raising children that - unbeknownst to them - aren't fathered by them?
>Benefits spread across the tribe won't help unless they're differentially directed to those members of the tribe who share the gay alleles, and that constrains the kind of story you can tell.
Benefits spread across the tribe can be selected for in case of group selection, and in *prehistory* humanity actually was subject to group selection (because genocidal conflict was so common that it made up a substantial portion of total deaths, let alone deaths-before-completing-reproduction).
Wasn’t one already found, that the sisters of homosexual men are a bit more fertile? I had heard that in multiple places, although I am not sure of the original study.
Summarised by the guardian as "Their findings show that female maternal relatives of gay men have more reproductive success than their counterparts who are related to heterosexuals."
This pretty well might be intentional -- I heard "we [married couple] both were single children, so we decided to make 2 children instead of 1" and maybe this generalizes to having gay relative as well.
This isn't that hard. For instance homosexual men might have a gene for "likes fucking men extra much", which means their sisters and other female relatives produce more kids at a rate that exceed the rate it reduces their production of offspring.
There are many potential scenarios, but they really are not at all hard to craft,
Why did the gene for "likes fucking men extra much" not spread to females regardless of what their brothers were doing? If "likes fucking men extra much" is more adaptive, the gene for it should appear and propagate on its own. (There is no pressure to keep it in men too.)
And since that gene is clearly mal-adaptive for men, its effect should disappear in men (only a toggle, a switch on or off, "if men then off", is necessary).
>Why did the gene for "likes fucking men extra much" not spread to females regardless of what their brothers were doing?
This sounds like a question from someone who doesn't understand how mutations in complex systems can have quite diverse and inseparable impacts.
Why do you assume this process is perfectly efficient? It isn't. It is a random walk through a wide variety of situations, and we are just caught in a moment in time.
It is like asking if running faster is better, why doesn't everyone run 50mph? There are tradeoffs.
And surely some people have genes which are conducive to faster running, say at least 22mph? Why doesn't everyone have those genes? Because not everyone is in the same situation so the genes don't have the same fitness everywhere, nor is there time for every slightly beneficial but not without cost mutation to be stomped out if it is less than optimal.
Increased fertility is not like running faster. Women already want to fuck men. If fucking men more meant more surviving descendants, the women who want to fuck men more would have more descendants. There certainly would not need for *someone else* to pay the cost (and an absurdly high cost in this case).
Why do assume that evolution is able to easily have agene affect only one sex? most things are duplicated across both even if utterly useless to one, eg. male nipples.
By this logic, a gene that makes women more fertile but men gay is going to stabilise at the frequency such that the effects across the 2 sexes roughly cancel out in expectation (and the fertility decrease from homosexuality is going to depend on societal factors, including the frequency of homosexuality)
Yes, I do expect natural selection to easily weed out traits that have a huge cost that is also well isolated. If the benefit and the cost were on the female only, it may be difficult to have one without the other. But when the cost is entirely isolated into another individual, the hypothesis becomes very implausible to me. It isn't impossible in principle, but it would make it much easier to eliminate (e.g. abort males who carry the gene), and the evolutionary pressure to do so large enough that it would almost certainly happen.
Nipples are a small cost to men. Most of the cost is actually carried by women. Completely eliminating nipples for men is more costly that simply keeping a common blueprint and then stopping further development for men. If the same thing had happened with a gene "that makes people want to fuck men more" the effect would have been suppressed in men very much like the development of functional breasts is suppressed.
For homosexuality, the cost is huge for men while the benefit for women dubious. The benefit for women seems straightforward at first: increased sex drive which increases fertility. But then why didn't women have that increased sex drive in the first place? Increasing fertility is obviously a huge benefit (self-evidently so). A simple answer is that the level of fertility is already optimum. In fact DNA data suggest that women who could bear children did bear children (much fewer men had progeny). The bottleneck simply isn't sex drive. (It may even be that sex drive in women is useless like nipples are useless in men.)
Ok, nipples wasn't best example. Other is wide hips. Males have widers hips than early hominids with smaller brain even though only females need them, but natural selection had to increase hip width for both sexes because it couldn't perfectly isolate changes
The idea that homosexuality is caused by post-natal environmental factors has never been corroborated, as far as I know. Those are the most easily observable factors and there's no discernible pattern.
You can make a plausible *a priori* argument that atypical prenatal hormonal exposure plays a role. But unless that can be correlated with an observable factor in the maternal environment, I think it just throws you back to genetics.
There are identical twin pairs with different sexualities, which is existence proof that post-natal environment plays a role. An awful lot of traits seem to have a bout 1/2 - 2/3 genetic heritability and the rest random noise with ~ no role in the modern day for deliberate environmental factors, I'd expect sexuality to be one of those. (Though I can easily see how environment affects the likelihood of being closeted, of course, which will affect any statistics one gathers)
It isn't a proof. Identical twins may have one or separate placentas, in latter case environments would be slightly different, and human ontogeny isn't 100% deterministic either.
I think the evidence points toward differences in *prenatal* environment being the main determining factor. For example, the fraternal birth order effect.
Genes are not the only influence on early development
Interesting thought, I think just looking at monogamy and marriage probably doesn't capture the reality that the more desirable parts of the dating pool choose not to marry or monogamous since it would limit their options and it's socially acceptable not to be married.
> Also, rich people meet poor people all the time. Poor people are their secretaries, servants, waitresses, and Uber drivers. Sometimes they have casual sex with these people. They just don’t (usually) marry them. I think it’s choice.
A more interesting research would be to measure social status and sexual relationships at a high school or a university campus.
I have trouble believing that there was really a world in which there was anything like a steady-state in which 16 celibate men provided for every nobleman and his 17 wives. I don't think we ever see anything nearly that extreme in recorded history. Why not?
More likely, if this genetic result is true, it's produced by repeated invasions by male warriors who are exterminating or subjugating the men of a rival tribe and claiming the women. We actually do see this in recorded history -- e.g., the Spanish conquest of Mexico. And have reason to suspect it in multiple places in prehistory.
It should be very easy to defeat an ultra-polygamous society in battle, because are those 16 eunuchs really going to fight and die for the fat bastard that is hogging all the women? If I were an invader, I'd make them an offer to join us instead.
Sometimes they would, because the best warrior ends up being the one that becomes a rich fat old bastard with a harem after the others get killed off in the war.
Basically, if you have a society in which men reproduce at a *much older age* than women, and you have a high attrition rate among younger men, you can get this kind of effect. Today you see it in extreme polygamist cults, which have a relatively old leadership that consists of middle-aged men with lots of younger wives and that kicks out a lot of teenage boys that might complete with the leadership for women.
The FLDS can get away with kicking out young men without those men taking vengeance and without outside parties making war on them specifically because they're a small group that is protected by the wider society and its laws. And importantly, it's not like those boys are compliant servants of the older polygamists. There's a reason they have to be expelled.
Interestingly there was some discussion of "warring clans" producing this result here:
Still makes sense to me. Not mutually exclusive with the idea that older successful warriors do a disproportionate share of breeding -- which honestly is almost certainly true, the only question being exactly how disproportionate.
The real problem is with the idea that a noble class with 5% of the population seizes effectively 100% of the women and that this arrangement is stable for any length of time, with non-breeding males demonstrating herbivorous compliance. No chance, I say.
"Valerie Hudson of Texas A&M University and Hilary Matfess of Yale have found that an inflated brideprice is a “critical” factor “predisposing young men to become involved in organised group violence for political purposes”. Terrorist groups know this, too. Muhammad Kasab, a Pakistani terrorist hanged for his role in the Mumbai attacks of 2008, said he joined Lashkar-e-Taiba, the jihadist aggressor, because it promised to pay for his siblings to get married. In Nigeria, Boko Haram arranges marriages for its recruits. The so-called Islamic State used to offer foreign recruits $1,500 towards a starter home and a free honeymoon in Raqqa. Radical Islamist groups in Egypt have also organised cheap marriages for members. It is not just in the next life that jihadists are promised virgins."
It follows that there are high rates of attrition amongst young men who engage in violence for a chance to reproduce.
What you're not seeing here is that men are being removed from the pool on both sides of the conflict - more men have died on campaign due to disease, starvation, and other misfortune than enemy action throughout most of history. Even failed wars produce a significant reduction in male population.
That's surely true of most of *history*, but not necessarily *prehistory*, circa 6000 BC. State-based warfare, with armies in the thousands and especially tens of thousands, marching many days from their homes and requiring dedicated logistics, creates a lot of opportunities for this sort of attrition.
You should expect a lot less death from disease, etc. when we're talking about clan/tribe/village-based warfare involving dozens or at most hundreds of warriors, perhaps attacking people 1-2 days' journey away at most.
Not to say there might not have been some larger-scale warfare in this era. But we have to think it was much less the norm than in later periods.
I think you may be right, although I'd defer to someone like Razib Khan. A "bottleneck" sounds like a one-off event, not a continuing arrangement in which only a small fraction of males reproduce in each generation.
However, if you switched from monogamy to ultra-polygyny in a short period of time, and the new system remained stable, wouldn't you see the same genetic fingerprint you'd see from a die-off of males: a one-off drop in Y chromosome diversity, but with no further decrease once the new system was established?
I think you would, but I also think you'd be unable to tell if male reproductive success later became less unequal. They may have demonstrated only that the 17:1 differential existed for some period of time, not necessarily a long one.
If the 17:1 ratio existed, even for a short period, it should show up as a drop in Ne as estimated by the autosomal loci. I don't think it does.
From the paper: “We note that any nonselective explanation for the reduction in Ne would also predict a reduction of the Ne at autosomal loci in this short time interval (Supplemental Fig. S6)” Take a look at that figure.
They cite Schiffels and Durbin 2014, who state: "In Europe, Northern European ancestors (CEU) experience a relatively constant effective population size between 2kya and 10kya, only increasing rapidly since 2kya; Southern European ancestors (TSI) have a consistently higher effective ancestral population size, appearing to show a more complex history of increase and decrease between 10kya and 3kya, and then increasing earlier than the CEU."
--
There are probably newer estimates of Ne from autosomal loci that you could check. Certainly, Razib knows more about this stuff than I do.
It's hard to imagine the 17:1 ratio being sustained for long periods of time.
But I mentioned that paper because it seems to show an extreme example of something I think has often been true in human history: a minority of elite men having multiple female reproductive partners while a fairly large share of men have zero.
So a high level of net female hypergamy has probably been the historic norm. I think this is why all white people are descendants of Charlemagne.
I have a question about this 17-to-1 thing. Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding.
In order to do the math on this, they can only track the male lineage thru the Y chromosome and the female lineage thru the mitochondrial DNA, right? So they can only determine if a male successfully had sons, but if a female successfully had daughters or sons. (Because everyone has mitochondrial DNA, but only males have Y-chromosomes.)
So in a situation where a male did, in fact, successfully reproduce, and either had 1) only daughters, or 2) both daughters and sons, but his sons were killed, he's still not going to show up in this data as having successfully reproduced, right?
So this data doesn't seem to show that only 1 out of every 17 males managed to reproduce at all. It seems to show that only 1 out of 17 males successfully produced surviving sons. And in an ancestral environment with lots of warfare in which young men were killed far more often than young women, it seems reasonable that more than 1/17 men were reproducing but only 1/17 successfully passed on his Y-chromosome, specifically.
Isn't marriage in general declining? Marriage data has the advantage of being readily available but does it still represent enough of a share of the population in committed relationships or are there perhaps other things that factor into which people marry (e.g. religion)?
I think this could potentially be a bigger problem - richer people are more likely to marry, poorer people are more likely to cohabit, so these studies may pick up more marriage vs cohabit signal than marriage vs single signal.
And they basically know what their life will look like in three years’ time, whereas if you live paycheck to paycheck trying not to get evicted you don’t
But wealthier people who want children are probably aware (at least subconsciously through cultural osmosis) that the children of married parents have better outcomes than the children of unmarried parents.
There is the fact that richer people are likely to marry _later_ —- marriage is viewed as a “keystone” after career has been figured out (and so the person marrying is making more income as they are farther along in their career) rather than done at the start of a career. Many middle- and upper-class people marrying right now in North America and Western Europe already own a house or condo together, for instance.
"... each quadrant in the (rich, poor) x (pretty, ugly) matrix pairs off with itself"
I wonder if this makes the gap between the prettiest and ugliest people bigger over time? Because the prettiest people create even prettier children, and vice versa.
I don't think this is how it would work. If an 8/10 man pairs off with an 8/10 woman, their children should (on average) be less than 8/10 attractive, because of regression to the mean.
(this confused me too the first few times I heard it, but I think it makes sense if you track the gene flows instead of worrying about the phenotype. On average, that couple's kids are getting genes for being 8/10. While a few lucky ones might get the best genes from each parents, and a few unlucky ones might get the worst genes from each parent, on average the gene frequency won't change. And then regression to the mean - beauty isn't just genetic, so if the kids don't get whatever non-genetic strokes of luck made the parents extra pretty, they'll on average be closer to the mean than their parents were).
I think my comment still holds looking at the ends of the population distribution. Your argument refers to looking at the average prettiness of the 8x8 couple's children. If we instead look at the distribution of their children, they will be producing 9s more often than if they had paired as a 8x5. Then their 9 children will pair off with other 9s and have a good chance of producing some 10s, pushing out the extremes of the distribution (even if the averages are unchanged). In contrast, in a world where there was no selection there would surely be a huge hump in frequency in the population at 4-6.
I concede at some stage the pushing out of the distribution runs out of steam due to regression to the mean pressure, but are we there yet? Feels like the pairing off tendency will be stronger than ever due to dating sites, which is a recent phenomenon. So I'd have thought the distribution is currently expanding.
It's not impossible that the best looking people are better looking today than in the past. After all, most of the women featured in paintings by the Old Masters would not get a second glance from the Ford Modeling Agency today, but with at least one exception: Botticelli's model, the noblewoman Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci (a distant in-law of the explorer after whom America is named). She was recognized as extraordinarily beautiful in 15th Century Florence and still is today:
It's not uncommon in intellectual circles for pools of inter-marrying high achievers to emerge. In Britain, for instance, many intellectuals have a Huxley, Darwin, Wedgwood, Benn, Keynes, Arnold, Cockburn, or Waugh in their family tree. In America, Eliots and Huntingtons have long stood out.
The notion that people looked less attractive in the past has a problem - its proponents only look at the women, and not the men.
My impression, when I look at Victorian photographs, is that while the women look "weird" by today's standard, which sometimes makes them oddly unattractive, the men don't look particularly unattractive.
What's going on?
To me it looks like all those faces have gone through a very, very subtle "masculinity filter". Everyone, men and women, looks a little bit more masculine than today. This makes the women weird and maybe even "ugly", but not the men.
You could even make a case that men looked better back then!
Sounds like it could be related to the large decline in testosterone levels since we started measuring like 70 years ago. Higher testosterone levels produce more masculine faces, notably jawlines
I think that the best looking people are better looking today, simply because of a far larger population and far less disease. Yes, there's obesity - but if you look at healthy-weight people in the West, you're looking at a population that's lived better than kings did in the Old Masters' time, in many ways. No smallpox to disfigure you these days.
I want to reply narrowly to one thing you said, which I think indicates a lack of clarity on regression to the mean:
> I concede at some stage the pushing out of the distribution runs out of steam due to regression to the mean pressure
I don't think modelling regression to the mean as pressure is well-formed.
The cause of regression to the mean is the mismatch between phenotype (the physically measurable trait) and genotype (the genetic predeliction toward having that phenotype.) All the polygenic traits of the sort we're discussing have an imperfect correlation between phenotype and genotype; there's an effectively random factor of circumstances and whatnot that makes even identical twin phenotypes diverge.
Regression to the mean is just the fact that when you select from a population based purely on phenotype (say, by picking the top 20% of sheep based on wool production) you're excluding some individuals with a >80% genotype (because their random factors pushed their phenotype below the threshold) and including some individuals with a <80% genotype (because their random factors pushed the phenotype above the threshold.) And genotype is, of course, what breeds true. So their children will have phenotypes that are based on the genotype selection, which is weaker than top 20%.
The biggest takeaway here is that there is NO regression to the mean on genotype. Genotype breeds true. If you can select directly on genotype (as we can in some genetic diseases that have only a few, known genes impacting them), regression to the mean does not exist.
The second takeaway is that regression to the mean is an artifact of selecting breeding pairs based on phenotype. If you don't do that for a generation, then there is no regression to the mean on that generation. For instance, suppose that you breed 100 sheep randomly selected from the top 20% of the population. Their offspring turns out to average top 35%. If you then just randomly breed those offspring with each other, the next generation (grandchildren of the selected pairs) will also average top 35%. And so will their children if you continue breeding from this limited population, and so on. There's no residual pressure to go back to the original mean; the average genotype of this breeding population is all that matters, and it breeds true. (This is how entire breeds of sheep, dogs, etc. become better.)
Thanks for the explanation and examples, really clear to follow.
Does this mean that if you keep selecting and breeding the top 20% of each generation for a certain trait, there is no theoretical limit to how extreme the trait can get e.g. coat length for sheep?
And so looping back to the human example, if the top 5% of beautiful people always couple up, a few generations down the line the new top 5% should be more beautiful than before. Ad infinitum. And ditto for the bottom 5%.
You eventually run into physical/biological limitations. Not all conceivable traits can be expressed by genes. Largely due to biological constraints, most genetic variance is based on tradeoffs. If being tall makes you beautiful (and stronger and more capable), but also increases your chance of dying from heart failure, then as tallness goes to infinity the population starts dying sooner and sooner until they can't breed.
Adding even more to this, beauty standards are partially subjective, and largely correlated with health. If you start making more and more extreme tradeoffs sacrificing valuable traits for superficial beauty, then the healthiest people will no longer be the same as the most beautiful people (by the old beauty standards), which will create a selective pressure on traits that govern beauty standards: people who are attracted to the new healthiest people who haven't made these extreme tradeoffs will have healthier children, eventually leading to a new set of beauty standards.
You do hit a limit eventually. Basically, most traits are less heritable among the top/bottom 1% than they are across the entire range, so the correlation between phenotype and genotype is weaker. Your phenotype selection becomes less powerful as you get closer and closer to the limit of natural variation.
One helpful way to grasp regression-toward-the-mean better is to think about the siblings of exceptional individuals. For example, Brad Pitt's brother Doug, a businessman, is a handsome guy, but as you'd expect, he's not as handsome as Brad:
But what we are looking at is Brad Pitts offspring. He will pair up with someone else good looking, and presumbly have kids which are better looking than him and his siblings (on average), rather than them regressing back to the mean of his parents. If you keep following the most beautiful offspring down the generations, surely the most beautiful 1% of people gets better looking...?
This even more significant given that many traits have opposite effect in different sex. E.g. darker skin, body hair, prognatism. A man marries woman with nice big ass, these nice ass alleles find way into sons (who are 1/2 of the man's offspring) and decrease their SMV.
>And then regression to the mean - beauty isn't just genetic
Regression to mean can be genetic too (non-linear effects)
There are probably traits that are basically carried by one sex and terrible in the other. PCOS is probably one - I've heard of families of slim men and very fat, very masculine-looking women that never had partners. I wonder if that gene makes the men that carry it more attractive...
Consider an animal counter-example. If you breed two 80th percentile wool-producing sheep, their offspring will be below the 80th percentile on average due to regression to the mean. However, we KNOW that people were able to successfully improve average wool production via selecting for nothing but the phenotype. So, what gives?
Well, this just goes back to what regression to mean is. The population of the top 80% phenotypically for a typical polygenic trait will *average* to the top 90% phenotypically, and to something like top 70% genotypically. The correlation between genotype and phenotype is strong, but not even close to 1.0. Regression to the mean is just the observation that a random top-80% pairing will produce children that average 70% phenotypically instead of 90%.
We can summarize this by saying that phenotype is an imperfect proxy for genotype, but it's still a proxy; so if you apply selection pressure to the phenotype, you will be applying some lesser amount of selection pressure to the genotype as well.
In my understanding of population genetics (...so take with a grain of salt), isn't this true for any specific individual, but not true at a group level? Let's say that you cross a cow which is at the 99th percentile for milk production with a bull who can't produce milk but who is, theoretically, also at the 99th percentile for milk production. Their offspring will probably regress to the mean. However, if you keep doing this every generation, then the amount of milk represented by the 99th percentile will increase.
Let's say that my father is an 8/10 man, and my mother is an 8/10 woman. I personally am probably less than 8/10, because of regression to the mean. However, if you keep doing this over time, the quantity represented by 8/10 will tend to rise, because you're selecting for that trait.
Am I in some way mistaken? This does feel sort of paradoxical now that I'm writing it out explicitly.
That kind of regression works better for almost all characteristics, but possibly not beauty -- remember the studies suggesting that perfectly average faces are the most beautiful? To the extent that this is true, mean reversion seems to be on the side of making people prettier each generation.
An 8/10 mother and an 8/10 father already have near-average faces with just a few facial idiosyncrasies here and there. As long as they don't have the same idiosyncrasies then when they breed it's likely they'll wind up with a kid with fewer idiosyncrasies than either, right?
1) beauty standards change over time - the biggest one being the reversal of fat/thin preference over the last 200 years or so. (I'm pretty certain about this - if being fat was seen as ugly, we won't have so many full body portraits of fat men and women who were the nobility of the day. Those people surely had pimples and freckles like everyone else - they don't paint every blemish, so they might be adding weight).
2) Among the more consistent measures of beauty are symmetry, height, and general markers of good health. Average heights have increased just about everywhere worldwide, proving your point. Symmetry and good health stuff (nice hair texture, clear skin, good posture, etc) are strongly correlated with class (freedom from environmental pollutants, backbreaking work, excessive sun exposure, exposures to the kind of situations that create disfiguring scars, etc) and access to resources (in this day and age, dental care, chickenpox vaccinations, adequate hydration, low stress lifestyle).
I mean, I look way better than my grandparents on either side (I'm taller due to access to adequate nutrition, better posture because I got to go to school to do an office job rather than doing backbreaking menial labour, access to dental care from birth, access to vaccinations, no nutritional deficiencies, and non-excessive sun exposure). My mum looks much better than her mother at the same age, and will look better at 80 than my grandma, for much the same reasons minus access to deworming meds, childhood dental care, and ability to address nutrient deficiencies. And I'm probably going to look better than my mother (or aunts from my dad's side) due to being able to fork out $10k for Invisalign early in life (which no one else in my family has been able to do, one of the reasons being Invisalign didn't exist when they were my age).
An 8/10 in 1910 is going to be very different from an 8/10 in 2010, but both of these people are probably going to have outsized access to things that help you avoid things that make people ugly over time (losing all your teeth, getting your face bashed in by a violent drunk because you live in a shitty neighbourhood).
Born in 1958 and raised in a middle class Southern California suburban family a few miles down the street from the Brady Bunch house, I grew up with most of the environmental advantages for good looks, as suggested by my being 6'4". The one exception I can think of is that my teeth were deemed straight enough not to get braces in 1971, but they wouldn't make the cut today.
That said about nurture, an interesting question is whether nature, the genes for good looks, might be clustering more than in the past. I wouldn't rule it out for reasons of the increased ease of assortative mating that were memorably spelled out for intelligence by Richard Herrnstein in his 1971 "Atlantic" article "I.Q.:"
On the other hand, did the New York City-raised Herrnstein understand what mating was really like in the American gentile hinterland before his day? Sociologist-biologist Dalton Conley is attempting to use the new DNA technology to critically assess Hernnstein's influential assumptions. We'll probably have a better understanding of these questions in five or ten years thanks to Conley's work.
So interesting to see social norms change as the structure of society changes. I would expect that we will see that difference in attitudes to income change in years to come, as educated women start to climb career ladders etc and society becomes less patriarchal.
I do find it amusing that "class" is such a strong explainer of peoples' marital choices, when it is itself so hard to agree on a definition for. One thing to consider, which I think Scott covers well, is that there is a lot of space to move around within your "class". For example, if you're a high-earning knowledge worker, you are highly likely to live somewhere full of professionals, have friends who are mostly professionals, use dating apps that professionals use etc etc. You don't need to consider moving outside of that when there are so many people around you with similar lifestyles and values.
It's hard to agree on a definition of "race" too, but in the vast majority of situations everybody understands what is being talked about. The point about there being many people around with similar lifestyles and values does most of the work, with additional understanding that there are also many people with significantly different lifestyles and values out there somewhere.
Isn't this essay directly contradicting the MRA 101 stuff? It shows that mostly there is NO hypergamy, no crisis due to disproportionate educational achievement, etc
I think male hypogamy was more of a thing in the past when executives often married their secretaries. I recall a story from Ben Rich's fascinating book "Skunk Works" about the three marriages of Kelly Johnson, the legendary first head of Lockheed's Skunk Works advanced aircraft design wing. His first wife was dying, so she arranged with his secretary that she would marry Kelly next, and then they explained what they had arranged to the great man. Then his second wife was dying so she found a friend of her who agreed to marry Kelly.
It was common at mid-Century Lockheed for engineers with some college education to marry secretaries with only high school degrees. That's how my parents met. And my mother's best friend in the secretarial pool married Henry Combs, whom Rich credits as the chief designer of the awesome SR-71.
I'm guessing that the spread of typing after the personal computer arrived in the 1980s has reduced the number of secretaries employed by engineering firms.
Also, some secretaries back in mid-Century America were well-educated women who took to secretarial work as a way to meet promising men in order to meet a suitable man, marry, and become a stay-at-home mom.
Yeah some of this is surely that a top 20% intellect woman might be a secretary in 1960. SO they are still matching like for like, just the incomes are very different.
Very good point. In 1960, women's education consisted of none (working class - cooks, janitors, factory, wait staff), vocational (working professionals - secretary, programmer) and women's college/ finishing school (stay-at-home wife).
I'd wonder if a lot of the compatibility is just lifestyle - a working man has a lot more in common day to day with his secretary, who would have lots of opinions and things to say about workplace issues, public issues, etc because she's out all day participating in society, compared to his first wife (a woman who did childcare and chores, and mostly just sat around watching TV or socialising with other housewives when there the chores got automated away and/or delegated to maids).
Something similar happened with Henry J. Kaiser, the Man Who Invented The State Of California And Who Also Won WWII.
As part of his invention of the State of California, Kaiser invented the HMO. When Kaiser's first wife was dying of cancer in a (Kaiser Permanente) hospital, Kaiser arranged for their best nurse to be assigned to take care of his wife. As the wife approached the end, she suggested to her husband and the nurse that they ought to get married, once she passed.
The explicit legal structures that made it more difficult for women to acquire and expand wealth in mid-century America might also have an effect there.
Because one or two of the surveys mentioned a two hundred year period, it might be relevant to point out that divorce became legal in the UK only in 1857, and I believe was difficult and expensive in the US and other western countries until at least that date, and probably well into the 20th century.
Also in the UK, until the 1920s a husband could obtain a divorce on the sole grounds of infidelity, but a wife's petition on the grounds of infidelity required cruelty as well. Although not sure, I would guess this kind of rights asymmetry was also reflected in other countries until around the same time.
So that meant guys could and frequently did "play away" with a mistress, secure in the knowledge that their wife would not be able to take them to the cleaners financially by asking for and obtaining a divorce. That in turn, I would imagine, meant less incentive in the first place for a man to marry a woman solely for her looks.
Just realized this could explain a lot of my relationship woes. If matching is determined to a very high degree by class, I managed to fuck up spectacularly by putting myself in a class with no available partners around me. The "work from wherever you want" thing apparently has downsides as well. This shall require some introspection.
Male and... probably rich for the town I live in. But the whole point of the article is that it's not trivial to date up/down. And also that class is probably about more than income. At least that's how I read it.
Enthusiastically. Lower income is not an issue (it probably makes me feel more of a provider) and formal education is a scam - I mostly finished mine to make my parents happy.
LOL, I was raised middle-middle-class but put myself in the upper-middle-class by education, then sexually imprinted on UMC women. So my social cues are undoubtedly all wrong in ways I'm incapable of understanding. The only remedy I've discovered is to date foreign-born women, who care much less about this.
This is interesting, and I wonder if it's confounded by where people *meet* rather than what people *prefer*.
Highly educated people with well paying jobs tend to meet spouses at university (studying similar degrees), at work (in similar income brackets), or work-adjacent networking type things (again, similar income/class brackets).
I feel this likely explains why the effect is so strong in heterosexual pairings but weak in homosexual pairings - straights meet and date just by existing in society, whereas gay, lesbian and transgender* people often need to go to queer spaces to find partners. Many queer spaces, potentially the demographic as a whole skew poor (as being out often has a negative effect on employment outcomes), so I expect that queer high earners are disproportionately more likely to date a poorer person compared to their straight high earning counterparts.
*Transgender footnote: trans partnerships can be complicated by one or more partner only realising that they're trans after being in a relationship - and apparently a decent proportion of those relationships manage to stay together. In that case initial conditions applying to straight partnerships apply. T4T (where both partners enter the relationship knowing that self is trans and partner is trans) seems to have queer dating dynamics (transcends class boundaries due to being a minority), even if theyre hetero. But gay people seem to rarely meet in the kind of "our friends introduced us to one another and we clicked" way that kicks off many straight partnerships unless they're in overwhelming queer friend groups.... In which case the same thing of most people being kind of poor applies again.
^ this is a meta-analysis I skimmed, concluding that lesbians outearn straight women, but gay men and bi people earn less. I guess it's not as cut and dry as I expected!
I feel like queer people might come from privileged backgrounds, but are at higher risk of losing the relevant privileges (the job you might have gotten from a family friend may be rescinded due to homophobia, not to mention just being disowned and disinherited). This part is speculation.
It might also be a relative (geographic) wealth thing. Queer people have a tendency to move to progressive urban areas which are expensive to live in. They might stay in the bottom quartile income for the city, but they won't look poor compared to the national average. I have no idea how I'd measure this.
It could also be age - there are many more young people openly identifying as LGBT, and income increases with age as a general trend.
I mean, the thing is, the median queer person is not in fact the lesbian CEO of a Fortune 500 or whatever, or even a high earning consultant. Those people don't fear losing their jobs for any reason, basically, and that includes sexuality. They're more likely to be out for that reason.
However they're probably not representative of most queer people, and in the kind of managers-preference, low income workplace like being a supermarket cashier or a waitress, I would say that yeah, it's not unlikely that queer people have a harder time trying to get jobs.
I don't really think it's a "luxury belief" in the way you're saying, no. At the end of the day the blue hair and pronouns crowd still have to eat, and there's just not enough $250k a year media consultant jobs for all of them to be doing that kind of stuff. I posit that progressive spaces hire a small number of visibly queer people (meeting other criteria like graduated from the right school with the right degree) to meet their progressiveness quota, and everyone else resorts to some combination of couch surfing, online commissions, a min wage job at a place with a sympathetic manager, e-begging, and e-prostitution (trans women especially overrepresented in sex work, which is the furthest thing I can think of from being upper class).
Interesting discussion. From my experience, queer people are not uncommon in the banking industry (where I work) but clearly overrepresented in the gastro/service industry (waiters, baristas etc.).
Prejudice is more subtle these days, and not quite as bad. The rule is: DON'T GET CAUGHT. If you want to discriminate against the openly-lesbian waitress, you simply need to not call her back when she goes for an interview. If you want to fire her...you can wait for her to commit some kind of petty infraction, or say that you are "downsizing", or something like that. You also have network effects, such that if most people have a mild bias against queer people they are likely to have less social capital and as such fewer job opportunities.
Yes - as you'd said before, this matters far less where there is a shortage. If you're a mildly or moderately-bigoted supermarket manager who needs bodies, you might prefer the All-American straight employee over the queer one, but you need bodies and literally - in dollars and cents - can't afford to care about things like that.
When the supermarket's letting employees go, however, maybe the queer one who's an average performer gets let go before the straight one that's doing a little worse...Multiply that over thousands of mildly bigoted supermarket managers and you have your effect.
The dynamics have now changed as most people meet their partner online these days. But it’s too early to be reflected in marriage statistics, so we won’t know the full impact of app driven dating for another decade or so.
I vaguely recall reading decades ago that somebody had counted all the marriages in Britain of peers of the realm to chorus girls, actresses, models and the like over a period of a couple of centuries or so. I think they had counted a little over 100 such marriages, although my recollection could be totally off. There are currently 806 hereditary peers. So assuming the study covered, say, six generations, 100 would represent about two percent of lords marrying beautiful and/or charming women from way down the social ladder.
That might be a high estimate. But nobles marrying actresses was definitely a Thing. Here are two newspaper articles from 1913 and 1916 arguing that most such lord-chorus girl marriages turned out to be happy ones:
There's also a phenomenon of wealthy widows marrying younger men that seems somewhat similar to noblemen marrying chorus girls. The wealthy widow marrying young man pattern was more common in the past when many marriages were broken up by one partner's early death.
The Prophet Muhammad's first wife was older and richer, although how much older is unclear. Man of letters Doctor Samuel Johnson's wife was 21 years older than him. (George Washington was one year younger than the rich widow Martha so I wouldn't count that as an example.)
Their husbands are college-educated men, though. They weren't married to plumbers or construction workers. I still think it's comparatively rarer for college-educated women to marry non-college men.
Yes, I am tracking. I think its a sensitivity vs specificity issue too. Splitting "college educated" into finer categories like "exactly how much graduate school" may not have much value here. But also, I think my larger point was wealth is a bigger motivator than marrying up academically to women.
Interesting throughout - though mildly "disappointing": no sand-worms this time. b) "maybe ...there’s no tendency for ugly rich people to marry attractive poor people". Maybe not in numbers high enough enough to show up in those studies. Bernie Ecclestone - again father at 89 - is not alone in this world (if you never heard, seems you do not read tabloids https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/12044460/bernie-ecclestone-wife-family-daughter-f1/ ) .
Having worked/lived in strange places (and being a weirdo), the only 3 constants I see in my partners: female, around 30 yrs. no money; but very different edu/class/looks. - Had I stayed home, I'd hooked up with a colleague or so. with all social markers identical to mine.
I think actually the case of same-sex-marriages warrantes being investigated further, since it might explain a bit the reasons for hypergamy (or lack thereof).
Spontaneously, I can think of three good reasons for same-sex couples to care less about it:
1. Scott already brought up the more diverse community/online dating aspect.
2. I would guess that family pressure still plays a much smaller role in same-sex relationships. If your parents are not on board with your relationship anyways, or don't much care if and when you get married, they are less likely to pressure you into an "appropriate" marriage.
3. Since most same-sex relationships (I think?) still remain childless, the idea or finding an appropriate match to found a family of a certain wealth or education and provide accordingly for children plays no or very little role.
Maybe looking at studies of subsets could help clear this up?
My guess, based on nothing but vibes, might be that same-sex relationships that do raise children might be likelier to look like different-sex relationships (in terms of both parents being from the same class, and things like this).
But I think the research will always come up short as long as it tries to work with narrowly defined and objective definitions of status. Status is in some sense a typical zero-sum game, but in other ways not, because the factors that go into judging any individual’s status will be highly subjective, subconscious, contextual, and constantly changing.
Someone who grew up surrounded by people with college degrees, will probably discount the status of education relative to qualities that were less common in their environment. A million dollars provides more status in East New York than on the Upper East Side. Status at the gym or on Instagram are different from status at the office or the club. And Bill Gates’ status was higher when his name was associated less with Epstein’s.
In the end, status is our subjective guess at others’ relative reproductive fitness, which will always be in flux, and impossibly hard to pin down in studies like these.
On a sort of related tangent...
I’ve discussed status a few times with my 14-yo daughter lately. It’s not great, but as this whole discussion proves, status is much more important for success and happiness than people will typically admit. Telling young people (as people often do) not to worry about what other people think or say about them seems like bad advice. It’s probably better to help them to see through it, and to recognize the games we play.
While I don’t expect my daughter to marry or start a career or build impressive wealth any time soon, the jockeying for status is definitely on, and is going to play a big (constantly changing) role in her life. And so, how do you play the status game at 14 in a way that sets you up for a happy and successful life when you’re 15, 25 and 50? Smart choices, like doing well in school *might* break into the top five status factors for a teenager, but only if it doesn’t look like you’re trying too hard and it doesn’t mean having to sacrifice being perceived as fun.
So what’s the optimal strategy in the lifetime game of status ...?
That sounds good, but unfortunately it’s probably not true. But it may be good to internalize the game so you don’t even know when you’re playing it – and certainly don’t show it. 😉
If that's a comment on the status game then I strongly disagree.
I furthermore think that believing this is a horrible trap that many smart (but not naturally high-status) teenagers fall into, to their peril. Some do not emerge by adulthood, and wind up very unhappy.
Like it or not, we are humans and we are bound by the laws of status as much as we're bound by the laws of gravity. Status is the key to all good things in life. Whatever you want in life, having more status will help you get it. Furthermore, status feels good -- there's a part of your brain that really really wants status, and the more status you gain the better it feels.
If you don't play the status game you will lose it by default -- you become the fat bearded guy in the corner who wants to talk about Warhammer 40K. But if you play it too hard or in the wrong way then you lose too. You can also lose by playing the game while lying/rationalising to yourself that you're not really playing the game (like the guy who wants you to convince you that his $40,000 watch is actually really practical because it shows the phase of the moon).
You win the game by playing it deliberately, consciously, and with an eye on what you're actually trying to accomplish. You listen to the part of your brain that wants more status but you don't let it rule you. You collect that status the same way you collect money -- as a tool to get you the things you really want.
On the object level, I agree with your comment. We're social creatures and depend on other people to meet our physical, emotional, and spiritual needs; "no man is an island" and all that. So yes, pragmatically, we have to play status games and we should therefore play them well.
On a meta level, I don't believe that status ought to be held up as an end in itself. In my understanding of Stoic and Taoist traditions, wisdom is can be expressed in terms detachment from the status. Stoics don't deny the instrumentality of status, but they see it as a mirage, a Goodhart proxy measure for happiness. The wise are happy because they are satisfied with themselves or their Selves, not because other people show them deference. In this sense, they win by not playing.
If I had to give honest advice to a teenager, I would advise them to find a niche where they can excel and pursue their goals. I was that "smart (but not naturally high status)" kid you mention. For someone like that, trying to compete against the front runners on their own terms is a sub-optimal strategy. Find the niche where you are most competitive, or make one. Just don't confuse the immediate warm-and-fuzzy of social validation with long-term satisfaction. Pursuing status for its own sake is a losing strategy, no matter who you are.
> That is: if men cared about looks more than women, then they would trade off status for looks: faced with a choice between an average-looking woman of the same class, or a beautiful woman of a slightly-lower class, they would choose the beautiful-but-poor woman. But this would mean men would marry lower-class women more often than women married lower-class men, which would imply a less-than-perfect status correlation between husbands and wives. But the data show a pretty perfect status correlation between husbands and wives. Therefore, men can’t care about looks.
Every time a higher class man marries a lower class woman it leads to a lower class woman also marrying a higher class man. Men would be marrying lower class women more often than women were marrying lower class men, but equally this implies that women would be marrying higher class men more often than men would be marrying higher class women. So the reduction in correlation of status between men marrying women vs women marrying men would go both ways, even if it was just men caring more about looks than women.
Embedded in these calculations is the idea that once a person is married they aren't free to marry somebody else. But serial monogramy is the norm. I'd be interested in learning if materially successful men tend to have more marriages than the mean, or the median. The upper echelon women do not have to 'marry down' if they are willing to be married for a shorter term. How do the 'formerly married' show up in these surveys?
I don't have any data but I would assume that's the case now. I believe previously women also got remarried at the same rate as the men. Now I suspect divorce rates will skew this more towards the men getting remarried (small pool) as the cost of remarriage is nothing for these men.
It’s an interesting post but the concept of hypergamy is very different than the one I’m used to reading about. In the redpill manosphere hypergamy is more about the type of man a woman will choose for sex vs the type of man she will marry. Beta bucks(good provider)vs Alpha fucks. It’s a woman’s duel sexual strategy. Women will marry a man of equal or lesser status if he is a reliable dependable provider but will cheat and fuck a man who is culturally more masculine or exciting. This understanding of hypergamy goes along way in describing why women cheat and marriages fail. When I saw title of the post I was hoping Scott would be critiquing the manosphere.
I’m mostly familiar with The Rational Male series by Rollo Tamasi, but Bruce Bryans is pretty good and more succinct. But also the Book of Pook is also good. Start with “The Secret of the Jerk” and “Be a Man” chapters.
Also “Blue Valentine” and “The Tao of Steve” are two good “redpill” movies. The Tao of Steve is a cautionary tale for redpill men that take things too far and for too long.
I suppose one could argue that the conclusion that women choose husbands more based on income than on status supports the "women marry beta bux" thesis of the redpillers --
"beta bux" being a man who is higher in income, but lower in status. The "choose for sex outside of marriage" issue is beside the point, because hypergamy has always been about marriage choices, not short term sexual ones (although I know that the red pill sphere uses it in the latter way), so it's not really something that is studied, I'd think.
I'm not able to figure out what is meant by "high status" there; the way it is used seems to be something like "top beef sires" if I'm using an agricultural metaphor:
They don't seem to mean "most intelligent, most cultured, most achievements", it's all about "has the Bad Boy energy and big dong because women are shallow and only care about that". It reminds me of that Stonetoss cartoon:
What men think women want, and what women want, aren't the same thing (same goes the other way: what women think men want, and what men want, aren't the same). The people truly impressed by your big, big bulging muscles and gains are not women, it's your fellow lifting bros.
Do women like handsome, sexy guys and would take them if they could get them? Yes. The same way men like pretty, sexy girls and would take them if they could get them, but somehow it's only women that are cheaters for that preference.
I think a more steelmanned version might be that women like men they find attractive, where attractive also includes things like "exciting" and "romantic." That women tend to marry men who are good income providers, which is a separate criteria from the men they are attracted to, seems to be a source of contention.
I don't know that "high status" is a meaningful construction here.
This is a good steelmanning. I would also add that the man may not be a good provider but a good father to children from a previous relationship. The manosphere calls this retroactive cuckoldry. A big reason the “redpill” is popular is because men particularly young men are oblivious to all this.
Yeah a lot of the redpill stuff is not really my thing, but this is absolutely a phenomena that leads to a LOT of angst.
I had a lot of dating success and partners (mostly serially) from ~16-25, and have long been happily married.
But two women I dated for over a year, in retrospect were never really very into me sexually. One of them I got engaged to briefly, and one of whom chased me for literally YEARS before she finally landed me for a while.
In both relationships things were hot and heavy at the start, and there was a reasonable amount of sex. But in both in retrospect they were with me for totally non-sexual, non-romantic reasons.
Luckily a lot of my other relationships and my marriage are more genuinely based on romance. Though even there, as amazing as the marriage and its sex life are, sex is still a much larger portion of the "relationship pie" for me than my wife.
I'm not even sure how to measure "high status". Is a full-on computer geek who owns a software company and who walks around in a bathrobe all day "high status"?
What about a plumbing contractor, union standard 1 1/2" of crack exposed at all times, but who rakes in the ducats?
I think “ high status” is a relative dependent on the needs of the woman. A woman might marry a higher status but boring rich and powerful nerd but then go out and fuck a high-t exciting gang member or biker. The redpill is about helping men become the kind of guy that fulfills a woman’s hypergamys duel sex strategy. A good looking exciting high earning loving father type. This is very difficult to do. That’s why most redpill evangelists discourage marriage.
I don't think there is a consistent definition of high status. Or if there is, it's a hilarious caricature of masculinity: think Patrick Bateman as a role model. Actually, that's pretty literally what Andrew Tate is.
Which has lead to weird situations where I'll hear people call Will Smith or Bill Gates a beta and, I mean, by any objective measurement they're both among the highest status people on the planet.
But as far as I can tell, "high status" or what the modern red-piller is selling is:
-Make as much money as possible
-Be ripped, ie six-pack
-Have "social status" meaning whatever will win influence on Instagram
-Be as sociopathic as possible, ie "frame"
But it also kind of makes sense. At the practical level, they're not selling anything Jordan Peterson wasn't selling, they just stripped out all the Boomer "responsibilities" and replaced it with the fantasy of the rich playboy lifestyle and placed all the blame on women. Of course that sold better to young, frustrated men.
And we're stuck with it because, well, I won't say it works well, but it works better than anything else people are selling. Sheepish admissions that women might be attracted to men based on on their income and fitness, rather than just their character, is not going to outcompete conmen who are selling the bejeezus out of a male fantasy that makes James Bond look tame.
Bill Gates and Will Smith are beta because they are extremely rich but considered nerds or bitches by redpill guys. Would any woman even look at Bill Gates if he weren’t rich? Will Smith is bullied and cucked by Jade all the time.
Even outside of the modern 'red pill sphere' stuff, looking only at marriage and excluding all the mistresses high status men historically had seems to be missing the point; If one wants to try and look at an 'objective' line between relevant relationships and irrelevant ones, children make the most sense as that line, since that's all evolution cares about, and plenty of men have had children with mistresses.
I realise that it's very comforting for men who can't attract a partner to think that even if they did get one, she'd just be a cheating whore spreading her legs for the Alpha bad boy with a harem, but it does get a little tiresome.
Do some women cheat? Yes. Do some men cheat? Also, yes. Humans of both sexes like sexual novelty. Not all marriages fail because of the cheating wife, sometimes it's the man is to blame. Sometimes both. "Marry in haste, repent at leisure" is a saying for a reason.
And honestly, if my choice was "guy who is relentlessly jealous and suspicious and thinks I'm just waiting for the chance to cheat on him", why would I even bother with that guy in the first place?
I’ve only listened to the audiobook version of these sources so I haven’t seen the bibliographies but they say the concepts are developed by evolutionary and behavioral psychology backed up by crowd sourced anecdotal evidence collected over twenty years on Internet forums. This quote from Sheryl Sandberg sort of sums it up.
“When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them. The things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home. These men exist and, trust me, over time, nothing is sexier.” ― Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
And the same advice is reasonable for a man. Date all the crazy hot party girls and then find someone who isn't going to ruin your life. It's just that no one is writing reasonable books for men to read that aren't hyperbolic T-dosing PUAs
It's the old model of men sow their wild oats when young, then settle down to marriage and a family with a different kind of woman to the one they were playing around with.
Nowadays women get the same chance. I don't necessarily think it's great for both sexes to run around like this, especially as there seems to be a pattern of cohabitation not leading on to marriage (e.g. that linked article in another post about Sean McElwee; he was living with his girlfriend for seven years, then broke up with her - and seemingly went on the 'now I'm free I can date the hot girls' spree, though that might just have been bravado). Seven years is long enough to be a marriage, so why didn't they marry?
I was a bit unkind to the guys above, but I do think it's more reassuring to the bruised ego if you can phrase it as "it's not me, it's them" - I'm a perfectly okay guy but women don't want men like me until they hit the wall and need to find a sucker to pay for them while they cheat on him with the chads.
People need to be sold a vision of why marriage is useful and valuable. In Canada, at least, we don't have to get married so that our partners can access the supreme luxury of medical coverage. I can see a couple of reasons:
- Marriage is hard to dissolve so maybe you'll stick around and enjoy the benefits of a partner in old age when you can't go around screwing hotties on Tinder
- ...
- The financial business/property arrangement side of things
- Having children with the same last name or something
At least in Canada, we don't need to get married so our partner can access the supreme luxury of a medical insurance policy with a $15k/year deductible so there's another point against marriage here (and maybe for marriage in the US)
Maybe some part of him knew they wouldn't be together forever and he didn't want the absolutely massive financial implications of divorce? There's definitely a category of relationship that's way better than being single but not good enough for life partnership, and depending on how much time and energy one has for looking for a better one vs. eg. focusing on career advancement, it doesn't make sense to break up.
I think there is probably just one female mating strategy, which would be competing for Alpha Bucks.
If Alpha Fucks/Beta Bucks was truly a female strategy, we would see a LOT more genetic cuckoldry in the data before birth control was invented. But cuckoldry has always been pretty dang rare in humans--less than 2% or so.
Thanks this is interesting. I think this is a huge problem with social psychology. Almost nothing seems to replicate. I’m just not sure how gender dynamics and human relationships can be tested in a lab or with a questionnaire. I think it’s similar to Freudian psychoanalysis it’s not really taken seriously by professionals but is still sort of has some practical utility. The Alpha Fucks/Beta Bucks redpill relies, for better or worse, on crowd sourced anecdotal evidence. I agree it certainly isn’t the skeleton key to understanding women, however it’s certainly a helpful and useful concept to keep in mind in real life.
Also the manosphere talks about retroactive cuckoldry. When a man marries a woman how has already had children with another man. Divorce and remarriage is very common these days. So you have women marrying there sexy alpha then divorcing and settling down with a more reliable beta.
Women aren’t necessarily even getting married to a “good genes” alpha they’re just getting pregnant by him then desperately finding a beta bucks guy to marry and raise alphas kids.
I'm not sure how I could find data for the number of women who have kids with a man they didn't marry, then marry later on. I'm looking at stats for single moms. (https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/04/25/the-changing-profile-of-unmarried-parents/) It looks to me that around half of single moms have never been married, and around half (not necessarily the same half) are not currently cohabitating with anyone. It seems like a pretty bad reproductive strategy--a less than 50% chance of even living with (much less marrying) that reliable beta after having kids with someone else?
The rise in single motherhood doesn't seem to be a deliberate cuckoldry thing, where a woman specifically plans to have kids with one type of dude and have another type of dude raise them. If I had to guess, I would guess that it's a result of both men and women wanting sex without commitment and having oopsy-babies. If men indulge their greater socio-sexual desires (i.e. fucking a variety of partners), as per the redpill, more babies out of wedlock would be a natural consequence, even if women are all competing for Alpha Bucks alone.
The twist that I always got caught up on is that the guys saying that absolutely want to be hypergamous, but just about looks and whoriness than money and education. The vibe I always got from these arguments was that they wanted to be sex-hypergamous, and it always felt like a silly double standard. Yes, you want the best mate possible, women may just have a different dimension on which they choose than men.
The MRA have some points, but any movement that is as focused on "women cheating" as much as they are really is missing some basic facts about the general nature of male/female relationships.
Women cheating is a HUGE deal, as raising kids that aren't your own involuntarily isn't something they need to worry about but men do. But they are also so much less likely to do it, especially in an otherwise happy relationship.
You don’t think women are less likely to cheat? Not sure where you would get reliable results in cheating data but I would be blown away if it were true men cheated less. I would bet at VERY heavy odds.
I mean, heterosexual sex requires 1 man and 1 woman, who do you suppose all those cheating men are sleeping with? unless your model is that single men have no sex while single women sleep with married men??
In general my presumption for anything heterosexual is that things are roughly symmetrical, and while that's a weak prior on my part, you haven't presented any evidence, only your personal disbelief.
Unattached women and/or women in open relationships/sex workers.
The idea that coupled women are as interested or willing to cheat as couples men is farcical to anyone with the vaguest sense of actual hetero relationships.
Next thing you are going to tell me that gay men don’t take better care of their appearance than hetero men.
I think you are over-simplfiying the "rich people meet poor people all the time".
First, how do they know? in apps, Status markers can be different for different classes/cultures. Is it an expensive car? a trip overseas? I mean, it is all abstract, no one is saying "I swiped right because I estimated he/she makes 180K a year".
You just, kind of, look at the clothes, the setting, and how they make you feel - and you just feel better about things that match high status for your class/culture - that are status markers for you.
So, for example, a googler would have pictures from trips abroad, and a girl from the Appalachians (to be stereotypical) would be looking for a big truck.
Secondly, even though rich people meet poor all the time, they don't meet them in social settings. Most people don't chat with the cleaner in the office, or the cashier at the shop.
The people they meet in social settings are much more likely to be from their own class.
Googlers will also list their job as "Software Engineer", and some apps even explicitly have an income field for people to filter on, though that seems like it invites gold digging rather than matching like for like (and class is often more about familial wealth than current income)
"So it seems more like neither gender cares about looks than that both do.
How do we square this with the fact that obviously men care a lot about whether women are attractive or not?
Also, rich people meet poor people all the time. Poor people are their secretaries, servants, waitresses, and Uber drivers. Sometimes they have casual sex with these people. They just don’t (usually) marry them."
Yes,that's pretty much it. I won't say all wealthy/high-status men did it, but traditionally there was always the mistress for looks (and other things, intelligent conversation and social ease are also part of it) while you married a woman of your own class/status as wife and mother.
There's an anecdote and I can't remember the exact details, about a king being rebuked by his confessor for taking mistresses instead of remaining faithful to his wife. The king arranged that the confessor should have partridge every day for dinner, and after a while asked the confessor if he was tired of it. Upon being told yes, he would like to eat something else, the king said "The same way you are tired of eating the same thing every day, even though it is the best, is why I take mistresses".
Um, Scott is the person who wrote that question. I get the feeling you did not read it very carefully mr ratking, I didn't point this out the first time I saw one of your comments do this but two is too many.
What about the supposed female tendency to get useless degrees for their 'educational attainment'? A woman with a four year degree in gender and women's studies is less educated in absolute terms than her boyfriend who got a two year in cybersecurity, and also earns less money. Of course, they might not bother to marry - she'd lose her health insurance.
"Class" already incorporates the difference between a women studies and a cybersec major.
Unlucky recepients of welfare queen degrees who didn't make valuable connections in college and don't have family support, will graduate with $40K+ student debt, get a part time job flipping burgers, get pregnant, and live off child support and welfare. A cybersec boyfriend will outclass her.
I'm not sure what about my original comment prompted you to make yours, but it certainly wasn't the point I was actually making. Let's just pretend this never happened, shall we?
That is true of gay men but not of lesbian women; should be easy enough to check if lesbian partnerships are similarly less contingent on matching class.
I’m the guy who wrote that negative review of Richard Reeves book that Scott mentioned above [taboo.substack.com/p/reeves]. I wanted to give a little context for that.
There’s a lot of good things about the book, Reeves brings up how dismal family courts are for men, how the American Psychological Association has defined masculinity as pathological, how the government is failing to take action on many of the crises affecting young men. But he had some faulty interpretations of the education data that ended up leading him to victim blame boys for the education gap. I dug into the data on that in my review and have a forecast coming out soon on college enrollment.
As a gay guy, a pretty obvious fact about gay dating is that you're already forced to be selective on a rare trait, namely *being gay*, which leaves a lot less room to be selective on other traits.
You might prefer a partner of the same social class, but the usual routes by which straight people meet such partners --- university classmates, work colleagues, friends-of-friends, etc. --- are only ~5% effective if you're gay. So typically you're forced to be more open-minded about meeting people outside of your immediate circles (or shifting your social circles to be mostly gay, i.e., joining the 'gay community', which amounts to the same thing).
This predicts that gay relationships will tend to look more heterogenous (less selective, more like random cross-assignment) on any other axis you care to choose: race, class, education, age, religion, and so on. Many of the other explanations (gays being more likely to meet through cruising, apps, etc) seem to me to be epiphenomena of this reality: not wrong, but fundamentally downstream of the basic math of the situation.
This is a very plausible explanation to me, and I wonder if it applies to highly-endogamous small groups. Do Orthodox Jews have more heterogeneous pairings than other straight couples? What about Mormons outside Utah? What about black women in areas of the country that are only a few percent black?
Absolutely true for insular religions - for them the relevant 'class' is "goes to the right church" and the tolerance for income disparities is higher. That's one where you'd have to study Father-in-Laws, though, because the extent to which religion matter enough to dominate is going to correlate strongly with cultures where women are expected to be stay at home mothers and won't really have an income of their own to look at.
I’m not sure you can assume no class-attractiveness correlation in general, but in particular in any dataset going back to the 19th Century there are going to be fairly substantial class-cosmetics and class-soap correlations.
More relevantly, education level is a terrible proxy for social class unless you very carefully rank it by institution (and institution class, not institution quality, to avoid putting MIT above Middlebury); you’d want either parents’ education level or grandparents’ income.
Insight from a friend: perhaps women are still hypergamous on education, but the crashing marriage rate may be disguising this fact? Perhaps women are still, on average, discerning on education status but many are not marrying partly for this reason?
IMO other factors like the illusion of choice and the assumption that they need to be farther along in their careers to properly raise a child are bigger factors. However, it seems plausible hypergamy on education must account for the decline in marriage partially.
Many men view female education as a negative for marriage. When they meet a social worker, rather than thinking wow, she has a masters, they think wow, 100k in debt, next. It’s literally a reverse dowry.
TLDR: IMHO, the people who ACTUALLY USE the word "hypergamous" who you will encounter at a bar or family gathering are men who WANT TO BE hypergamous, but for hot ladiez and not education, but are unable to so they seize on this word as a pat explanation.
Something that is hinted at but not really satisfied is that the people who use the word "hypergamy" are not usually making strong intellectual points. The PUAs and MRAs on reddit from 8-10 years ago were complaining of female hypergamy where it applied to not dating them and instead dating interesting chads who had money and big dicks, while complaining that they could be "male hypergamous" and get laid by a different woman every night of the week.
And also, I feel like something is missing... In my experience, there is a LOT of dating activity that isn't captured in the studies that you have access to. My dating career in Toronto was flush with a lot of dates that I had no real right to, simply because I was a moderately successful man in a city full of highly educated women who would never date a man with a blue collar job, who can talk the talk on Tinder.
And if you come to a nearby Canadian city of Hamilton, Ontario, you see a lot of moderately attractive men with very unattractive women. The educated people (women) flee to Toronto and set up an unequal dating pool there, and leave an unequal dating pool behind in Hamilton.
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How I prefer to use "hypergamy":
- hypergamy == dating up for any reason
- people who are highly sensitive to the dimension of which they are being hypergamous and who STRIVE for it
Why? Most of the time I encountered the practical usage of the term was in complaints that women were "branch swinging B***s" who would leave you for a better man at the drop of a hat. There were very few reasoned arguments.
This is not where the "red pill"-whatever is today.
As far as I can tell, most of the self-pitying types went on to form the incel subculture or variations thereof.
Instead, most of the current stuff is this self-improvement "hustle-grind" thing that's basically selling a caricature of masculinity as the only solution to dating problems. On the upside, there's not a lot of self-pity anymore, instead there's a heavy focus on making money and losing weight and judgment of people who can't. On the downside...they're basically selling Patrick Bateman to young men as a role-model.
But yeah, the "hypergamy" stuff isn't Mystery anymore, goofy as he was, it's Andrew Tate.
The problem is that it's a time bomb - modern red pill basically sells the idea that if you're not a top 1% male you're a failure, and also that everyone can be a top 1% male - its a very unstable culture and I expect it to be co-opted by another ideology in the next decade as young men get a little older and confront reality. On the other hand, this message can be sold indefinitely to new cohorts of young men as they enter adulthood, so it's possible it will be stable in its appeal but not in its adherents.
Great point! I guess it's better that the incels split off? I took what I could of value from some kind of male-viewpoint-centric movement and then moved on so it's been a long time since I checked in.
I wonder if humans are so moldable that we should worry about people receiving messages on a spectrum of outright toxic -> suboptimal -> little messages or guidance -> antithetical messages that are against their interests. That's kind of how I see the problem of the aimless man these days. You have incel toxicity -> PUA/biz-fluencers/real estate agents -> no messaging received -> positive feminist ideas -> anti-male rhetoric from angry women
I was a red-pill Reddit guy 8-10 years ago. Still am in a way, though I'm now older and married and Reddit banned most of the interesting subs.
It wasn't that my worldview was "molded" by the red pill internet. It merely gave me a vocabulary to describe a reality that was already clear to me by 10th grade. Call it my "lived experience" if you will. What I saw was that the liberal feminists(and also conservative Christian moral purity people) seemed to be living in an alternate reality, while the red-pill people described it as it was.
I wonder if there is more hypergamy in religious communities, small towns, etc. not so much because they’re more “traditional” but because there are more opportunities to develop strong social relationships across class lines when you go to the same church and live in a town of 10k people vs if you are secular and live in a large city. In the latter case, you’re almost assuredly meeting someone through work or friends (which would strongly increase the odds of people having equal educational/income) or apps.
Small towns do have a lot more social mobility, and some nicer way of saying "lack of options" is part of it. It's also true that both relative and absolute wealth disparities and cultural differences are much smaller. It's hard to live in a town of 2,000-10,000 people and have very different cultural expectations. There also just isn't the means to have 1000X the wealth and income as other people, usually not even 100X . Frankly, even 10X above median is rare. I live in a fairly rural area, and could probably name most of the people who make more than $500k/year - their names are often on car dealerships or other businesses.
Footnote 8 suggests that "educational attainment, income, etc - are proxies for some underlying value that suitors are able to assess more finely than the statistics." My immediate reaction is, do you mean IQ?
g is going to be a big one, but I also think there are other stable selection targets like health and motivation/ambition - it seems likely that despite the extreme novelty of the age in some ways, reproductive selection is probably mostly unchanged by these novelties insofar as the targets of selection. Much more so, however, insofar as these targets/traits are represented by individuals - displays of wealth, makeup, Instagram, etc. are going to alter what appears healthy/intelligent/capable far more rapidly than humans are going to start selecting for other factors.
The negative selection effect is the dominating one. No-one* feels comfortable spending a lot of time with someone more than 1 SD away in thinking ability. And that tendency is enough to drive the statistical correlations.
*I predict a general study of spouse IQ will show <15% of couples are more than 15 points away from each-other, and less than 1% are more than 30 points different. An ACX survey would be <30% and <7.5% respectively, since it skews high, and >50% of marriages are between two people of around 100 IQ who don't read ACX
This is my hypothesis as well, but I'd love to see it tested. I know it's true for me--I find it difficult to make conversation with people who have below average IQs.
That being said, there's a stereotype that men like dumb women. There's also a stereotype of dads being dumb and incompetent and their wives running the show and taking care of everything. So I could see the data going in either direction (either men or women on average being hypergamous for g)
Men are socialized to focus and excel at a single thing, while women are socialized towards multitasking. Running a household is multitasking, so the wife leans all the skills needed to, for example, clean Ketchup off a counter. And then the husband looks fooling when he can't do any of the 17 things he never bothered to learn because he was focused on being the best [job], and emotionally supportive spouse, and Football fan. Different application of same g.
On the flip side, dumber people are easier to control, and some people (of both genders) want to be in control, rather than have an equal partner (and/or they don't value the partners g, so they filter for higher beauty and/or wealth).
My understanding is that it's the difference between stated preferences and actual choices.
Virtually every large study - some cross-cultural - shows that men will rate looks a bit higher than women do whilst women rate financial resources a bit higher than men do. However when you look at actual relationships/marriages, you find evidence of assortative mating. People are pairing up with those who are similar to them. The highest correlations are in social status, education/intelligence, political and religious views, etc.
Off the top of my head, hypergamy is driven by the characteristics that make women hypergamous (focus, drive for security, etc.), rather than the money or education per se. that I, hypergamy is a proxy for those characteristics.
I haven't read the post in full because I got confused right away. Doesn't 'older, more educated men marrying younger, less educated women' solve this? Why doesn't that let you to have both absolute and relative hypergamy always even with everyone getting married, it's just that the men get an education first, marry when older, women marry young first, get education later?
I propose an alternative conjecture for women marrying down and I'd be curious to the extent that the data supports or refutes it: education matters less than it used to. It was only ever a proxy for the things women actually cared about (income, social class, etc) and we are in the early stages of the correlation starting to fail. I'm not saying it's already failed (although maybe it has) but rather it's lost momentum as a signifier. The most successful people of my generation in my family are among the least educated, maybe we're an outlier but I suspect we aren't.
As for the lack of rich white Google programmers marrying stunning girls from the class fringes, you yourself posited the most likely answer some years back when you were living in Michigan: people self-segregate at an almost unbelievable that-number-is-so-big-you-obviously-made-it-up level. Going to university is the one chance (at least in America?) to really mix with people of even slightly different social classes, and the people who become rich Google programmers were busy studying and hacking.
Naively I would expect the trends and preferences to be for the "best" marriage in your social circle, which will be circumscribed and kinda homogenous. You don't marry the prettiest girl you've ever met, you marry the prettiest girl you know well enough to date and eventually marry. You don't marry the richest man you've ever met, you marry the richest man you know well enough that he asks you out and you eventually get married. I don't have to tell you that it's actually really hard (especially in crowds that put a de-emphasis on traditional gender roles) to pursue a relationship with someone, you just aren't going to go way outside your own tribe to find the "best deal on the market".
When I look inward at my character flaws, I find that I do care a lot about status in a partner, but it has little to do with income or education.
I care if my partner can make other people jealous. This can be through a combination of measurable qualities such as attractiveness and height, and hard to measure qualities such as charisma, interestingness, suave-ness, and involvement in the community.
I think it's possible that women could select for status, and that this would be undetectable in studies.
On the other hand, I do consider this a character flaw: I know in my brain that "ability to make other people jealous" is not going to make me happy in the long run!
Ma’am, I’ve been searching for answers for 11 years, and I think you just hit the nail on the head. Your vulnerable and introspective writing is a gift. Thank you.
I realize now I’ve been making the mistake of trying to advertise *competence in relationship*, when actually the heuristic most people live by is “will my involvement with this person spark envy in others”. Now I’m wondering how to advertise enviability. This strikes me as a perverse but rewarding social game that will yield more/better “dating” experiences but will lead both parties astray from forming quality relationships.
Looking inward myself, I can see that I apply the same heuristic, but the social praxis of what sparks envy in others is very deeply gendered. In many cases, just being found acceptable for touch and intimacy is hugely affirming for male-bodied people of their own worth, status, and enviability; we spend most of the time being implicitly or explicitly told our physical presence is menacing, burdensome, untouchable, plain, and unremarkable. I think this explains the gendered slant in behaviors of sexual solicitation.
This feels refreshingly honest. An additional piece to it might be that women are more susceptible to “advertising”/hype, due to their socialization being centered around consensus-building, and most advertising (not just commercials but media in general) being targeted towards them.
As a guy, it feels like a lot of women have been duped into wanting the guy who’s *most* X, where X is any given quality that’s been overly hyped by the mainstream, at the cost of us trying to be well-balanced people.
In reality, I think the actual best way to make anyone *actually jealous* is to be as happy as you can. Which I, (possibly arrogantly/naively), feel like I might have an actual shot at if not for corrupting influences.
I feel somewhat like this is not what I meant. The fact that men seem to like beautiful women doesn't necessarily indicate that they're unusually susceptible to advertising, since advertising contains beautiful women. In the same way, I don't think that the fact that (one) women like(s) "high-status" men, where "high-status" is defined as some mish mash of traits that I think would make others envy me, necessarily has anything to do with manipulation by corporations.
In addition, someone's "status" is a part of their overall attractiveness to me, but like any type of attractiveness, it's not the only thing I base my relationships on. Maybe if I were looking for a fling it would have more of an impact, but since I'm mainly looking for relationships I value the things that I imagine most people value: compatibility, kindness, trustworthiness, the traits of a well-rounded and good human being.
It seems implausible to me that an attraction that’s explicitly based on “what other people envy” *wouldn’t* be corrupted by external influences. I mean it seems true just definitionally speaking.
I didn’t mean to imply men are immune to the same effect. But I have lost a couple friendships because they didn’t like the girls I was in a relationship with. I feel like women prioritizing romantic relationships over friendships is rare.
If feel like all the conclusions are about actual marriage outcomes in modern society rather than underlying preferences (which is fine! Outcomes are important, revealed preference is interesting!). But I think a lot of the thinkers you're responding to here are talking about the more basic evolutionary impulses that in practice get tempered by societal pressure/increasing age of marriage/long term planning for child success.
You could have also written a post about how everyone says men are naturally polygamous, but that in Western Europe and North America you find very few instances of men actually legally marrying multiple women.
I work in anti-fraud and identity theft and can speak on that angle, although I think its a small contributor overall to what you are interested in here. You state that scam artists are mostly women trying to scam men. This is not actually the case. Its mostly men scamming both genders, though women (or at least female voices) are very useful for actually accomplishing the fraud, they aren’t strictly speaking necessary, especially now with AI advances. Fake AI generated women, both photos and voices, slammed into the romance fraud world like a tsunami in the last 6 months. The reason this feels like its primarily an area when men are the primary targets is simply b/c there are many more men than women on dating sites and replying to personal ads etc than there are women. Women honestly looking for a relationship tend to succeed much faster than men and use online tools less, so the mark pool is mostly full of men. While the majority of romance fraud victims are in fact men, from my experience when women are taken by it they tend to lose more money, are harder to convince it’s a fraud, and generally have fewer defenses against manipulation. They skew older as well.
All the dating site data is ruined by this reality. You mention a baseline of men sending low quality “want to bang?” type messages possibly confounding the data. While its difficult to know exactly what the numbers are, I would speculate that automated romance fraud “fishing” messages outnumber them considerably. The majority of the messages all men receive on dating sites from “women” are fishing bots from romance scammers. The footnote with the anecdotes from the woman trying to use Christian Mingle, and her confusion with the experience, pattern matches automated fraud-bots. When she mentions men not responding to her messages, or her replying to men but then they seem to disappear is explained by those “men” not being real. These are likely fishing messages where an actual human is not available to pick up the mark for a number of reasons, most likely the bot has been abandoned but is still running mindlessly as CM has bad automated enforcement processes against bad actor accounts. Or based on her replies she was written off as a bad prospect.
None of this really speaks to the subject of hypergamy in any meaningful way, but it does explain why the messaging data from dating sites is worse than useless.
(Romance frauds are among the saddest professional experiences I have. Most other marks are vulnerable to scams due to a combination of greed, stupidity, arrogance, and entitlement. Romance fraud victims are often just lonely and inexperienced with the opposite sex.)
I have no idea and the sites themselves are pretty uncooperative with private investigators. I suspect its to hide the number of their own bot-accounts which arent used for fraud per se but to hide the massive gender disparity of authentic accounts. The only real data we have is from Ashley Madison getting hacked back in '15 revealing something like a 900-1 male/female ratio.
That's very informative, thanks. (I had not thought hard enough on the problems of using messaging data from dating sites to say something meaningful about male & female mating preferences.)
If you ever write a blog post somewhere talking about your experiences with your work, I'd be super interested to read it. If you ever write something up somewhere (or have already written something) please send me the link!
I know, statistically insignificant, but my fat, dorky computer geek friend (the one who said that programming can be learned in a couple of days) has been married for some decades now to a black lady.
My friend also is very rich, and a high school dropout, so he's a statistical outlier in pretty much everything he touches.
Not wading through 137 comments to check if others have brought this up, but is the drunk searching for his keys under the lamppost issue in play?
We can check marriage data because of licenses. We cannot check common law marriages, long term dating where both sides are happy but they don’t want to get married, casual dates, or hook ups.
To some extent you can use whether a couple has a child as an alternative measure for a strong relationship. Far from perfect for obvious reasons, but in this day and age probably a better proxy than yes/no marriage license.
Honest question: income is relatively easy to measure, but how does one determine who is "more educated"?
If someone has a BA, Summa Cum Laude in Deep Thinkin' from Stanford and put off grad school so they could get paid the big bucks to Think Deep Thoughts, are they more or less educated than someone who stumbled through a masters' from a third tier State U?
Does having a law degree from a US law school (juris doctor) make you more or less educated than someone who has a masters in social work? Where does an MBA fit in?
You get the idea. Social status and attractiveness seem even harder to quantify.
Studies mostly just bucket High School / associates / Bachelors / graduate degree (sometimes splitting up Masters and MD and JD and PhD, but only if focused on that end of society because the numbers are small)
I agree that this is an imperfect mapping and university quality matters quite a lot too, though I don't think too much is lost by grouping all graduate degrees together (PhD is much lower earning but higher intellectual status than the professional degrees, but it roughly averages out)
Yes, I agree, it was much more! Drenched in dense data! Thank you for this effort.
It got me researching into mating strategies in China where I was busy being assembled for 13 years along with iPhones and I learned a little about how much I didn’t know about Chinese culture and its persons. Specializing in couples I discovered how dismal the marriages were—mirages.
I note (did I miss it eyes dizzy with data?) you had nothing about China and I think that will be different in terms of the education hypergamy where it definitely seems to be big time.
Have a view:
CHINA’S DATING APPS ARE SWIPING RIGHT ON SNOBBERY
In China, where education has become the ultimate marker of social class, match-making platforms are helping users screen out graduates of inferior colleges.
I know single Chinese men who are having to take things in hand, ahem, and things are definitely desperate. And the single women are also taking things in hand and seeking those Beachboy Good Vibrations it seems:
Stay in a permanent partnership if you have one; or get one if you don’t.
“It is a striking fact, for example, that mortality rates in the United States for all causes of death, and not just for heart disease, are consistently higher for divorced, single, and widowed individuals of both sexes and all races. Some of the increased death rates in unmarried individuals rise as high as ten times the rates for married individuals of comparable ages.” A Cry Unheard—New insights into the medical consequences of loneliness by James J. Lynch.
"What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” Fyodor Dostoevsky
> no tendency for ugly rich people to marry attractive poor people.
I know Netflix recently had a documentary on Anna Nicole Smith, and it's hard not to think of her marriage to that rich guy on death's door after previously marrying a FAR lower class man.
"But as long as this is still uncommon, the norm against it persists and women who earn too much have a hard time."
I'm amazed that "women earning so much money" would be considered a problem for women, as opposed to men and boys falling behind in the education system for 40 years and artificially delaying their income/career progression being a problem crying out for rectification? (I dunno, unless the argument is just that women have biologically superior work ethic, in which I would like to know which of our other social policy institutions accepts outcomes predicated on Sex A being innately superior at a given task to Sex B.)
I think this elides the fact that attending college is a class emulation process. So you do know rich men who date a beautiful woman from rural West Virginia, provided she completes government subsidized finishing school.
I cannot find it right now, but IIRC, Gary Becker had a piece long ago that looked at how different immigrant groups educated their children back in the day (late 19th-early 20th Cs). I don't recall the findings precisely, but from what I remember, both Irish and German immigrants gave their daughters more formal education than their sons because the latter learned skilled trades and could support a family that way. There were very few occupations open to woman that enabled them to support themselves reasonably (while they were they remained unmarried) and these required formal education: at that time, it was essentially school teacher and eventually nursing for women. For men, plumbing, carpentry, masonry, etc, which were learned outside of school.
To the extent that it remains the case that men can earn more than women with less education, this is one plausible reason for women's having more schooling than men (see Zuckerberg & Chan)
> They want someone who shares their norms and values.
I think this explains the class correlation right here. Your “class” isn’t your income+education, it’s your upbringing, which is tied to your -parents- income+education (or even your grandparents). Recall Fussell on Class: suddenly making a lot of money doesn’t make you upper-class, it just makes you nouveau riche.
Even with the rise of online dating, people generally marry people from within their own IRL social circles, or people they meet online who could plausibly become members of their social circles. This goes for marrying up as well as marrying down. As hypothetically appealing as marrying a Hollywood starlet might seem, in reality it would mean completely upending my life. People want the highest-status “normal” partner they can find, for whatever “normal” means to them.
Here's a bit of extremely broad anecdotal evidence based on my lifelong experience with school teachers (grand- and great-grandparents, parents, dating partners, colleagues, friends, parents friends, etc.) At least here in the U.S. public K-12 teachers are expected to have considerable education. In some school districts (e.g. in districts here in Washington State) they're expected to accumulate additional degrees or even advanced degrees just to keep their jobs.
In my experience most of these teachers have more education than their partners, most of whom have no more than a bachelor's degree. They typically have similar or lower incomes than their partners.
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While we're at it, I think there's now probably enough accumulated data, both from dating sites as well as census and other demographic sampling, to see if "evolutionarily determined" hypergamy applies to same-sex relationships.
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Finally, consider the common phrase among men that some prospective partner is "out of your league." Compared to the surprising infrequency of women who claim they're out of a prospective partner's "league." One tends to wonder how much of the male experience of "hypergamy" is internalized? If one's reaction to a prospective partner is "she'd never give me the time of day" then is *she* the one making the "hypergamous" decision?
Sure, but isn't that how the law of averages works?
I should have mentioned that it's really common for (mostly) men to say "he must either have money or a big d**k to wind up with her."
See also a complaint raised in the 1920s that "[Broadway] showgirls only date millionaires." And the observation that couldn't be true because in New York in the 1920s "showgirls" outnumbered millionaires by something like 100 to 1.
Finally, back when I was blogging about relationships another blogger said "take two women with equal personalities, most men are going to go for the prettier one." Which, sure, fine, maybe so, but I posed the counter question, which went unanswered: "if you take two women of equal beauty, most men are going to go for the one with the better personality."
Similarly, in the context of "hypergamy," if you take two men of equal "wealth," will women really just say "guess I'll just have to flip a coin?" Or will they evaluate other qualities?
And, again in the same context of "hypergamy," if given a choice will women on average prefer a man who's an abusive a**hole over someone who makes half as much but isn't?
The point being that we've got lots of stories about how men and women choose partners. We even have stories about the peer pressure they get to make certain choices (never rule out social pressure over "biological imperatives.") But a survey of the neighborhoods I've lived in (again anecdotal but I've lived everywhere from slums to ultra-wealthy neighborhoods) "hypergamy" markers on dating sites don't seem to play much of a role in the long-term outcomes.
While the discussion of education is interesting, it's not at all a central component of what I'd think of when discussing hypergamy. I've never heard red-pillers say "the secret to success with women is getting a Master's degree, even if it's in a low-paying field".
> The distribution of the number of sex partners among American heterosexual men was skewed already, but in just ten years, the distribution of sex partners among men became even more skewed. During the same time, there was no such change in the number of sex partners for heterosexual women. Sex is concentrated within a small, yet sexually active, group of people. In one study, it was reported that the 5 % of the population with the highest number of vaginal sex acts (penile-vaginal-intercourse) accounted for more vaginal sex acts than the bottom 50 % of the population with the lowest number of vaginal sex acts. 4 Using the Gini index, it is found that the distribution of the number of sex partners both for men and women throughout their lifespan is as unequal as the distribution of wealth among the most unequal countries in the world (South Africa Gini 0.63 in 2014 and Namibia Gini 0.59 in 2015).
Also, I'd echo what a few others have pointed out: while the latin root of "hypergamy" technically refers specifically to marriage, people (at least non-academics) use the term in reference to relationships more broadly.
"Women obsess over the top decile of men far more than the reverse, leading to an exceptional gini coefficient where a small amount of men have a huge amount of sex, while the rest of men get table scraps."
Is that your opinion or a rendering of the usual red pill opinion?
I find it quite strange to worry about the distribution of the number of lifetime sexual partners. Is this something you find important for yourself?
In the linked study, my guess would be that the trend towards increasing numbers of lifetime sex partners in the top decile and decreasing numbers in the bottom decile is caused by different factors, for example the availability of dating apps will increase 'success' for attractive men who want to have lots of partners, and the global increase in time spent alone at home for bot sexes will decrease it for less motivated men. I think it is very unlikely to be caused by some very attractive men 'stealing' partners from less attractive ones.
Anyway, my impression is that most people, men and women, prefer to have a regular partner at some point, and since there are roughly equal numbers of men and women, well, it works for most people!
>Speaking for myself, my number of lifetime sexual partners is currently 0 and yes, I would value raising it to 1 even if I would not get regular partner (but not at all cost or in every circumstances). I guess sex is one of the notable experiences that one can find in life.
Sure, of course! But I understand that you are (very!) interested in your number, not the distribution of this number for the American population. My impression was that some people were kind of 'jealous' that the maximum number of partners seemed to have increased, and I find that a bit strange.
>So this is where the difference is, you are simply replacing *attractiveness* by *motivation* as the decisive distinction between the men who have a lot of sex and those who don't (while also acknowledging that the big sexhavers must also be attractive). There must be some truth to this but it is almost certainly not the whole story.
I agree with you, that was a huge oversimplification. I think that the vast majority of men and women are physically attractive enough and that the main barriers are usually behavioural, but that does not mean that these barriers (shyness, poor social skills, etc.) are easy to overcome.
>And the share has decreased so something must be "working" less and less (which may or may not be a bad thing, perhaps those couples were oppressive after all).
My impression, which is 100% anecdotal, is that this is partly due to the fact that people can afford to live alone, which is more expensive than sharing, and are less tolerant of problems in relationships. Just an impression though.
>I find it quite strange to worry about the distribution of the number of lifetime sexual partners. Is this something you find important for yourself?
Everyone should worry about sex distribution, if not for themselves or their children, then at least for wellbeing of the society they live in. Sex is extremely, overbearingly important for most men, to a much greater degree than it is for women. A bunch of aimless, sexually frustrated men is fodder for political violence, chaos, and revolution. As someone who generally likes modern society, I'd like to preserve it from dangers like this.
>I think it is very unlikely to be caused by some very attractive men 'stealing' partners from less attractive ones.
Sexual competition among men is typically a zero-sum game outside of things like prostitution.
>since there are roughly equal numbers of men and women, well, it works for most people
One man pairing with one woman is not the natural state of human existence. It only ended up that way for most of history because all major religions understood that severely unequal sexual access is a Bad Thing for society. Now that religion is in decline, we're reverting to humanity's normal state of sexual competition, which is one of *extreme* inequality with a few lucky men at the top having large harems, and a bunch of frustrated sexless men at the bottom causing problems.
>Everyone should worry about sex distribution, if not for themselves or their children, then at least for wellbeing of the society they live in. Sex is extremely, overbearingly important for most men, to a much greater degree than it is for women. A bunch of aimless, sexually frustrated men is fodder for political violence, chaos, and revolution. As someone who generally likes modern society, I'd like to preserve it from dangers like this.
Yes but that is not the distribution of the number of partners, this is specifically about people not having partners (which I do find important for these people and society!)
>Sexual competition among men is typically a zero-sum game outside of things like prostitution.
I really don't think that's the case.
For people in stable 2-person relationships, well, obviously no man can monopolise many women.
For hook-ups, that would be the case if women had a predetermined amount of sex they wanted to have, and any hook-up with one man reduced the number of hook-ups available for the others, but that is really not how women's sexuality works.
I'm not saying there isn't competition, there definitely is, but I really don't think it's close to a zero-sum game.
>One man pairing with one woman is not the natural state of human existence. It only ended up that way for most of history because all major religions understood that severely unequal sexual access is a Bad Thing for society. Now that religion is in decline, we're reverting to humanity's normal state of sexual competition, which is one of *extreme* inequality with a few lucky men at the top having large harems, and a bunch of frustrated sexless men at the bottom causing problems.
Absolutely not. All human societies, with or without a major religion, have or have had some kind of arrangement with stable couples or stable polygamous pairing. There has never been extreme inequality historically (and we have the genetic data to prove that!). Some animal species have no permanent pairing, such as cats, others have long-term pairing, such as wolves. Humans are clearly in the latter category (we call it falling in love!), most likely because it usually took two parents to raise a baby successfully.
>For hook-ups, that would be the case if women had a predetermined amount of sex they wanted to have, and any hook-up with one man reduced the number of hook-ups available for the others, but that is really not how women's sexuality works.
I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here, but men want sex vastly more than women do. A woman can get sex easily by just propositioning men, whereas for men the process is much more involved. Women are the bottleneck for sex, so a few lucky men monopolizing sex does indeed other men are having less sex. At the micro level a woman might have more or less sex depending on certain factors, but at the macro level it really is a zero-sum competition between men.
>There has never been extreme inequality historically (and we have the genetic data to prove that!).
The fact we have so many more female ancestors than male ancestors is a clear indicator that there were often a few lucky men with harems, while others got scraps or nothing at all.
A bunch of aimless, sexually frustrated POOR men is fodder for political violence, chaos, and revolution.
Fixed that for you. I don't think that the modal 30-year-old virgin that wants a sex life and a partner and all that is willing to risk being maimed, killed, or long stretches of prison time in some kind of Incel Rebellion: he's middle-class and has too much to lose to go for broke and try to overthrow the system by force.
Yes, we've got crazy mass shooters - but do we have crazy incel militias training in the woods for the Beta Uprising? If they're out there, they're keeping an extremely low profile.
>Maybe this isn’t as common-sensically wrong as it seems. I know many rich male Google programmers, but I have never seen any of them marry a stunning black girl from the ghetto. Why not? Wouldn’t the hypergamy hypothesis pronounce this a good deal for both of them? He gets a beautiful wife, she gets a rich husband? And it’s not just a race thing, I’ve also never seen them marry a beautiful hillbilly from West Virginia, or a beautiful farmer’s daughter from Modesto. I don’t even really see them marry a beautiful girl from the suburbs with a community college degree.
That kind of thing (minus the interracial aspect) used to be more common in the past. Today it wouldn't fly since that kind of marriage is likely to end in divorce and the high-earning man will wind up paying a boatload of "child support" money even if he managed to get joint custody.
Also, status is not reducible to income/education. On the Big Bang Theory, Leonard was
"high status" in that he had high educational attainment and medium income, and was by this measure higher-status than low-income/low-education Penny.* But initially she rejected him as too unattractive for her.
Indeed, perhaps a more realistic version of the Big Bang Theory would have Penny continually blow Leonard off. Finally once she's forty-five with two kids and a baby daddy in county jail, she inquires into Leonard only to learn he married Leslie Winkle, moved out to the suburbs, and has one child. A few days later she sardonically complains "oh, where have the good men gone."
*Yes, this is a work of fiction, but we all know guys like Leonard IRL.
The Big Bang Theory is interesting because it reflects some weird pop culture idea of the way the world works that is completely and obviously unrealistic.
The male main characters are all successful, especially considering their age. Penny is a waitress and a wannabe actress. So why does Leonard share an apartment with Sheldon (who is the most successful of all, he's a genius), while Penny has an apartment of her own in the same building?
In real life, even if Leonard felt super awkward talking to Penny, he would still be aware of the fact that he is more successful than she is. There is hardly any indication of this in the series.
The characters in Big Bang Theory are like overgrown teenagers. The viewer is supposed to accept the premise that they have the same social "status" vis a vis each other they would have if they were still in high school and going to the prom (Penny is cool, because she's hot, the others are not cool).
I could totally see Leonard and Sheldon sharing an apartment given how expensive LA real estate is. Penny having her own apartment is unrealistic unless she had some source of familial wealth.
"In real life, even if Leonard felt super awkward talking to Penny, he would still be aware of the fact that he is more successful than she is. There is hardly any indication of this in the series."
It does come up later in the series, Leonard mentioning that Penny has a lot of credit card debt and that he doesn't think her acting career is going to go anywhere.
I think the way they see one another is fairly realistic. Penny sees Leonard as just another middle-class man, it's not like he drives a Mercedes or anything, and a short, awkward one at that. Whereas she imagines herself having a future as a millionaire actress on the covers of magazines. Leonard knows he's smarter than penny, but he knew the same thing in the 11th grade. He knows Penny's not looking for a provider or a good father to her children, she's looking for someone who can be sexy now, and on that front he still feels like a loser.
Aren't Sheldon and Leonard supposed to be faculty members at Caltech (according to Wikipedia, Sheldon is supposed to be a senior researcher)? Are such people really paid so little that they have to share apartments like students?
There is a difference between the way a 11th grade boy views the hot girl in his class and the way a 30 year old professional views the hot waitress at the Cheesecake Factory (even if the 30 year old is very insecure around women and finds her desirable). That's the difference the TV series ignores. (Besides, how does Leonard know what Penny is looking for?)
"Everyone’s first goal is to marry the highest-class person they can, but women prefer husbands whose class is lopsided towards income, and men prefer wives whose class is lopsided towards education."
This model plays out frequently in rural areas. Women with 4 yr Elementary Ed degrees from Cowtown Teachers College are, I suppose by the metrics of these studies, more educated than the electrician or contractor type they usually pair off with. As a teacher, she is definitionally middle class whereas her contractor husband is "high prole" (using the Paul Fussell groupings). She knows he carries status and money, and he knows she was able to get a 4 year degree so she probably isn't gonna act like she's on the Jerry Springer show. As you say, they have both prioritized the part of class that actually matters to them. And at this level, her time at some podunk directional school doesn't make their interests or worldviews incompatible.
I assume when you move into elite urban enclaves, you'd see a reskinned version of this with women from upper middle class backgrounds with JDs and MAs marrying guys from lower middle class backgrounds who dropped out of college to enter tech fields or have bachelor's degrees that led to lucrative jobs in finance or engineering. But it does seem like the chance for her education to have altered her worldview and values is much higher having spent 5-7 years at a real school with an academic focus, making that class dip a bit trickier to navigate.
"her time at some podunk directional school doesn't make their interests or worldviews incompatible"
As someone who attended a podunk directional school, and then a highly prestigious law school, I think this is a bad assumption. People definitely get socialized into elite assumptions at Directional State (and perhaps to a greater degree than at the elite school, where people feel comfortable assuming you already know the score), even if they don't actually get the elite markers. The struggles between teachers and parents in much of downscale America show how this plays out. Those teachers aren't prestigious at all by the standards of people who went to elite schools, but they have often internalized a model of the world closer to those elites' than those they live around.
The obvious counterargument to this is "well I don't see students rioting over speakers at Directional State," but (1) those campuses get fewer notable speakers and (2) the students are more likely to have distractions like *jobs*, and (3) they're less likely to live on campus, so the pressure cooker effect for activism doesn't work as effectively.
It's possible this happens at Directional State but is largely invisible because the cohort who DO substantially update their worldview aren't going back to work at Cornfield R-VII Intermediate School and rejoin rural/exurban life. I'm sure there are smug post-modernist sociology teachers at Directional State, but noone's coming home to their 10K pop county seat advocating for prison abolitionism or telling the school board to integrate concepts from queer theory, and she's definitely not telling her new boyfriend whose dad owns the contracting company and runs a bunch of mobile home parks that property is theft. Or taking the politics back out of it, if her worldview was changed enough that she became engrossed in some form of performance art or niche hobby or social cause that would alienate her non-college potential boyfriends, she is also likely to be trying to make it in the city where those pursuits are possible.
And as you allude to, these students often have too many pre-existing life experiences and obligations to fully absorb any cultural weirdness, nor to re-orient their perception of their own social class position.
...this seems like a higher-class version of an often-found effect investigating the attitudes toward public welfare among those who are just an inch or so above being very poor themselves. They often score lower in their acceptance of such policies than solid middle & higher-class people. We cannot look into the heads of people who answer surveys to find out how they think, but the usual suspicion is that they are more determined to signal that they are not "those people" than social strata that are secure in their non-poor status.
Just my 2 cents: are there any Cowtown jobs available to Ms Cowtown with an education available in Cowtown?
It's quite likely that Cowtown's vocational training options are welding, electrical, bricklaying, and hairdressing, and all the hairdressing spots have been taken up by a bunch of girls who were mean to Ms Cowtown in high school so she needs to go out of town to get a qualification for any other local job (teaching, nursing).
Ms and Mr Cowtown could be high school sweethearts, it's just that Ms Cowtown doesn't have the local vocational training options that Mr Cowtown has, and she doesn't want to be a janitor, so she goes away for a bit to come back as a qualified teacher.
I agree that's how it plays out, and it's why I don't think her education makes very much difference to her dating targets. Her education is transactional and vocational just as much as the men's is, and it's seen as getting a certificate not as social advancement. In rural areas a responsible/timely/punctual-but-unskilled male can make $25/hr with a road and bridge crew while her best bet out of HS is a $12/hr clerical job. She had to take a few semesters of Spanish and some History or Lit class en route to being a nurse or counselor and now has a 2/4 year degree her boyfriend doesn't, but that education was socially irrelevant.
You identified it in section VI. The people who care about this started noticing it on dating sites and from PUAs. There's not very significant hyperGAMY; per your point that people generally have to live with their spouse and prefer to mate as assortatively as possible. The thing PUAs and bloggers and social critics and the terminally-online college age youth who read their thoughts are noticing is hyperLAGNY (sex having, not marriage). There is a very strong effect, which you mention regarding the wealthy and the stereotype of affairs with servants, of women being sexually available to men of higher status. It's just that those men rarely repay the favor with marriage.
Comment from a former female coworker to me (a male):
"I've seen a number of smart male friends marry dumb women. I've never seen a smart female friend marry a dumb man."
IF this observation is applicable to the general population, one presumes that men are more likely to forego intelligence in a spouse for physical attractiveness than women are.
I took it as a compliment as my wife is more intelligent than I am.
For what it's worth, my female coworker was likely an XXY person who exhibed a mix of male and female physical characteristics. She identified as a woman, was a strong feminist, and was extraordinarily intelligent.
Hrm.... Regarding the differences between same sex and opposite sex couples... one obvious possible difference is available population/selection size. This suggests a possible question to ask: How do things look if we look at same sex couples where both partners happen to be strongly bisexual, and thus the fact that they're a same sex couple is more likely to be a "just happened to work out that way" thing rather than either specifically searching for same sex partners. Would that subset look more like the tight assortment of opposite sex couples or the looser assortment of same sex couples?
On the looks point specifically, I think men do a good job of deluding/realizing (I like to think it's the latter) that the person they're into is good-looking after they fall for them. No one is like "I love her but she's a 3 at best" despite the fact that there are obviously 3s in this world.
I think people get attractiveness wrong, it’s not just about your body. You might think she’s a 3 from afar, but if you’re old friends who start dancing at a wedding, or you go to sing Karaoke and she nails your favorite song, or you both get stranded waiting for a bus on the first warm day of the year, your perceptions will change. Some people are so outstandingly attractive that you know right away, but for most people it’s that mix of circumstance and personality.
My husband is cute but it wasn't love at first sight or anything. Once I got to know him he became the sexiest man alive in my eyes. As in, his physical attractiveness increased substantially. The longer we're together, the sexier he gets.
Interesting, but I find it hard to trust the studies' conclusion if they don't account for age gaps (which correlates with income gap but maybe less so with class).
Also the term "class" has to be defined better, and I'll bet it means different things in the British study and the US study.
I've gone to great (heroic) lengths to make myself my attractive, and pursued women in lower socioeconomic classes for casual relationships but I would probably never marry them.
I guess that probably sounds crass but my point is, marriage is FAR from the be all end all of the sexual marketplace. Whereas, marriage is a social and economic arrangement as much as a sexual one
In the short term market looks dominate for both sexes, obviously.
Out of curiosity, did you specifically "pursue women in lower socioeconomic classes for casual relationships" or did you also chase women from (I suppose) the same, higher, class as you?
Both, and for relationships I really only am compatible with educated women. But when optimizing for one thing (say beauty/youth) you often sacrifice other things. I've dated a lot of waitresses...
My wife has a higher level of education than I do, but she also tells me that I'm one of the smartest people that she's ever met. She also makes more money than I do, though that wasn't always the case. I'm curious how much relative IQ plays a role and how it compares to the relative education of couples.
That's a good point, education is a terrible proxy for IQ. Women are being more highly educated, but their distribution on the IQ curve is still where it was.
The key for men is having at least some ways to gain money and status that are NOT tied to the increasingly female-oriented college/government/corporate realm to which a certain variety of the smartest men will never be suited.
I definitely agree with this - I tend to advocate for a sense of identity that is far more aligned with stoic/zen values than external frames of reference. Neither money nor status fit that bill.
I like what Sam Harris pointed out - that ultimately we need to be more process oriented than goal oriented, because the goals are transitory and the process is ongoing until we die. Objectively if we are content in our processes, we don't need to achieve the goals we persue in order to be content with our day to day lives. Achieving those goals still matters, obviously, but that is a secondary result, akin to reaching for the stars in the hopes of touching the moon.
Fwiw, I (a woman) am pretty sure I don’t care about formal education, but the minute I realize a man is less intrinsically intelligent than I am, I instantly lose interest; it’s entirely involuntary, like a switch flipping off. I realize this may be silly or counterproductive--IQ isn’t everything, and many very good men aren’t as smart as I am--but once I know he can’t keep up mentally I feel like his mom or something. Yuck.
*nods* I can see this. So much of who we are attracted to involves our own sense of what we want from a partner - and I have often found that its those who lack self confidence that prefer to have partners that are better described as accessories. I would guess that self-confidence, like EQ, tends to correlate with fluid intelligence as well.
So who knows, there might be that "exception to the rule" out there, but my guess is that your right match matches your "instinct" of attraction. My guess is that there has to be a "proportional gap" in relative IQ for couples, regardless of which one is ultimately smarter than the other. How much of a gap is "too much" for attraction to be mutual... that would be interesting to find out!
I know Scott briefly touched on this in the footnotes, but I think age difference is a factor. Stats on age differences would help, but to take a fairly extreme case where the man is 30 and the woman is 23,
- it’s more likely that he earns more
- it’s more likely that at that moment, he has a higher degree of education
- it’s likely that he perceives her to be pretty (say, compared with his college cohort and work colleagues)
- in a vague way, his age confers status on him besides money and education
Later on, everything could change, but for now, they can in a way “play act” that he is immutably higher-status and she is immutably gorgeous.
Something I saw a few years ago that has always stuck with me:
"If you ask women who they would prefer as a mate, [a famous movie-star] or a waiter who looks just like him, most women will choose the movie-star. If you ask men who they would prefer as a mate, [a famous movie-star] or a waitress who looks just like her, most men will choose the waitress."
Presumably, women choose the movie-star because they're attracted to status, while men choose the waitress because they seek respect, which they are more likely to get from a waitress than a famous movie-star.
Even in atomized cultures like that of the 21st century United States, marriage usually implies one is joining an extended family, and extending one's own family. Even when children aren't planned, but even moreso when they are. This matters. To varying degrees, but on average, a lot. This is somewhere between the explanation of and the definition of in-class homogamy.
I'm fairly confused by the "men and women are equally and highly class homogamous, therefore nobody cares about looks very much" point. This argument seems to assume that both (a) class and looks are the only [relevant] dimensions on which people vary; (b) people are willing to trade off between these.
That seems...plausible..but not necessarily true? Here's a sketch of a different world which shows the class-matching but has relevant asymmetric looks preferences:
- Everyone marries only within their social class; to do otherwise is unthinkable.
- People within a class vary on many dimensions: looks, but also sense of humor, kindness, ability to cook, willingness to share household chores, etc.
- So within each class there's still a spectrum of mate quality.
- Men care proportionally more about looks, women proportionally less.
- So within each social class, funny men who are gentle and will share household labor tend to marry more beautiful women, unfunny jerks tend to marry less beautiful women, etc.
I suppose that marriage data is easier to get than dating data, but it's still looking at the wrong thing, IMO. Marriage (in most countries) means taking on a huge legal responsibility, and if you're marrying down in terms of income and class, this incurs serious financial risks if things go wrong. And people know that they often do.
Casual sex (mentioned in the post), on the other hand, is wrong for the opposite reason: of course people want to have casual sex with beautiful partners, and of course their income has little to do with that.
I would say that the relevant notion would be dating, defined as spending lots of time with the person and perhaps (but not necessarily) living together; this is the level where you care deeply about what the person is like outside of bed, but you are not taking on serious financial risks by being with that person, so this should give a less skewed picture of preferences. I have no idea whether this kind of data is available, though.
Doesn't your analysis forget how people mingle? People tend to clump together based on the same interests, schools or proximity. This tends to re-enforce class. As a rich "ugly" male is unlikely to cross pass with a stunning "ghetto" woman. Therefore you tend to trade off between partners within your social group.
Hasn't the real concern been that dating apps break this limit social grouping such that woman have a larger pool of men to draw upon for relationships, resulting in the top x% of men getting a disproportionate amount of the female population. This mismatch allows for the mento have lots of short term relationships, and burns out the women on men and dating or they only turn to men outside the x% after their used by date. Isn't that the fundamental concern people have about hypogamy?
Hm, I will probably get some backlash for that, but here it goes anyway:
I would like to know how "same status" is "calculated"? Because it is mentioned multiple times, that "today" women outperform men in education and so their status got higher. And well... yeaaaaah... but in what areas? In most "western countries" it is still the norm, that men/women study quite different stuff. Men are most commonly found in "hard sciences" like IT, Engineering, Physics, ... - women on the other hand are often enrolled in some "social studies", Philosophy, Drama, ... (the medical area is a special case here)
Are degrees in those field "similar"? Yeah, the woman with the degree in African Studies marries someone with a degree in Mathematics. So they are "the same status" ... but are they? And how does the different income of those two come in effect later?
When I lived in the US, I used to buy the NYT. It has an engagement section and it was pretty clear that it was all Finighan-Coleville 3rd marrying Webster-Carringtion 2nd, and so on. Sometimes you would get a Jewish name. I don’t recall much inter racial engagements although that might be different now.
There was often a pedigree attached (son or daughter of this Ambassdor, or that justice, or that academic) on both sides.
Seems that that eastern elite class definitely intermarries. Whether the well paid google engineer is as fusy I don’t know, but in strict Marxist terms he’s a proletarian
The NYTimes announcement is free but they only do announcements for couples that are high achievers or from prominent families…so they have to choose your announcement. I did opposition research for politics and the opposing candidate had a NYTimes wedding announcement and it made oppo research very easy because I had birthdates and middle names and college attendance and mother’s maiden name etc…had the guy been a Santos I would have easily disqualified him…be careful what you wish for. ;)
I know several men who have wed twice, had two batches of children and for both wives it was their first marriage. The second time around the wife was considerably younger than the husband.
Is this so rare that it can be disregarded? Or is this a workaround for hypergamy?
I would add only one point to this extensive and cogent analysis. There has been a slow decoupling of education from both class and income over the past six decades. That's why educational homogamy has decreased, but not class & income homogamy. This has been caused by the huge increase in the number of people receiving post-secondary education, and the decreasing quality of that education. I recall a report several years ago that, in the U.S.A., 25% of baristas and 10% of parking lot attendants had earned a degree or diploma from a university or college. It's become somewhat of a standard joke that a bachelor degree in the liberal arts gives you the opportunity to work under the assistant manager who has a high school diploma, and the manager who has a community college diploma.
Not everyone marries. Pew reports that almost 40% of US adults are currently unpartnered. Looking at their charts, the unpartnered, whether male or female, lag behind their partnered peers on markers such as education, income, living independently, not being institutionalized.
Appearance may lead to romantic interest at the beginning, but other factors come into play with time, such as personality, character, behavior and compatibility. Doing well in a career corresponds with social skills such as good manners, the ability to handle disagreement, etc.
I am not certain that dating apps would increase hypergamy. Does anyone know how the apps select the profiles presented to the users? Talking with friends, it seems to me that different people see unique selections; it would not surprise me at all to know that some of the factors in the matches are connected to class.
And then, there's the fact that income doesn't necessarily match social background. A number of children of the really wealthy pursue careers that don't pay well, but are useful and socially respected, such as teachers, artists, nonprofit staffers.
The bit about looks seeming not to matter much was especially interesting. I'm thinking that it probably does matter a lot but it's mainly just about meeting some minimum standard. If your standards are lower then it might appear that looks "matter less" to you simply because more potential partners are able to meet them, even though you're just as likely as others to reject someone who doesn't meet your standard.
I wonder what correlation all of these have with the well-documented decline in birthrate in most developed economies (apropos of the referenced DeBoer's article), which also often tend to parade a population of highly educated and socially mobile women?
Thanks for the clear and enlightening post! I'm not sure I understand the swipe at (feminist) academics, though.
Setting aside that the quotations provided are from different authors and academics are known to occasionally have different opinions from each other, is there any contradiction in believing that freedom-restricting societal norms tend to be upheld when straight people systematically sort themselves into couples where the man earns slightly more than the woman, and tend to be eroded when queer people pair off with little regard for each other's economic background?
I couln't find any reference in the article or the comments to the issue of age, so maybe I'm missing something obvious.
But on my naive model, age is the missing factor here. I believe on average older men marry younger women, and since status, education and income all grow with age, while beautiy and attractiveness decline with it, I wouldn't naively expect any problem with hypergammy of all sorts even if women on average had more than men on every single factor. The question would be how do women stack up to men in terms of status at the time of marriage.
Per google, in the US the average heterosexual marriage has a man 2-3 years older than the woman. So yeah, even if the two have identical education and careers the man would tend to earn slightly more on average.
As most people compromise on their marriage choice sooner or later, reductive statistical analysis into this or that dimension of "revealed" preferences may muddle more than clarify.
Loosely checking David Deida... The broad spirit of female hypergamy apparently lies in looking for a superiority feature in a man to admire or appreciate. Largely, that used to be (and still is) status, wealth, physique, education - but if these factors become gamed or skewed too much, then a dude may show something else rather exceptional.
By the way, the topic of hypergamy was touched in the commentary to Scott Aaronson's blog, particularly around the posts #26-#52 here: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5171
Am I in a hypogamous or hypergamous marriage? Or is my marriage... iso-gamous?
I have a bachelor's degree and work in a white collar job. My husband dropped out of community college to work for his parents' restaurant--he's very smart and could have finished school, but the money on offer was too good to refuse. He makes slightly less per hour than I do, but makes more than double what I make per year because he works double my hours. (I have some health issues so I work part time.) All of my parents and grandparents are college-educated, but none of his parents or grandparents are. I grew up solidly middle class, approaching upper middle class (dad military officer, mom stay-at-home); he grew up working class (dad military enlisted, mom a waitress), although his parents' restaurant ended up being very successful and shot them into upper middle class when he was in his early 20s.
We're probably both solid 6s when it comes to physical attractiveness, if that's relevant.
I wonder about an analysis that looks at emotional intelligence. We know there to be significant differences in physical ability between men and women. Do signals of emotional intelligence in a man (I.e., woman can be more confident to not get abused) allow for more hypogamy across other dimensions without increasing chances of divorce?
This is a field where 'Simpson's paradox' arises with a vengeance. Some subpopulations have hypergamy preference for females and 'education' of certain types can be both a relevant signaling and screening device. In my own community, ceteris paribus, the rule used to be that the husband should be one degree higher- e.g. wife has B.A, husband has MA. However, this reversed itself in the Sixties and Seventies when girls stayed longer in College but still could not enter the job market on equal terms. Now, there is more emphasis of enterprise, rather than education. A person with a diploma who has a start-up outranks a Lecturer with a PhD. This isn't pure income based hypergamy. It's more like a proxy for genetic or epigenetic contribution to future progeny.
In some Islamic countries- e.g. Tunisia, Iran- which previously had a 'bride price' culture- female education becomes a type of reverse bride-price or 'dowry'. Moreover, a daughter's earnings may become important for the parents. They would prefer a lower status 'live-in' son-in-law who may be 'blue collar'- e.g. plumber, cab-drive etc.- but this creates its own tensions.
We would expect heterosexual marriage (for the fertile cohort) to show either bride-price, or female hypergamy because of asymmetric parental investment. However, for endogamous groups, the Price equation militates for more complex solutions to the stable marriage problem. 'Education' itself might be part of that solution which explains why, in many fields, it correlates poorly with Income.
Studies comparing the education of married couples should distinguish between education levels at the time they met vs after they were married.
It is not improbable that in a significant number of cases women are able to indulge in more edu *because* they've engaged in the income hypergamy of marrying a man who "got a real job" and thus can afford her that luxury.
Even prior to marriage... it's harder for a man to continue with more edu under the assumption he might be able to marry someone who would be earning more and have that to fall back on.
Re the Christian Mingle footnote, a therapist who knew I hoped to meet somebody once advised me not to go on Catholic Match, because from what female clients had told him it was full of fetishists with a “Catholic school girl” thing... possibly the evangelicals are experiencing something similar...
Re: section VI, it seems obvious intuitively that a person's class affects how they present themselves, in a way that tends to make them more attractive to people of their class and less attractive to people of other classes—at least, higher ones.
For example, as a middle-class man, I don't find the way working-class women present themselves appealing. Positing two physically identical women, one working-class, one middle-class, I'm going to find the middle-class one more attractive based on how she presents herself. Not clear to me whether a working-class man typically prefers a working-class woman over a middle-class one, but I would think so.
A woman of a particular class's way of presenting herself as attractive is not very legible to men of other classes, I would say.
I think hypergamy is still not a viable strategy for marriages insofar as marriages still almost exclusively require significant compatibility on a variety of meat-space axes that prevent a lot of cross-class, cross-race, cross-industry, and other cross-group pairings.
Cyberspace allows for total mixing and hypergamy along whichever axis people find most important. However, only hookups and flings are really low-cost enough in meat-space for this to take effect, and why Discourse(TM) on the subject of hypergamy often comes from terminally online hookup-interested groups. And why hookup apps are the ones that actually show this hypergamous effect where the top 20% of men have the attention of 80% of women and the other 80% of men are left fighting over the bottom 20% of women. Maybe this also explains the difference between gays (happy to hook up indefinitely) and lesbians (move in together on the third date), although this includes the caveat of not giving in to crass stereotypes etc. etc.
But when it comes to building marriage-worthy relationships, they come with a significant time and social cost. You have to share values to a certain degree, as Scott mentions. You have to get along with each other's social groups, to a certain degree. You have to get along with each other's family, to a certain degree. You have to be willing to commit to living in the same place with each other. You may have to agree on education and religious upbringing of children. All this adds up to lines of race, religion, social class, economic class, etc. not getting crossed all that much when it comes to marriage.
The problem with the first graph is that the column to the right doesn't actually represent hypergamy. It should show the women marrying 'up', and thus have an even larger gap at the top and the bottom.
Wow! This was a very awesome and interesting read. I think generation Z’s (who are currently the new 20’s) and all the few generations below who are reaching 30s are all starting to realise this now. It’s actually trending and I completely agree with the research 🔬 done on the dating apps. I can confirm as a lady that I am one of those who like to choose a provider. It makes us more scientifically happy as women. Whereas opposite and going for a ‘less financially’ individual it never was successful. It’s really attraction. It shows manhood and safety. Whereas we are warm and make a home 🏡 ☺️❤️ whether its 2024 or 1908. Womanhood never changes.
This was a good read. I wonder how applicable it is in non-western countries where expats often do pick up “beautiful” local women. My observation is that wealthier/more attractive men can pick up higher status and more beautiful local women, ie better education, better English, but not necessarily. Marriage prospects for lower status western males are much better, female hypergamy can be maintained and the western guy gets a hotter wife than he would have managed back home. Communities can form where the western husbands and the Asian wives can hang out and new types of status games can emerge.
I'm sure I'm not the first person to mention this, but we all know that "education" in the sense of bachelors>masters>doctorate just isn't a useful benchmark, right? It isn't distinguishing between an MSc in Mathematical Finance and an MA in Postcolonial Queer Media Communications
Indeed, and the philosopher in me feels like we shouldn't read too much into the arbitrary ontological boundaries we establish, especially as it pertains to these squishy, social concepts. That doesn't mean they're all wrong and useless, it just means we should continually look for issues and limitations in the data.
Do the studies account for relative age? I’m thinking of a couple where, at marriage, he is older and has a professional degree and is entering the workforce, where she is younger and has an undergrad degree and is three years out from starting her career. At the time of marriage, she is marrying up in income and education, and she will always be behind on income, but will catch up or surpass in education.
This is excellent. I just finished a deep dive on hypergamy myself, and it seems like we came to very similar conclusions. Mahin Hossain (above) brought this to my attention.
This topic is a constant source of argument between me and my wife. What do you call a men that cares only only about beauty? What do you call a women who only cares about your income? Each of those answers has social repercussions, especially women's reaction to the latter. Women put a lot of stock in education but even more stock in the type of lifestyles their partner can provide. Think especially about atheles and their wives. I also think the marriage market has been distorted and all you have to do is look at the black community in the U.S.. my wife has more degrees than I do, however, I earn 2x her salary. My degrees are harder to get though.
This assumes that people getting married are weighing the risk of divorce, which I'm not so sure about.
There are also prenups. Anecdata, but I know one trustfund woman who is marrying a working class poor dude. They definitely signed a prenup.
Fair enough.
I think my original point should've been something more like, I'm not sure why high earners would avoid marriage to people they're interested in altogether as opposed to seeking out marriages with pre nups instead.
"There are also prenups."
Courts can just ignore them if they don't consider them "fair."
It’s thrown out in cases where it would be as invalid as any other contract (pressuring someone to sign, misleading etc). As long as you have lawyer presents to advise for him and also for her (it’s on the up-and-up) you can absolutely arrange it however you want (it won’t and can’t affect things like alimony or child support) but prenups are generally used for protecting large assets, inheritances, etc.
The couples in my family had a prenup, but it was specifically waiving away the “voting rights” (worth $0) part of a family business (ie to prevent a vengeful ex-wife from refusing to agree on things like selling the business or expanding), it explicitly didn’t apply to financial assets. I don’t know, my dad is a tax attorney on Palm Beach so he does all this stuff for his livelihood; maybe it’s from him seeing uber-wealthy bitterly fight over trivial $$$ for spite where being overly concerned with “recouping” $50,000 after a 20 year marriage to the point of pessimism is just setting yourself up to find any financial “hit” as an attack. I guess the trade-off is that your spouse is less likely to see bleeding you dry as a “win.”
I’m mostly just confused why attitudes towards prenups seem to be less “guarded” for the upper-middle class (who has more $$ to potentially lose) than for the average person. I guess because the divorce rate for white upper-middle class is like 13% (versus the national avg of 50%) so the relaxed forecasting accounts for that?
"pressuring someone to sign"
What does this mean?
Physical coercion, or whatever would invalidate any other kind of contract. Just discuss it before you get engaged because it will likely impact her decision to work or stay home if you have kids. If you’re worried about being fleeced in a divorce just look up the actual state laws (not anecdotal stories online) on how assets are divided, alimony and child support are recorded in census data as well.
If prenups were invalidated left and right wealthier people wouldn’t be paying lawyers charging $500+/hr to draft them.
Andrew Sullivan talks about how education and status don’t really come into play in homosexual relationships…romantic heterosexual relationships seem to be much more about status than other types of relationships at least among people that have status or aspire to higher status.
Isn't this the same content from a few posts ago?
Yes, plus some edits. That was a subscriber-only first draft, this is visible to everyone.
Ohh, I didn't realize it worked that way. Thanks.
This was fun! I think while the West this is all mostly informal, the more formalised marriage pools in China for instance has rules that are far more rigid
Can you tell is more about formalised marriage pools in China? I'm curious!
Instruct us, please.
Also, if someone here could provide some insight into how this dynamic might play out in arranged marriages on the Indian subcontinent, I would be grateful.
Well from knowing some Indian Brahmin in IT who did the arranged marriage thing, it was always to other Brahmin.
Sample size: 2
I know caste, subcaste and community are still very much a thing on the Subcontinent, but there can be a LOT of variation in status within a group.
There are, for a variety of reasons, rather wealthy and educated untouchables, for instance, as well as poor brahmins.
Opposition to inter-caste (and of course inter-religious) marriage is extremely strong across India, and it doesn't vary much between groups. Inter-caste marriage is more or less similarly strongly opposed by "high" castes and "low" ones; by Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Jains; by educated people and less educated people; by young people and older generations. The one place where you see a difference is that 1) Buddhists are much more open to it than members of other religions, and 2) Southerners are much more open to it than people in the north.
I'm guessing in the last case that it's a legacy of left-wing politics in the South during the last century that consciously sought to de-emphasize the salience of caste. I also think members of the southern nationalities have a strong ethno-national consciousness (especially Tamils), and maybe that trades off against the importance of caste somewhat: if you think of your identity primarily in ethnoracial and linguistic terms then maybe caste is correspondingly less important.
In India, one way sub-castes (jatis) compete for higher social status is by abandoning 'bride-price' for 'dowry'. However, female Education became a proxy for 'dowry' (which is illegal) and represented better epigenetic outcomes for progeny. 'Educationally Forward Castes' retained notional hypergamy such that the bride had one degree lower educational attainment (and was younger).
Now that women are getting good jobs or starting their own businesses things have loosened up a bit. The problem is that young people can see that the kids of 'mixed' marriages have trouble getting arranged marriages. Look at Rahul. Already 53 years old and still living with Mummy.
> I know many rich male Google programmers, but I have never seen any of them marry a stunning black girl from the ghetto
Mail order brides are (or used to) be a thing. When I think of the kind of men that resort to this, my first intuition is a high-income but a romantically unsuccessful man.
Alternatively, sugar daddy/trophy wife dynamic is fairly popular.
I'm certain examples of marrying down in this way exist, but that's not the point. Scott's offering here was an intuition to correspond with the evidence he presented earlier. Evidence suggests that people don't usually marry across classes. This tracks with my understanding of Rich Male Google Programmers, which is that they probably find mail order brides morally objectionable.
I wonder how much the idea of men marrying down is morally objectionable vs. socially objectionable, and how much it varies by political spectrum. I could see a significant left-right divide here.
You are not the only one seeing a left-right divide, though maybe not exactly the kind of divide you envision.
'Over the past several decades, women’s educational attainment has far outpaced that of men’s; “Women in the United States have earned more bachelor’s degrees than men every year since the mid-1980s,” writes Derek Thompson in the Atlantic.'
' “American colleges and universities now enroll roughly six women for every four men. This is the largest female-male gender gap in the history of higher education, and it’s getting wider.” '
'The education divide between men and women has become more politically relevant because of the stronger connection between educational attainment and political behavior. In recent elections, college graduates have become a much more loyal Democratic constituency. And on a range of issues, college-educated Americans are more liberal than those without a Bachelor’s degree.'
'There are a number of reasons why a college education may lead one to adopt more liberal views, but one oft-overlooked is how obtaining a college degree affects your social life. Having a college degree increases the likelihood you’ll live in or near a city, and that you’ll work and become friends with other college graduates, who are more likely to be left-of-center than those without a college degree. The political context one lives in exerts a powerful effect on their own views. As Harvard political scientist Pippa Norris noted recently in an interview with the New York Times: “If you live in a community which is more liberal, there’s a self-reinforcing ratcheting effect.”'
https://storylines.substack.com/p/the-political-gender-gap-is-exploding
What happened to mail-order brides? Did they stop being a thing? Did anyone ever check what percent of mail-order relationships succeeded/continued by some definition?
Duckduckgoing "Mail Order Brides" to see if there was an answer to this question just turned up a dozen sites to get mail order brides, so I assume the industry is still going.
That being said, if I had to guess at any decline in the popularity of the service, the growth of SE Asian economies would presumably be the factor? Thailand was always the country you would hear about with MOBs, but it's not too poor these days and maybe Thai women just have better choices? Or they can just wait for wealthy expats to pick them up directly?
I've travelled around SE Asia and saw many WM AF couples, but it's hard to tell if they are going for marriage or just vacation flings. Conversely, in Korea I saw surprisingly many AM WF couples.
The Asian male is high-status in Korea, being the dominant group--Korea is a rich country after all. I'd be curious what the pattern is in China, or in Japan, though they might not have enough foreigners to observe. (AM-APF [anime pillow female] would presumably be only the lowest-status AMs.)
I live in Tokyo but I think selection effects are so strong I can't tell you anything useful. I can think of maybe ten WM AF relationships among my friends and coworkers. The non Japanese women who are in relationships are with foreign men. I do know one couple that's a Japanese man and a Japanese/Brazilian woman. Also a Japanese/American woman and an American man.
The other thing would be what I see when I'm walking around, but honestly it's mostly Japanese couples or foreign couples.
I thnk Caucasians are about 1% of the Japan population. My wife told me before we married that I should get a job paying better than my poor researcher's stipend, presuming rightly that there were disadvantages to being married to a white guy, despite American culture having some lingering cachet.
Thanks anyway. That's basically what I figured--Japan would be mostly Japanese, with the small pool of foreigners dating each other. Maybe you get the occasional westaboo, but the culture is so conformist most would be endogamous.
Found this chart of top countries for K-1 visas as of 2019:
https://www.boundless.com/research/k-1-fiance-visa-report/
SE Asia is number 1 (Philippines and Vietnam), but Thailand is much further down the list, and indeed the Thai economy has strongly outperformed the Philippines in particular, so you're probably on to something.
Next is Latin America (Mexico, DR, Colombia, Brazil). I have to wonder if the Mexicans are often marrying Mexican-Americans.
The most surprising one to me is that Russia and Ukraine only have a middling rank. These seem like popular choices, for obvious reasons, and Ukraine in particular remains very poor. Though I suppose they also have Western Europe as a potential destination that's much closer to home.
The Philippines and Vietnam both have very large population (each have about 100 million). They also have a young population. The median age in the Philippines is 24.5 and 32.5 in Vietnam. Russia has a large population, but a higher median age (39.6).
The Philippines also has the advantage of being English speaking.
Good point -- and Russia and Ukraine also have an unusually small cohort in their 20s, due largely to the post-Soviet fertility crash. This might help explain why we're more familiar with cases from prior decades, i.e. women born behind the Iron Curtain (see also the comment below from nickiter).
I've known three men married to "MOBs" and all three women came from Eastern Europe. The marriages happened in the early 80s, so perhaps that's specific to the time period?
(Unrelated but interesting to me; all three remained married ~40 years later at the time I knew them, and seemed at least stable if not happy.)
I know no studies, and I see a problem (as in husband-earning less): if you ask: nobody does "mail order", only others do. "We met on okc and it clicked" / "I was traveling/working there and then I saw her face, now ... " / "She worked as an au-pair nearby when we met". (Also: What woman ever goes to a beach - maybe it's the third world - to be picked up by younger men?). Nowadays, "mail order brides" are on-line and do have a lot of agency, thus not much need for an agency! - In times bygone, I did okc and looked specifically at some low-gdp/head-places. (India was a big white spot then, sad to say.) Not a bad strategy.
As a middle-aged single man, I see lots of internet advertising (e.g. on Facebook) for what are basically mail-order brides - mostly from Eastern Europe (I'm British) rather than South-East Asia. I'm guessing that you're either too young to be their target market, or the algorithms know that you are partnered.
There used to be lots from Ukraine before the Special Military Operation.
About 15 years ago, one of my readers with a Ph.D. grew dissatisfied that his children didn't appear likely to provide him with grandchildren, so as part of his make-your-own-grandchildren plan, he moved to Kiev and quickly found a lovely wife who presented him with a baby. Of course, lately Putin is shooting missiles at Kiev ...
Don't think he has a Ph.D., but this sounds like Graham Seibert, who has a Substack giving daily reports on what it's like to live in Kiev during the war: https://substack.com/profile/1979897-graham-seibert. He has a comprehensive autobiography: https://grahamseibert.com/biography.pdf
I knew at entrepreneur who did this. He met his wife in a business context in Ukraine. I always wondered if he chose that country for supply due to more than purely economic factors.
Wait, he wasn't going to get grandchildren so he had another kid? That escalated fast (unless the implication is that American grandfathering is about the same level of commitment as Ukrainian fathering)
Well, I think I get it. Looking ahead towards the remainder of his life, rather than hanging out with old people and doing old people things, he'd rather focus on children and return to family-centered life again. Finding a new wife and having kids again is much more demanding than being a grandparent. But if being a grandparent seems to be off the table, it might be the best option he sees.
Several years ago there was a big scandal in the news about Russian mail-order brides, with a lot of talking heads openly wondering (not without justification) where the difference lay between this and prostitution. We haven't heard too much about it since then. But I did some digging, and apparently it's become a big (if quiet!) industry in the Czech Republic. People in the know call them Czech Mates.
But you really have to beware of scammers. All too often you'll try to order one, and they take your money, and no one ever comes. You try to get information on your order and they just tell you the Czech's in the mail...
...damn you
"openly wondering (not without justification) where the difference lay between this and prostitution"
There's the "marriage" part.
True. Thing is, we tend to think about marriage as the traditional "until death do you part" variety. Even if that's not always the case in practice, it's typically seen as the ideal to strive for. IIRC a lot of the scandal with Russian brides was that in many cases the brides weren't even pretending they were making any attempt to live up to that ideal.
(Please don't quote me on that, though; it's been several years and I could be wrong on the details.)
Some random data points from my social circle:
Had a HS teacher in the late 1990s who was kind of funny and charming, but also pretty gross and unkempt for his otherwise attractiveness level (and a creeper on the HS girls in a way some seemed to like/tolerate). Think an average or slightly above average ~45yo guy who took zero care of himself. Also chewed tobacco. He would go with a buddy trolling in eastern Europe and the former Soviet states looking specifically for a bride for many years.
One time he actually came back with this smoking hot blonde 19 year old from the former Soviet union. They got married, had twins, were together about 3 years, and then she fled back home and ransomed his children back to him. He was heartbroken but did it, and I always wondered if this was actually a long term scam the whole time.
~5 years ago I knew a union baggage handler who was pretty similar, maybe late 40s, probably slightly below average looking, decent shape but took zero care of his appearance and would come across in a US context as very low class. He took a trip to Kazakhstan and came back with a woman who was way more together/intelligent/attractive/young than he would have been able to pull off in the US context. As far as I know they are happily married with no kids, he got her a job, and they have moved within the US a few times.
From my experience, it was (and still is) a thing, but maybe not to the point of being clear in statistics. It comes with certain correlations, which is also why I agree with your anecdotal evidence that wealthy googlers do not marry hot ghetto or rednecks girls:
- older male - younger wife (in itself an example of trading wealth for look. This also means a lot of second marriage or mariage-like arrangement. I guess statistics for second marriage should show the effect more clearly, if it's real...
- male need a specific background. In particular, he should be able to manage this socially, meaning either non conventional social circle, no social circle, or dominant enough he will not suffer any social penalty. Googler or tech guy may be a good example. CEO too. Mid-level salesman, not really.
- bride must come from a culture different enough the social issues are kind of bypassed. This also somewhat bypass character/hobby/interrests compatibility issue, class difference are less obvious and less penalizing the more the culture are far appart. This again means a certain type of male, one with interest in different cultures, the kind of traveller who want to experience local things. Or someone with extremely bland global taste you will find everywhere (blockbuster and fast foods)
- contrary to the same culture situation where class is class, different cultures or races come with a certain intrinsic class, probably a mix between countries average wealth and some remains of the colonial era. Global tourism tends to muddle this thought...
This makes me think that it's not only because of relative weatlh that the stereotypical MO bride comes from eastern Europe or SE asia. In a way, it's a dichotomic choice: either assortive mating or cultures as far away as possible. In particular, culture without strong awareness of the other culture classes.
Why is sub-saharan Africa not a popular destination for brides then? Is it more culturally similar to the wealthy countries?
Non PC factoid ahead - careful: It is, but there is also the lower attractivity (OK cupid data) of black females on average.
Skip to 3:30 on this 2014 video and listen to the CEO of OKcupid (who apparently didn't have a comb or a hoodie at the time) talk about how everyone on his dating website is a little bit racist.
https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/380086/the-uncomfortable-data-behind-online-dating/
That effect is real (and also note that black women tend to be more averse to dating white men than Latin or Asian women are).
But note that Haiti shows up as a reasonably large K-1 visa source, particularly relative to its size. DR ranks even higher (#5 per the link I posted elsewhere) but I think its population only averages around 50% African DNA.
There are very poor foreign black women within a short flight of the US, it's not necessary to go all the way to Africa.
All that said, I'm not sure that cultural distance is REALLY a plus as you suggest. What's a real-world example of a country that is poor but culturally too similar to the US for mail-order brides to work? The countries culturally most similar to the US are not poor, which isn't a coincidence: culture and economics are tightly interwoven.
You certainly don't want a woman who's too culturally distant -- say, a hunter-gatherer from Papua New Guinea. I also think that shared Christianity, or even cultural Christianity, is probably a positive in international marriages. I've only known one white guy married to a woman born in India, and it so happened that her family was part of India's small Christian minority.
You have a point with hunter gatherer ;) My point of view is that class-blindness counts, and explain that within a country or culture, assortive mating is much stronger, hence the google programmer not marrying rednecks or ghetto. But a Phillipino, Columbian or Letton girl, yes. Younger, hotter, poorer...
But I guess there could be too much distance, even for short term attraction. That and the fact that from the documentary I saw, Papua new guinea HG girls are not likely to fit the definition of what most western male would find hot. By the way, i'm from Europe and in a tech field. My anecdotal but first hand experience is that indeed, hypergamy is real and when it happen, it show the correlation mentioned above quite strongly: different native language, different cultures and wider age gap (older male) for the hypergamy situation (which is not so uncommon, maybe 1/4 or 1/5) and strong assortivity in the more common situation.
Those couples do not necessarily last....but neither do assortive classic ones. I could not tell which ones last longer, except maybe that it seems to last longer in my tech world than outside, if I split my friends and colleagues into tech / non-tech groups.
It's well know that in USA, black women have least SMV, because they look relatively masculine to women of other races (prognathism and black skin are considered masculine traits)
Also, African males wouldn't like white men looking for mail order brides, unlike Eastern European males.
They mostly just transformed into dating websites where people can correspond directly and have more plausible deniability to say it's no different from match.com
How recently were they common and accepted/? I tend to think of them as back in the California gold rush, where there was a very wide region with lots of men and very few women. And these men came from somewhere, so there were much larger areas with few men compared to the number of women.
There's a whole show called 90-Day Fiance (with its various spin-offs) that manages to come up with endless content.
With the Internet and the proliferation of smartphones in poor countries, it's probably easier to do than ever -- you can do video calls, you can use apps to help translate if her English skills are lacking, and you can potentially disintermediate the expensive services that facilitate these things (while also opening the door to more fraud).
I'd guess though that in most of these arrangements, while there's a large gap in incomes, she's basically middle-class by her country's standards: a relatively educated city-dweller with potentially pretty good English skills.
Might be because of the impartial hand of the law, in particular IMBRA and VAWA.
https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/law-and-life/are-mail-order-brides-illegal/
I don't think the archetypical "guy with a mail order bride" was ever actually per-se wealthy. The most common type of man involved, in my experience, is a middle-aged, not-very-educated man who's fairly well along in a reasonably-well-paying blue-collar career - or, to put it in cruder terms, "Rich for West Virginia."
Such a man might have an annual income approaching or over six figures, typically owns a reasonably nice house already, and - because the cost of living in his area is low - he might well have as much as several hundred thousand dollars in the bank, even if he isn't particularly thrifty. He has no plans to "go back to school" or change careers out of his male-dominated field - as a result, he's missed out on meeting a spouse via college or the workplace, where the vast majority of relationships form. He lives in a rural area that's already has a male-tilted population, so he meets very few unmarried women. Due to his blue-collar career field, he'll likely face no serious blowback for having a "mail order bride."
At this point, the money's burning a hole in his pocket - he can't move because his well-paying blue-collar job depends on living somewhere rural, and there's only so much a middle-aged man can spend on his truck and booze (stereotypically). These men are the same reason that fully-kitted F150s are some of the fastest-selling cars over $100k, and they're also in large part the reason that Americans "on average" own so many guns - I've seen blogs from guys like this who buy another $1500 gun with every $4000 paycheck. The mail-order bride thing usually only happens after these guys have had as much fun with trucks & guns as it's possible to have in one lifetime.
If you sign up to tinder or another dating service as a 20-30 year old guy in a large western city, you often find that most of your matches are women from developing countries who want visas. (Or at least my group of average engineer/programmer/scientist and not super muscular / attractive / rich friends did). Few local or western women matched with us except for prostitutes and the women from the developing countries had nothing on their profiles indicating they didn't live in your city - they just sprung it on you when chatting.
Perhaps they avoid the middle man that way.
I've heard of way too many scams in that direction.
I wonder who rich male Google programmers *do* marry. Are they the only nerd men rich enough to get the elusive nerd women? SJW types and that's why Silicon Valley outside of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk leans so far left? Non-SJW types and that's why the the media hates Silicon Valley? I feel like the answers to many otherwise hidden sociological questions are related to this.
> Are they the only nerd men rich enough to get the elusive nerd women?
From personal experience, no. 😉
Data point of 1: I'm a male Googler, and found myself a female Googler. Compatibility was great.
Data point of >1: Friends and colleagues making good money in tech find themselves high-education/high-status partners in similar fields like tech or econ.
So there are a few dimensions here.
So many of the tech workers are immigrants, that in aggregate they would need to be separated. Indian and Chinese immigrants have their own demographics separate from native Americans. Amongst themselves, there are probably less to no income differences, since all needed to pass the immigration bar.
A typical marriage for a tech guy is probably a nurse/teacher/doctor/lawyer.
I was engaged to a veterinarian, so interpret that how you want.
What we want is a smart woman who *could* have been a doctor, but chose not to. Sometimes this involves actually getting a credential and not using it. Or rather, not using it in a career, but as a signal. Yes, I realise this is a waste of societal resources and a bit sexist.
Apparently Pakistanis feel the same way. Pakistan has a huge number of female MDs but very few practicing female physicians. An MD in Pakistan functions as an MRS degree.
I wonder that too. I know two guys fitting that description. Both are Burners who are either married or in long-term relationships with current or former sex workers. Not quite like Aella (although one has met her) but still very much middle class people.
Wow, interesting. I guess they place less value on fidelity etc.; do they have kids? I'd guess they'd be poly. I also wonder, are they nerdy sex workers? I always wondered if 'sex worker to nerds' was an actual niche; seems like you would decrease your risk of violence, though it would not fall to zero. They might be into weirder stuff though.
Hmm. I don't know if they have nerdy clientele; I can ask the one that's still seeing clients. That one is in a theoretically open relationship, although the man is demisexual and so doesn't even want anything other than his partner. The other one...she's in a mono relationship as far as I know; she's not a sex worker anymore.
Not "mail order" but there was a trend (maybe still going on?) of US men visiting the Philippines and marrying women from there. I have a cousin who married such a woman, and have known a few other men who were thinking about it.
While it's a real thing, I suspect that it's rare enough to not influence any statistical numbers of the full population.
When I worked at Google in 2009, one of my (rich) programmer team mates had 3 Chinese ex wives, and was in the process of travelling over to get his 4th. They had several children.
I expect most guys who do this don't talk about it as openly as he did.
Mail order brides and trophy wives are "popular" in the sense that everyone has heard of them and you might know of a couple cases but as a percentage of all marriages they're a small enough percentage to not change the statistics a lot.
"sugar daddy/trophy wife"
Trump/Melania
To what extent is the modern data confounded (or biased) by the relatively low modern marriage rate? Did I miss that discussion?
In addition there's a generational aspect as well. The percentage of males without partners among Gen Z and young Millennials is pretty astounding compared to previous generations.
And this definitely transcends just marriage, there are a lot who don't date at all.
Yeah in this decade, seems like the data should at least include cohabitating couples, since one of the question is do men wanna live together with women with different class/culture.
"After all, on average, the average man has 50th percentile educational rank among men; the average woman has 50th percentile educational rank among women, therefore the average husband and wife would share the same educational rank."
Isn't this misstating the problem? More than 50% of the college population now is women. If every college educated woman wants a college educated man there's simply not enough to go around.
From what I understand the imbalance is so bad on certain campuses that the dating situation has been completely distorted compared to previous generations, i.e. female college students chasing eligible males who are presented with an array of potential partners.
"...seems to have produced a change in the preferences of individuals, in the social norms that are internalized or imposed upon them by their social environment."
Or it may be that college educated women are settling in the belief that marrying down is better than not marrying at all. In that scenario is it unreasonable to hypothesize that such unions may be less stable than ones where one partner didn't lower their expectations?
"Women’s rising share of education isn’t directly damaging the marriage market. Women’s rising share of income might be, with one study suggesting it’s responsible for 23% of the decline in US marriages."
This would seem to be contradictory. Income correlates with education--how many times have we heard how much more college grads make over a lifetime?
> Income correlates with education
Not all kinds of education are equal, and men -- for some mysterious reason -- seem more likely to choose the kind of education that leads to greater expected income, e.g. STEM.
"This would seem to be contradictory. Income correlates with education--how many times have we heard how much more college grads make over a lifetime??
Not necessarily, if women with college degrees make less than men with college degrees. It could still be true that men with college degrees make more than men without, and women with college degrees make more than women without, and so the overall numbers would still support increased income for having a college degree.
I strongly suspect that "women's rising share of income" is a result of women's rising share of the population of college graduates.
Yes, but they are not the same thing. If women were getting useless degrees and never joining the workforce, then education - on its own - wouldn't be leading to marriage problems. That's Scott's point. As a proxy for income, education may have some effect, but it's easier and better to just use income directly since that's the thing that apparently actually makes a difference. Apparently, both men and women are okay with a marriage where the woman is more highly education, but not where the woman makes more money.
The problem as I see it is that a four year degree is increasingly viewed as primarily some kind of glorified job training program, a ticket to a lifetime of high earnings. If women are increasing their share of the income pie is there any real doubt that the primary vehicle is higher education? In how many of these mixed couples where the woman earns more than the man is the woman a college grad? I would hypothesize that it's virtually all of them.
And again are college married women marrying down because society's perceptions have changed or simply because they have no choice?
Anecdote isn't data but my personal experience matches this very well. I (34m) am less educated (3 years of university) but higher earning (finance) than my wife (32f, 6 years of university, veterinary surgeon). In the last comparable year where we were both working full time before she went on maternity I earned 50% more than her, since her return to work 3 days a week and a promotion for me I earn 3 times more.
Furthermore of the 3 girls that my wife shared a house with for her last 2 years of vet school 2 are married, both to less well educated but higher earning husbands.
The Veterinary sector is probably a slightly extreme example as it is quite poorly paid (at least in the UK) relative to the required education.
On the class points my background matches my wife's pretty closely and that's part of the reason why our relationship works. My previous long term girlfriend, who I met at university, came from a pretty different background and while that was fine when dating as we got more serious that difference became a bigger issue and led to the relationship ending. With my wife our expectations and views are well aligned.
"The Veterinary sector is probably a slightly extreme example as it is quite poorly paid (at least in the UK) relative to the required education"
I think it's a part of a pattern. Jobs that are high-education but relatively low-paying tend to be female dominated while jobs that are low-education but relatively high-paying (mechanics, miners, electricians, etc) tend to be male-dominated.
But that is at least partly downstream of the dating market. It is rational for men to choose careers which maximise their earnings relative to the educational requirements at the exclusion of pretty much everything else.
I don't know how much of that has to do with the dating market. Those have been male dominated careers for a long time, before any percentage of women to speak of would have been educated at all. I would say it's certainly about maximizing earnings relative to educational requirements, but how much of that has to do with dating rather than just wanting more money for all the other reasons people want money is unclear.
Women like money as much as men, the fact that there is a strong correlation between gender and the education requirement/salary ratio for professions suggests there's something more going on.
Specifically that women can obtain access to money without having to pursue a high earning career via marriage while men not only can't obtain access to money they reduce their chance of getting married if they don't maximise their earnings.
As for why some professions have switched from male dominated to female dominated while others haven't I think the common factor is jobs which don't appeal to women, either because they require "male brain" like engineering or are physically demanding/unpleasant like building or agriculture.
Because men are motivated by money rather than prestige those jobs have had to maintain attractive wages to fill posts, while jobs which appeal to women, have seen relative wages plummet as the supply has exceeded demand.
People-oriented jobs are not obviously high-leverage, which explains why they would be lower paying. And females are more people oriented even from infancy.
Also, I am suprised to hear that men are more interested in money than prestige, as the precise opposite is a common view.
Isn't some of that just comparative advantage regarding physical strength?
I have different specifics, but this all closely matches my experience.
Not too different from me. I've got maybe 1.5 years of university vs. my wife's 5 years (BS in speech language pathology and a special ed certificate), but I make more than 3X what she does. I'm 46m, she's 44f. I work in digital analytics. Education, and maybe special ed in particular, suffers from some of the same issues where the pay is much lower than the work ought to get.
Re class, tough to say; her dad sold seed corn, so maybe kind of low-status in the "farmer" field, but also well-educated. My dad was a professor at a large private university, but not one of the top-tier schools. Roughly even on class, though I might have a slight edge by being from a medium-sized city with a large university while she grew up in a small mid-western farm town.
I know it's not on the topic, but expectations and views aligning plays a big part too. I'm LDS, and most of the time, LDS people marry other LDS people. I think that weighs higher than class or income for my particular population. There might be a similar thing happening with politics or other strong "culture" identifiers among couples that could play a similar role to the role religion plays in my experience.
Class is always a tricky one to judge at scale but it's one of those "I know it when I see it" things, do you have major "culture" differences with someone of the same race and nationality? Then you are from different classes. A warehouse supervisor in Liverpool and an associate professor at Oxford earn about the same but we instinctively know they will have very little in common.
For all encompassing faiths I think it can replace class as a factor, the way poorest and richest member of an Orthodox Jewish synagogue have a "culture gap" far smaller than you would expect from their relative wealth. However as a someone with a Christmas and Easter Church of England religious background that wasn't a factor for me.
To go back to dating my wife comes from a similar background from me, upper middle class English, but another factor is how she earns her money, bluntly I feel proud talking about my wife the veterinary surgeon to acquaintances, in a way that I wouldn't feel talking about an equally well paying but stereotypically lower class position, like beauty salon owner. Yes it's snobbish and irrational but it's very common. I think "job prestige" weighting applies in both directions, I'm pretty sure most upper middle class women would prefer a associate professor to a warehouse supervisor, finances being equal, but I think it is much stronger for women's jobs then for men.
For better or worse men are still seen as primary breadwinners and the amount of bread is what really matters, for women having an "appropriate" job carries more weight. Which in turn partly explains why many prestigious but female coded jobs are so badly paid. The supply exceeds demand.
I was wondering the same thing. I'm disappointed that none of the studies cited here seemed to control for religion, politics, or other lifestyle choices independent from income.
I think religion and politics tend to cluster fairly strongly within class, but I agree that income is terrible proxy for them.
I know this is a tangent but I'm amazed to hear that vets are poorly paid in the USA! Vets are notoriously expensive here in Aus, much like dentists (though all the money is in looking after rich city people's pets and I've heard there's a big shortage of vets for farm animals in rural regions)
UK not USA but vets fees are regarded as high in Britain, though the NHS is probably a factor as most people lack any understanding of the costs of healthcare.
But very little of that cost makes it through to salaries for vets, insurance, compliance enforced overheads and medicines both eat up most of the cost to the customer.
I think this discussion might be missing a crucial point. For almost all of the period in Western culture during which monogamy has been the only recognized form of marriage, near-universal opposite-sex marriage has *also* been the norm. If your metric is any rank-ordered variable, that imposes a fairly low mathematical limit on how much net female hypergamy there can be.
The phenomenon we're talking about was enormously more important in the times and places (much of human history, I think) in which monogamy wasn't the norm. There's no way to understand a finding like this, for example, except as describing a society in which the norm was extreme polygamy with extreme hypergamy: roughly, one where around 85 percent of women and around 5 percent of men produced at least one child who survived to reproductive age.
https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success
Relatedly: if there's a genetic component to male homosexuality, which there probably is, its persistence has to be explained in the same way as the persistence of genes for sickle-cell anemia. There has to be some positive effect on fitness which equilibrates with the obvious negative one at some allele frequency greater than zero.
If you're going to speculate about what positive effects might have manifested under prehistoric conditions, you have to assume the kind of reproductive environment demonstrated in this study. I can think of a few possibilities, but at any rate the question seems less mysterious than it would be in an environment of near-total opposite-sex monogamy.
For example the homosexual men wouldn't compete for the women but still be available as providers.
I'm not sure that's it. Providers for whose children?
What you have to envision, I think, is a social structure in which most non-elite men are deprived of access to women, but non-elite men who are homosexual have significantly more access: enough to offset the fact that they take advantage of it less often.
I can see that working through two channels. Homosexual men might provide services to the households of elite men which are exclusively non-sexual. Or if the sexual interests of some elite men aren't entirely binary, those services might be partly sexual as well.
I think someone actually worked the second version out and called it the "Tartuffe hypothesis", after the Moliere play in which a rich man schemes to get his daughter married to a young man in whom he's clearly interested himself.
Either for the children they are indirectly related to or even just the "tribe" or whatever social unit has formed in general.
Yeah, but it has to work at the level of the selfish gene. Benefits spread across the tribe won't help unless they're differentially directed to those members of the tribe who share the gay alleles, and that constrains the kind of story you can tell.
Maybe. You would also have to explain why a lot of childless males sacrifice for the tribe at large (is it just a result of coercion or do they think it improves their fitness?). Is there even a robust mechanism to tell which individuals we're genetically related to? How would one explain fathers raising children that - unbeknownst to them - aren't fathered by them?
>Benefits spread across the tribe won't help unless they're differentially directed to those members of the tribe who share the gay alleles, and that constrains the kind of story you can tell.
Benefits spread across the tribe can be selected for in case of group selection, and in *prehistory* humanity actually was subject to group selection (because genocidal conflict was so common that it made up a substantial portion of total deaths, let alone deaths-before-completing-reproduction).
How would elite men know that homosexuals are truly homosexuals? In many societes they castrated servants/slaves.
They weren't sure they could tell :)
Wasn’t one already found, that the sisters of homosexual men are a bit more fertile? I had heard that in multiple places, although I am not sure of the original study.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15539346/ Found the original study.
This looks to be the study, they looked at 100 gay and 100 straight men and compared their female maternal relatives.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15539346/
Summarised by the guardian as "Their findings show that female maternal relatives of gay men have more reproductive success than their counterparts who are related to heterosexuals."
Too many confounding factors, if it's a study conducted in modern times among people with access to birth control. But still interesting.
This pretty well might be intentional -- I heard "we [married couple] both were single children, so we decided to make 2 children instead of 1" and maybe this generalizes to having gay relative as well.
Adding to what Jeff said.
This isn't that hard. For instance homosexual men might have a gene for "likes fucking men extra much", which means their sisters and other female relatives produce more kids at a rate that exceed the rate it reduces their production of offspring.
There are many potential scenarios, but they really are not at all hard to craft,
Why did the gene for "likes fucking men extra much" not spread to females regardless of what their brothers were doing? If "likes fucking men extra much" is more adaptive, the gene for it should appear and propagate on its own. (There is no pressure to keep it in men too.)
And since that gene is clearly mal-adaptive for men, its effect should disappear in men (only a toggle, a switch on or off, "if men then off", is necessary).
>Why did the gene for "likes fucking men extra much" not spread to females regardless of what their brothers were doing?
This sounds like a question from someone who doesn't understand how mutations in complex systems can have quite diverse and inseparable impacts.
Why do you assume this process is perfectly efficient? It isn't. It is a random walk through a wide variety of situations, and we are just caught in a moment in time.
It is like asking if running faster is better, why doesn't everyone run 50mph? There are tradeoffs.
And surely some people have genes which are conducive to faster running, say at least 22mph? Why doesn't everyone have those genes? Because not everyone is in the same situation so the genes don't have the same fitness everywhere, nor is there time for every slightly beneficial but not without cost mutation to be stomped out if it is less than optimal.
Increased fertility is not like running faster. Women already want to fuck men. If fucking men more meant more surviving descendants, the women who want to fuck men more would have more descendants. There certainly would not need for *someone else* to pay the cost (and an absurdly high cost in this case).
Why do assume that evolution is able to easily have agene affect only one sex? most things are duplicated across both even if utterly useless to one, eg. male nipples.
By this logic, a gene that makes women more fertile but men gay is going to stabilise at the frequency such that the effects across the 2 sexes roughly cancel out in expectation (and the fertility decrease from homosexuality is going to depend on societal factors, including the frequency of homosexuality)
Yes, I do expect natural selection to easily weed out traits that have a huge cost that is also well isolated. If the benefit and the cost were on the female only, it may be difficult to have one without the other. But when the cost is entirely isolated into another individual, the hypothesis becomes very implausible to me. It isn't impossible in principle, but it would make it much easier to eliminate (e.g. abort males who carry the gene), and the evolutionary pressure to do so large enough that it would almost certainly happen.
Nipples are a small cost to men. Most of the cost is actually carried by women. Completely eliminating nipples for men is more costly that simply keeping a common blueprint and then stopping further development for men. If the same thing had happened with a gene "that makes people want to fuck men more" the effect would have been suppressed in men very much like the development of functional breasts is suppressed.
For homosexuality, the cost is huge for men while the benefit for women dubious. The benefit for women seems straightforward at first: increased sex drive which increases fertility. But then why didn't women have that increased sex drive in the first place? Increasing fertility is obviously a huge benefit (self-evidently so). A simple answer is that the level of fertility is already optimum. In fact DNA data suggest that women who could bear children did bear children (much fewer men had progeny). The bottleneck simply isn't sex drive. (It may even be that sex drive in women is useless like nipples are useless in men.)
Ok, nipples wasn't best example. Other is wide hips. Males have widers hips than early hominids with smaller brain even though only females need them, but natural selection had to increase hip width for both sexes because it couldn't perfectly isolate changes
Why do you say there "probably is"?
The idea that homosexuality is caused by post-natal environmental factors has never been corroborated, as far as I know. Those are the most easily observable factors and there's no discernible pattern.
You can make a plausible *a priori* argument that atypical prenatal hormonal exposure plays a role. But unless that can be correlated with an observable factor in the maternal environment, I think it just throws you back to genetics.
No etiology at all has been "corroborated". Cochran's pathogenic theory is the most plausible a priori to me.
There are identical twin pairs with different sexualities, which is existence proof that post-natal environment plays a role. An awful lot of traits seem to have a bout 1/2 - 2/3 genetic heritability and the rest random noise with ~ no role in the modern day for deliberate environmental factors, I'd expect sexuality to be one of those. (Though I can easily see how environment affects the likelihood of being closeted, of course, which will affect any statistics one gathers)
Yeah, that's what makes me dubious about the twin studies.
All these things will be revealed in time
It isn't a proof. Identical twins may have one or separate placentas, in latter case environments would be slightly different, and human ontogeny isn't 100% deterministic either.
I think the evidence points toward differences in *prenatal* environment being the main determining factor. For example, the fraternal birth order effect.
Genes are not the only influence on early development
Interesting thought, I think just looking at monogamy and marriage probably doesn't capture the reality that the more desirable parts of the dating pool choose not to marry or monogamous since it would limit their options and it's socially acceptable not to be married.
It's even kinda mentioned in the article.
> Also, rich people meet poor people all the time. Poor people are their secretaries, servants, waitresses, and Uber drivers. Sometimes they have casual sex with these people. They just don’t (usually) marry them. I think it’s choice.
A more interesting research would be to measure social status and sexual relationships at a high school or a university campus.
I have trouble believing that there was really a world in which there was anything like a steady-state in which 16 celibate men provided for every nobleman and his 17 wives. I don't think we ever see anything nearly that extreme in recorded history. Why not?
More likely, if this genetic result is true, it's produced by repeated invasions by male warriors who are exterminating or subjugating the men of a rival tribe and claiming the women. We actually do see this in recorded history -- e.g., the Spanish conquest of Mexico. And have reason to suspect it in multiple places in prehistory.
It should be very easy to defeat an ultra-polygamous society in battle, because are those 16 eunuchs really going to fight and die for the fat bastard that is hogging all the women? If I were an invader, I'd make them an offer to join us instead.
Sometimes they would, because the best warrior ends up being the one that becomes a rich fat old bastard with a harem after the others get killed off in the war.
Basically, if you have a society in which men reproduce at a *much older age* than women, and you have a high attrition rate among younger men, you can get this kind of effect. Today you see it in extreme polygamist cults, which have a relatively old leadership that consists of middle-aged men with lots of younger wives and that kicks out a lot of teenage boys that might complete with the leadership for women.
The FLDS can get away with kicking out young men without those men taking vengeance and without outside parties making war on them specifically because they're a small group that is protected by the wider society and its laws. And importantly, it's not like those boys are compliant servants of the older polygamists. There's a reason they have to be expelled.
Interestingly there was some discussion of "warring clans" producing this result here:
https://www.livescience.com/62754-warring-clans-caused-population-bottleneck.html
Still makes sense to me. Not mutually exclusive with the idea that older successful warriors do a disproportionate share of breeding -- which honestly is almost certainly true, the only question being exactly how disproportionate.
The real problem is with the idea that a noble class with 5% of the population seizes effectively 100% of the women and that this arrangement is stable for any length of time, with non-breeding males demonstrating herbivorous compliance. No chance, I say.
The Economist published an article on this, "The link between polygamy and war":
https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2017/12/19/the-link-between-polygamy-and-war
"Valerie Hudson of Texas A&M University and Hilary Matfess of Yale have found that an inflated brideprice is a “critical” factor “predisposing young men to become involved in organised group violence for political purposes”. Terrorist groups know this, too. Muhammad Kasab, a Pakistani terrorist hanged for his role in the Mumbai attacks of 2008, said he joined Lashkar-e-Taiba, the jihadist aggressor, because it promised to pay for his siblings to get married. In Nigeria, Boko Haram arranges marriages for its recruits. The so-called Islamic State used to offer foreign recruits $1,500 towards a starter home and a free honeymoon in Raqqa. Radical Islamist groups in Egypt have also organised cheap marriages for members. It is not just in the next life that jihadists are promised virgins."
It follows that there are high rates of attrition amongst young men who engage in violence for a chance to reproduce.
What you're not seeing here is that men are being removed from the pool on both sides of the conflict - more men have died on campaign due to disease, starvation, and other misfortune than enemy action throughout most of history. Even failed wars produce a significant reduction in male population.
That's surely true of most of *history*, but not necessarily *prehistory*, circa 6000 BC. State-based warfare, with armies in the thousands and especially tens of thousands, marching many days from their homes and requiring dedicated logistics, creates a lot of opportunities for this sort of attrition.
You should expect a lot less death from disease, etc. when we're talking about clan/tribe/village-based warfare involving dozens or at most hundreds of warriors, perhaps attacking people 1-2 days' journey away at most.
Not to say there might not have been some larger-scale warfare in this era. But we have to think it was much less the norm than in later periods.
>>"roughly, one where around 85 percent of women and around 5 percent of men produced at least one child who survived to reproductive age.”
Despite the headline, that is not what the actual study said.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25770088/.
I think you may be right, although I'd defer to someone like Razib Khan. A "bottleneck" sounds like a one-off event, not a continuing arrangement in which only a small fraction of males reproduce in each generation.
However, if you switched from monogamy to ultra-polygyny in a short period of time, and the new system remained stable, wouldn't you see the same genetic fingerprint you'd see from a die-off of males: a one-off drop in Y chromosome diversity, but with no further decrease once the new system was established?
I think you would, but I also think you'd be unable to tell if male reproductive success later became less unequal. They may have demonstrated only that the 17:1 differential existed for some period of time, not necessarily a long one.
If the 17:1 ratio existed, even for a short period, it should show up as a drop in Ne as estimated by the autosomal loci. I don't think it does.
From the paper: “We note that any nonselective explanation for the reduction in Ne would also predict a reduction of the Ne at autosomal loci in this short time interval (Supplemental Fig. S6)” Take a look at that figure.
They cite Schiffels and Durbin 2014, who state: "In Europe, Northern European ancestors (CEU) experience a relatively constant effective population size between 2kya and 10kya, only increasing rapidly since 2kya; Southern European ancestors (TSI) have a consistently higher effective ancestral population size, appearing to show a more complex history of increase and decrease between 10kya and 3kya, and then increasing earlier than the CEU."
--
There are probably newer estimates of Ne from autosomal loci that you could check. Certainly, Razib knows more about this stuff than I do.
It's hard to imagine the 17:1 ratio being sustained for long periods of time.
But I mentioned that paper because it seems to show an extreme example of something I think has often been true in human history: a minority of elite men having multiple female reproductive partners while a fairly large share of men have zero.
So a high level of net female hypergamy has probably been the historic norm. I think this is why all white people are descendants of Charlemagne.
I have a question about this 17-to-1 thing. Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding.
In order to do the math on this, they can only track the male lineage thru the Y chromosome and the female lineage thru the mitochondrial DNA, right? So they can only determine if a male successfully had sons, but if a female successfully had daughters or sons. (Because everyone has mitochondrial DNA, but only males have Y-chromosomes.)
So in a situation where a male did, in fact, successfully reproduce, and either had 1) only daughters, or 2) both daughters and sons, but his sons were killed, he's still not going to show up in this data as having successfully reproduced, right?
So this data doesn't seem to show that only 1 out of every 17 males managed to reproduce at all. It seems to show that only 1 out of 17 males successfully produced surviving sons. And in an ancestral environment with lots of warfare in which young men were killed far more often than young women, it seems reasonable that more than 1/17 men were reproducing but only 1/17 successfully passed on his Y-chromosome, specifically.
Am I missing something?
Isn't marriage in general declining? Marriage data has the advantage of being readily available but does it still represent enough of a share of the population in committed relationships or are there perhaps other things that factor into which people marry (e.g. religion)?
I think this could potentially be a bigger problem - richer people are more likely to marry, poorer people are more likely to cohabit, so these studies may pick up more marriage vs cohabit signal than marriage vs single signal.
It's an interesting dynamic all by itself, wealthier people have a lot more to lose in divorce...
And they basically know what their life will look like in three years’ time, whereas if you live paycheck to paycheck trying not to get evicted you don’t
Oh I also know some outwardly rich people who live paycheck to paycheck. They're just a lot more confident about their next paycheck coming.
But wealthier people who want children are probably aware (at least subconsciously through cultural osmosis) that the children of married parents have better outcomes than the children of unmarried parents.
There are also prenups.
There is the fact that richer people are likely to marry _later_ —- marriage is viewed as a “keystone” after career has been figured out (and so the person marrying is making more income as they are farther along in their career) rather than done at the start of a career. Many middle- and upper-class people marrying right now in North America and Western Europe already own a house or condo together, for instance.
Is there data on this with "education" broken down into fields? Seems potentially relevant, considering the wild gender imbalances in a lot of fields.
"... each quadrant in the (rich, poor) x (pretty, ugly) matrix pairs off with itself"
I wonder if this makes the gap between the prettiest and ugliest people bigger over time? Because the prettiest people create even prettier children, and vice versa.
I don't think this is how it would work. If an 8/10 man pairs off with an 8/10 woman, their children should (on average) be less than 8/10 attractive, because of regression to the mean.
(this confused me too the first few times I heard it, but I think it makes sense if you track the gene flows instead of worrying about the phenotype. On average, that couple's kids are getting genes for being 8/10. While a few lucky ones might get the best genes from each parents, and a few unlucky ones might get the worst genes from each parent, on average the gene frequency won't change. And then regression to the mean - beauty isn't just genetic, so if the kids don't get whatever non-genetic strokes of luck made the parents extra pretty, they'll on average be closer to the mean than their parents were).
I think my comment still holds looking at the ends of the population distribution. Your argument refers to looking at the average prettiness of the 8x8 couple's children. If we instead look at the distribution of their children, they will be producing 9s more often than if they had paired as a 8x5. Then their 9 children will pair off with other 9s and have a good chance of producing some 10s, pushing out the extremes of the distribution (even if the averages are unchanged). In contrast, in a world where there was no selection there would surely be a huge hump in frequency in the population at 4-6.
I concede at some stage the pushing out of the distribution runs out of steam due to regression to the mean pressure, but are we there yet? Feels like the pairing off tendency will be stronger than ever due to dating sites, which is a recent phenomenon. So I'd have thought the distribution is currently expanding.
Btw thanks for your reply!
It's not impossible that the best looking people are better looking today than in the past. After all, most of the women featured in paintings by the Old Masters would not get a second glance from the Ford Modeling Agency today, but with at least one exception: Botticelli's model, the noblewoman Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci (a distant in-law of the explorer after whom America is named). She was recognized as extraordinarily beautiful in 15th Century Florence and still is today:
https://www.virtualuffizi.com/botticelli%E2%80%99s-venus-and-some-love-stories.html
But the enduring fame of Botticelli's model for his "Venus" and "Primavera" paintings suggests that she was unusual for the past.
It's not uncommon in intellectual circles for pools of inter-marrying high achievers to emerge. In Britain, for instance, many intellectuals have a Huxley, Darwin, Wedgwood, Benn, Keynes, Arnold, Cockburn, or Waugh in their family tree. In America, Eliots and Huntingtons have long stood out.
I'd jump into her lap.
The notion that people looked less attractive in the past has a problem - its proponents only look at the women, and not the men.
My impression, when I look at Victorian photographs, is that while the women look "weird" by today's standard, which sometimes makes them oddly unattractive, the men don't look particularly unattractive.
What's going on?
To me it looks like all those faces have gone through a very, very subtle "masculinity filter". Everyone, men and women, looks a little bit more masculine than today. This makes the women weird and maybe even "ugly", but not the men.
You could even make a case that men looked better back then!
Sounds like it could be related to the large decline in testosterone levels since we started measuring like 70 years ago. Higher testosterone levels produce more masculine faces, notably jawlines
I think that the best looking people are better looking today, simply because of a far larger population and far less disease. Yes, there's obesity - but if you look at healthy-weight people in the West, you're looking at a population that's lived better than kings did in the Old Masters' time, in many ways. No smallpox to disfigure you these days.
I recall reading that this hypothesis was tested on drosophilas and it doesn't work.
I want to reply narrowly to one thing you said, which I think indicates a lack of clarity on regression to the mean:
> I concede at some stage the pushing out of the distribution runs out of steam due to regression to the mean pressure
I don't think modelling regression to the mean as pressure is well-formed.
The cause of regression to the mean is the mismatch between phenotype (the physically measurable trait) and genotype (the genetic predeliction toward having that phenotype.) All the polygenic traits of the sort we're discussing have an imperfect correlation between phenotype and genotype; there's an effectively random factor of circumstances and whatnot that makes even identical twin phenotypes diverge.
Regression to the mean is just the fact that when you select from a population based purely on phenotype (say, by picking the top 20% of sheep based on wool production) you're excluding some individuals with a >80% genotype (because their random factors pushed their phenotype below the threshold) and including some individuals with a <80% genotype (because their random factors pushed the phenotype above the threshold.) And genotype is, of course, what breeds true. So their children will have phenotypes that are based on the genotype selection, which is weaker than top 20%.
The biggest takeaway here is that there is NO regression to the mean on genotype. Genotype breeds true. If you can select directly on genotype (as we can in some genetic diseases that have only a few, known genes impacting them), regression to the mean does not exist.
The second takeaway is that regression to the mean is an artifact of selecting breeding pairs based on phenotype. If you don't do that for a generation, then there is no regression to the mean on that generation. For instance, suppose that you breed 100 sheep randomly selected from the top 20% of the population. Their offspring turns out to average top 35%. If you then just randomly breed those offspring with each other, the next generation (grandchildren of the selected pairs) will also average top 35%. And so will their children if you continue breeding from this limited population, and so on. There's no residual pressure to go back to the original mean; the average genotype of this breeding population is all that matters, and it breeds true. (This is how entire breeds of sheep, dogs, etc. become better.)
Thanks for the explanation and examples, really clear to follow.
Does this mean that if you keep selecting and breeding the top 20% of each generation for a certain trait, there is no theoretical limit to how extreme the trait can get e.g. coat length for sheep?
And so looping back to the human example, if the top 5% of beautiful people always couple up, a few generations down the line the new top 5% should be more beautiful than before. Ad infinitum. And ditto for the bottom 5%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherian_runaway
You eventually run into physical/biological limitations. Not all conceivable traits can be expressed by genes. Largely due to biological constraints, most genetic variance is based on tradeoffs. If being tall makes you beautiful (and stronger and more capable), but also increases your chance of dying from heart failure, then as tallness goes to infinity the population starts dying sooner and sooner until they can't breed.
Adding even more to this, beauty standards are partially subjective, and largely correlated with health. If you start making more and more extreme tradeoffs sacrificing valuable traits for superficial beauty, then the healthiest people will no longer be the same as the most beautiful people (by the old beauty standards), which will create a selective pressure on traits that govern beauty standards: people who are attracted to the new healthiest people who haven't made these extreme tradeoffs will have healthier children, eventually leading to a new set of beauty standards.
You do hit a limit eventually. Basically, most traits are less heritable among the top/bottom 1% than they are across the entire range, so the correlation between phenotype and genotype is weaker. Your phenotype selection becomes less powerful as you get closer and closer to the limit of natural variation.
One helpful way to grasp regression-toward-the-mean better is to think about the siblings of exceptional individuals. For example, Brad Pitt's brother Doug, a businessman, is a handsome guy, but as you'd expect, he's not as handsome as Brad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTY8esK3pFc
When approached this way, regression-toward-the-mean seems pretty natural.
But what we are looking at is Brad Pitts offspring. He will pair up with someone else good looking, and presumbly have kids which are better looking than him and his siblings (on average), rather than them regressing back to the mean of his parents. If you keep following the most beautiful offspring down the generations, surely the most beautiful 1% of people gets better looking...?
This even more significant given that many traits have opposite effect in different sex. E.g. darker skin, body hair, prognatism. A man marries woman with nice big ass, these nice ass alleles find way into sons (who are 1/2 of the man's offspring) and decrease their SMV.
>And then regression to the mean - beauty isn't just genetic
Regression to mean can be genetic too (non-linear effects)
There are probably traits that are basically carried by one sex and terrible in the other. PCOS is probably one - I've heard of families of slim men and very fat, very masculine-looking women that never had partners. I wonder if that gene makes the men that carry it more attractive...
Consider an animal counter-example. If you breed two 80th percentile wool-producing sheep, their offspring will be below the 80th percentile on average due to regression to the mean. However, we KNOW that people were able to successfully improve average wool production via selecting for nothing but the phenotype. So, what gives?
Well, this just goes back to what regression to mean is. The population of the top 80% phenotypically for a typical polygenic trait will *average* to the top 90% phenotypically, and to something like top 70% genotypically. The correlation between genotype and phenotype is strong, but not even close to 1.0. Regression to the mean is just the observation that a random top-80% pairing will produce children that average 70% phenotypically instead of 90%.
We can summarize this by saying that phenotype is an imperfect proxy for genotype, but it's still a proxy; so if you apply selection pressure to the phenotype, you will be applying some lesser amount of selection pressure to the genotype as well.
In my understanding of population genetics (...so take with a grain of salt), isn't this true for any specific individual, but not true at a group level? Let's say that you cross a cow which is at the 99th percentile for milk production with a bull who can't produce milk but who is, theoretically, also at the 99th percentile for milk production. Their offspring will probably regress to the mean. However, if you keep doing this every generation, then the amount of milk represented by the 99th percentile will increase.
Let's say that my father is an 8/10 man, and my mother is an 8/10 woman. I personally am probably less than 8/10, because of regression to the mean. However, if you keep doing this over time, the quantity represented by 8/10 will tend to rise, because you're selecting for that trait.
Am I in some way mistaken? This does feel sort of paradoxical now that I'm writing it out explicitly.
That kind of regression works better for almost all characteristics, but possibly not beauty -- remember the studies suggesting that perfectly average faces are the most beautiful? To the extent that this is true, mean reversion seems to be on the side of making people prettier each generation.
An 8/10 mother and an 8/10 father already have near-average faces with just a few facial idiosyncrasies here and there. As long as they don't have the same idiosyncrasies then when they breed it's likely they'll wind up with a kid with fewer idiosyncrasies than either, right?
I could think of a couple of counterarguments.
1) beauty standards change over time - the biggest one being the reversal of fat/thin preference over the last 200 years or so. (I'm pretty certain about this - if being fat was seen as ugly, we won't have so many full body portraits of fat men and women who were the nobility of the day. Those people surely had pimples and freckles like everyone else - they don't paint every blemish, so they might be adding weight).
2) Among the more consistent measures of beauty are symmetry, height, and general markers of good health. Average heights have increased just about everywhere worldwide, proving your point. Symmetry and good health stuff (nice hair texture, clear skin, good posture, etc) are strongly correlated with class (freedom from environmental pollutants, backbreaking work, excessive sun exposure, exposures to the kind of situations that create disfiguring scars, etc) and access to resources (in this day and age, dental care, chickenpox vaccinations, adequate hydration, low stress lifestyle).
I mean, I look way better than my grandparents on either side (I'm taller due to access to adequate nutrition, better posture because I got to go to school to do an office job rather than doing backbreaking menial labour, access to dental care from birth, access to vaccinations, no nutritional deficiencies, and non-excessive sun exposure). My mum looks much better than her mother at the same age, and will look better at 80 than my grandma, for much the same reasons minus access to deworming meds, childhood dental care, and ability to address nutrient deficiencies. And I'm probably going to look better than my mother (or aunts from my dad's side) due to being able to fork out $10k for Invisalign early in life (which no one else in my family has been able to do, one of the reasons being Invisalign didn't exist when they were my age).
An 8/10 in 1910 is going to be very different from an 8/10 in 2010, but both of these people are probably going to have outsized access to things that help you avoid things that make people ugly over time (losing all your teeth, getting your face bashed in by a violent drunk because you live in a shitty neighbourhood).
Born in 1958 and raised in a middle class Southern California suburban family a few miles down the street from the Brady Bunch house, I grew up with most of the environmental advantages for good looks, as suggested by my being 6'4". The one exception I can think of is that my teeth were deemed straight enough not to get braces in 1971, but they wouldn't make the cut today.
That said about nurture, an interesting question is whether nature, the genes for good looks, might be clustering more than in the past. I wouldn't rule it out for reasons of the increased ease of assortative mating that were memorably spelled out for intelligence by Richard Herrnstein in his 1971 "Atlantic" article "I.Q.:"
https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/files/sept_1971_-_herrnstein_-_i.q..pdf
On the other hand, did the New York City-raised Herrnstein understand what mating was really like in the American gentile hinterland before his day? Sociologist-biologist Dalton Conley is attempting to use the new DNA technology to critically assess Hernnstein's influential assumptions. We'll probably have a better understanding of these questions in five or ten years thanks to Conley's work.
You were born in 1958, not 1858. You had running water, good sewers, ample and good nutrition, and not much infectious disease to contend with.
Kings in Lincoln's time would have killed for the shot of penicillin that an ordinary laborer could easily access in 1958.
Don't forget the same traits aren't going to be pretty in both men and women--big jaws etc.
So interesting to see social norms change as the structure of society changes. I would expect that we will see that difference in attitudes to income change in years to come, as educated women start to climb career ladders etc and society becomes less patriarchal.
I do find it amusing that "class" is such a strong explainer of peoples' marital choices, when it is itself so hard to agree on a definition for. One thing to consider, which I think Scott covers well, is that there is a lot of space to move around within your "class". For example, if you're a high-earning knowledge worker, you are highly likely to live somewhere full of professionals, have friends who are mostly professionals, use dating apps that professionals use etc etc. You don't need to consider moving outside of that when there are so many people around you with similar lifestyles and values.
It's hard to agree on a definition of "race" too, but in the vast majority of situations everybody understands what is being talked about. The point about there being many people around with similar lifestyles and values does most of the work, with additional understanding that there are also many people with significantly different lifestyles and values out there somewhere.
I once suggested that race could be defined as who your ancestors were and class as who your descendants are likely to be.
This is Men's Rights 101 level stuff. Did you just hear about it?
Probably just now decided to read about it.
Lucky 10000 ;) https://xkcd.com/1053/
The time between "I read about X" and "I wrote a long essay on X with good citations after reading the available literature" could be rather long.
Isn't this essay directly contradicting the MRA 101 stuff? It shows that mostly there is NO hypergamy, no crisis due to disproportionate educational achievement, etc
I think male hypogamy was more of a thing in the past when executives often married their secretaries. I recall a story from Ben Rich's fascinating book "Skunk Works" about the three marriages of Kelly Johnson, the legendary first head of Lockheed's Skunk Works advanced aircraft design wing. His first wife was dying, so she arranged with his secretary that she would marry Kelly next, and then they explained what they had arranged to the great man. Then his second wife was dying so she found a friend of her who agreed to marry Kelly.
It was common at mid-Century Lockheed for engineers with some college education to marry secretaries with only high school degrees. That's how my parents met. And my mother's best friend in the secretarial pool married Henry Combs, whom Rich credits as the chief designer of the awesome SR-71.
I'm guessing that the spread of typing after the personal computer arrived in the 1980s has reduced the number of secretaries employed by engineering firms.
Also, some secretaries back in mid-Century America were well-educated women who took to secretarial work as a way to meet promising men in order to meet a suitable man, marry, and become a stay-at-home mom.
Yeah some of this is surely that a top 20% intellect woman might be a secretary in 1960. SO they are still matching like for like, just the incomes are very different.
Very good point. In 1960, women's education consisted of none (working class - cooks, janitors, factory, wait staff), vocational (working professionals - secretary, programmer) and women's college/ finishing school (stay-at-home wife).
I'd wonder if a lot of the compatibility is just lifestyle - a working man has a lot more in common day to day with his secretary, who would have lots of opinions and things to say about workplace issues, public issues, etc because she's out all day participating in society, compared to his first wife (a woman who did childcare and chores, and mostly just sat around watching TV or socialising with other housewives when there the chores got automated away and/or delegated to maids).
Something similar happened with Henry J. Kaiser, the Man Who Invented The State Of California And Who Also Won WWII.
As part of his invention of the State of California, Kaiser invented the HMO. When Kaiser's first wife was dying of cancer in a (Kaiser Permanente) hospital, Kaiser arranged for their best nurse to be assigned to take care of his wife. As the wife approached the end, she suggested to her husband and the nurse that they ought to get married, once she passed.
The explicit legal structures that made it more difficult for women to acquire and expand wealth in mid-century America might also have an effect there.
Someone call HR, please. ;)
Because one or two of the surveys mentioned a two hundred year period, it might be relevant to point out that divorce became legal in the UK only in 1857, and I believe was difficult and expensive in the US and other western countries until at least that date, and probably well into the 20th century.
Also in the UK, until the 1920s a husband could obtain a divorce on the sole grounds of infidelity, but a wife's petition on the grounds of infidelity required cruelty as well. Although not sure, I would guess this kind of rights asymmetry was also reflected in other countries until around the same time.
So that meant guys could and frequently did "play away" with a mistress, secure in the knowledge that their wife would not be able to take them to the cleaners financially by asking for and obtaining a divorce. That in turn, I would imagine, meant less incentive in the first place for a man to marry a woman solely for her looks.
Just realized this could explain a lot of my relationship woes. If matching is determined to a very high degree by class, I managed to fuck up spectacularly by putting myself in a class with no available partners around me. The "work from wherever you want" thing apparently has downsides as well. This shall require some introspection.
Your comment is delightfully ambiguous. Are you male and poor, or female and rich?
Male and... probably rich for the town I live in. But the whole point of the article is that it's not trivial to date up/down. And also that class is probably about more than income. At least that's how I read it.
Would you be open to dating someone with a lower income and educational background than yourself?
Enthusiastically. Lower income is not an issue (it probably makes me feel more of a provider) and formal education is a scam - I mostly finished mine to make my parents happy.
How about this: would you be open to marrying someone who you perceive is less intelligent and/or ignorant in some significant and intractable way?
LOL, I was raised middle-middle-class but put myself in the upper-middle-class by education, then sexually imprinted on UMC women. So my social cues are undoubtedly all wrong in ways I'm incapable of understanding. The only remedy I've discovered is to date foreign-born women, who care much less about this.
This is interesting, and I wonder if it's confounded by where people *meet* rather than what people *prefer*.
Highly educated people with well paying jobs tend to meet spouses at university (studying similar degrees), at work (in similar income brackets), or work-adjacent networking type things (again, similar income/class brackets).
I feel this likely explains why the effect is so strong in heterosexual pairings but weak in homosexual pairings - straights meet and date just by existing in society, whereas gay, lesbian and transgender* people often need to go to queer spaces to find partners. Many queer spaces, potentially the demographic as a whole skew poor (as being out often has a negative effect on employment outcomes), so I expect that queer high earners are disproportionately more likely to date a poorer person compared to their straight high earning counterparts.
*Transgender footnote: trans partnerships can be complicated by one or more partner only realising that they're trans after being in a relationship - and apparently a decent proportion of those relationships manage to stay together. In that case initial conditions applying to straight partnerships apply. T4T (where both partners enter the relationship knowing that self is trans and partner is trans) seems to have queer dating dynamics (transcends class boundaries due to being a minority), even if theyre hetero. But gay people seem to rarely meet in the kind of "our friends introduced us to one another and we clicked" way that kicks off many straight partnerships unless they're in overwhelming queer friend groups.... In which case the same thing of most people being kind of poor applies again.
So this is somewhat weird.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-021-00862-1
^ this is a meta-analysis I skimmed, concluding that lesbians outearn straight women, but gay men and bi people earn less. I guess it's not as cut and dry as I expected!
I feel like queer people might come from privileged backgrounds, but are at higher risk of losing the relevant privileges (the job you might have gotten from a family friend may be rescinded due to homophobia, not to mention just being disowned and disinherited). This part is speculation.
It might also be a relative (geographic) wealth thing. Queer people have a tendency to move to progressive urban areas which are expensive to live in. They might stay in the bottom quartile income for the city, but they won't look poor compared to the national average. I have no idea how I'd measure this.
It could also be age - there are many more young people openly identifying as LGBT, and income increases with age as a general trend.
I mean, the thing is, the median queer person is not in fact the lesbian CEO of a Fortune 500 or whatever, or even a high earning consultant. Those people don't fear losing their jobs for any reason, basically, and that includes sexuality. They're more likely to be out for that reason.
However they're probably not representative of most queer people, and in the kind of managers-preference, low income workplace like being a supermarket cashier or a waitress, I would say that yeah, it's not unlikely that queer people have a harder time trying to get jobs.
I don't really think it's a "luxury belief" in the way you're saying, no. At the end of the day the blue hair and pronouns crowd still have to eat, and there's just not enough $250k a year media consultant jobs for all of them to be doing that kind of stuff. I posit that progressive spaces hire a small number of visibly queer people (meeting other criteria like graduated from the right school with the right degree) to meet their progressiveness quota, and everyone else resorts to some combination of couch surfing, online commissions, a min wage job at a place with a sympathetic manager, e-begging, and e-prostitution (trans women especially overrepresented in sex work, which is the furthest thing I can think of from being upper class).
Interesting discussion. From my experience, queer people are not uncommon in the banking industry (where I work) but clearly overrepresented in the gastro/service industry (waiters, baristas etc.).
Prejudice is more subtle these days, and not quite as bad. The rule is: DON'T GET CAUGHT. If you want to discriminate against the openly-lesbian waitress, you simply need to not call her back when she goes for an interview. If you want to fire her...you can wait for her to commit some kind of petty infraction, or say that you are "downsizing", or something like that. You also have network effects, such that if most people have a mild bias against queer people they are likely to have less social capital and as such fewer job opportunities.
Yes - as you'd said before, this matters far less where there is a shortage. If you're a mildly or moderately-bigoted supermarket manager who needs bodies, you might prefer the All-American straight employee over the queer one, but you need bodies and literally - in dollars and cents - can't afford to care about things like that.
When the supermarket's letting employees go, however, maybe the queer one who's an average performer gets let go before the straight one that's doing a little worse...Multiply that over thousands of mildly bigoted supermarket managers and you have your effect.
The dynamics have now changed as most people meet their partner online these days. But it’s too early to be reflected in marriage statistics, so we won’t know the full impact of app driven dating for another decade or so.
I vaguely recall reading decades ago that somebody had counted all the marriages in Britain of peers of the realm to chorus girls, actresses, models and the like over a period of a couple of centuries or so. I think they had counted a little over 100 such marriages, although my recollection could be totally off. There are currently 806 hereditary peers. So assuming the study covered, say, six generations, 100 would represent about two percent of lords marrying beautiful and/or charming women from way down the social ladder.
That might be a high estimate. But nobles marrying actresses was definitely a Thing. Here are two newspaper articles from 1913 and 1916 arguing that most such lord-chorus girl marriages turned out to be happy ones:
http://www.stagebeauty.net/th-frames.html?http&&&www.stagebeauty.net/th-peerg2.html
There's also a phenomenon of wealthy widows marrying younger men that seems somewhat similar to noblemen marrying chorus girls. The wealthy widow marrying young man pattern was more common in the past when many marriages were broken up by one partner's early death.
The Prophet Muhammad's first wife was older and richer, although how much older is unclear. Man of letters Doctor Samuel Johnson's wife was 21 years older than him. (George Washington was one year younger than the rich widow Martha so I wouldn't count that as an example.)
In my PhD program (2004-2009) the ratio of men to women was 1:4
Most of the hottest women were in relationships with men who they met in undergrad and those guys went straight into the workforce and were rich.
The PhD was a hobby for these girls. They didn't need the money or a husband.
Their husbands are college-educated men, though. They weren't married to plumbers or construction workers. I still think it's comparatively rarer for college-educated women to marry non-college men.
Yes, I am tracking. I think its a sensitivity vs specificity issue too. Splitting "college educated" into finer categories like "exactly how much graduate school" may not have much value here. But also, I think my larger point was wealth is a bigger motivator than marrying up academically to women.
Understood.
Interesting throughout - though mildly "disappointing": no sand-worms this time. b) "maybe ...there’s no tendency for ugly rich people to marry attractive poor people". Maybe not in numbers high enough enough to show up in those studies. Bernie Ecclestone - again father at 89 - is not alone in this world (if you never heard, seems you do not read tabloids https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/12044460/bernie-ecclestone-wife-family-daughter-f1/ ) .
Having worked/lived in strange places (and being a weirdo), the only 3 constants I see in my partners: female, around 30 yrs. no money; but very different edu/class/looks. - Had I stayed home, I'd hooked up with a colleague or so. with all social markers identical to mine.
I think actually the case of same-sex-marriages warrantes being investigated further, since it might explain a bit the reasons for hypergamy (or lack thereof).
Spontaneously, I can think of three good reasons for same-sex couples to care less about it:
1. Scott already brought up the more diverse community/online dating aspect.
2. I would guess that family pressure still plays a much smaller role in same-sex relationships. If your parents are not on board with your relationship anyways, or don't much care if and when you get married, they are less likely to pressure you into an "appropriate" marriage.
3. Since most same-sex relationships (I think?) still remain childless, the idea or finding an appropriate match to found a family of a certain wealth or education and provide accordingly for children plays no or very little role.
Maybe looking at studies of subsets could help clear this up?
My guess, based on nothing but vibes, might be that same-sex relationships that do raise children might be likelier to look like different-sex relationships (in terms of both parents being from the same class, and things like this).
This is interesting.
But I think the research will always come up short as long as it tries to work with narrowly defined and objective definitions of status. Status is in some sense a typical zero-sum game, but in other ways not, because the factors that go into judging any individual’s status will be highly subjective, subconscious, contextual, and constantly changing.
Someone who grew up surrounded by people with college degrees, will probably discount the status of education relative to qualities that were less common in their environment. A million dollars provides more status in East New York than on the Upper East Side. Status at the gym or on Instagram are different from status at the office or the club. And Bill Gates’ status was higher when his name was associated less with Epstein’s.
In the end, status is our subjective guess at others’ relative reproductive fitness, which will always be in flux, and impossibly hard to pin down in studies like these.
On a sort of related tangent...
I’ve discussed status a few times with my 14-yo daughter lately. It’s not great, but as this whole discussion proves, status is much more important for success and happiness than people will typically admit. Telling young people (as people often do) not to worry about what other people think or say about them seems like bad advice. It’s probably better to help them to see through it, and to recognize the games we play.
While I don’t expect my daughter to marry or start a career or build impressive wealth any time soon, the jockeying for status is definitely on, and is going to play a big (constantly changing) role in her life. And so, how do you play the status game at 14 in a way that sets you up for a happy and successful life when you’re 15, 25 and 50? Smart choices, like doing well in school *might* break into the top five status factors for a teenager, but only if it doesn’t look like you’re trying too hard and it doesn’t mean having to sacrifice being perceived as fun.
So what’s the optimal strategy in the lifetime game of status ...?
"The only winning move is not to play."
That sounds good, but unfortunately it’s probably not true. But it may be good to internalize the game so you don’t even know when you’re playing it – and certainly don’t show it. 😉
If that's a comment on the status game then I strongly disagree.
I furthermore think that believing this is a horrible trap that many smart (but not naturally high-status) teenagers fall into, to their peril. Some do not emerge by adulthood, and wind up very unhappy.
Like it or not, we are humans and we are bound by the laws of status as much as we're bound by the laws of gravity. Status is the key to all good things in life. Whatever you want in life, having more status will help you get it. Furthermore, status feels good -- there's a part of your brain that really really wants status, and the more status you gain the better it feels.
If you don't play the status game you will lose it by default -- you become the fat bearded guy in the corner who wants to talk about Warhammer 40K. But if you play it too hard or in the wrong way then you lose too. You can also lose by playing the game while lying/rationalising to yourself that you're not really playing the game (like the guy who wants you to convince you that his $40,000 watch is actually really practical because it shows the phase of the moon).
You win the game by playing it deliberately, consciously, and with an eye on what you're actually trying to accomplish. You listen to the part of your brain that wants more status but you don't let it rule you. You collect that status the same way you collect money -- as a tool to get you the things you really want.
On the object level, I agree with your comment. We're social creatures and depend on other people to meet our physical, emotional, and spiritual needs; "no man is an island" and all that. So yes, pragmatically, we have to play status games and we should therefore play them well.
On a meta level, I don't believe that status ought to be held up as an end in itself. In my understanding of Stoic and Taoist traditions, wisdom is can be expressed in terms detachment from the status. Stoics don't deny the instrumentality of status, but they see it as a mirage, a Goodhart proxy measure for happiness. The wise are happy because they are satisfied with themselves or their Selves, not because other people show them deference. In this sense, they win by not playing.
If I had to give honest advice to a teenager, I would advise them to find a niche where they can excel and pursue their goals. I was that "smart (but not naturally high status)" kid you mention. For someone like that, trying to compete against the front runners on their own terms is a sub-optimal strategy. Find the niche where you are most competitive, or make one. Just don't confuse the immediate warm-and-fuzzy of social validation with long-term satisfaction. Pursuing status for its own sake is a losing strategy, no matter who you are.
What is the definition of class used here. I thought it was simply income. Is it parental income or some other proxy?
Probably the one discussed here:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class
Hmm, I'm not sure I understand this bit:
> That is: if men cared about looks more than women, then they would trade off status for looks: faced with a choice between an average-looking woman of the same class, or a beautiful woman of a slightly-lower class, they would choose the beautiful-but-poor woman. But this would mean men would marry lower-class women more often than women married lower-class men, which would imply a less-than-perfect status correlation between husbands and wives. But the data show a pretty perfect status correlation between husbands and wives. Therefore, men can’t care about looks.
Every time a higher class man marries a lower class woman it leads to a lower class woman also marrying a higher class man. Men would be marrying lower class women more often than women were marrying lower class men, but equally this implies that women would be marrying higher class men more often than men would be marrying higher class women. So the reduction in correlation of status between men marrying women vs women marrying men would go both ways, even if it was just men caring more about looks than women.
Embedded in these calculations is the idea that once a person is married they aren't free to marry somebody else. But serial monogramy is the norm. I'd be interested in learning if materially successful men tend to have more marriages than the mean, or the median. The upper echelon women do not have to 'marry down' if they are willing to be married for a shorter term. How do the 'formerly married' show up in these surveys?
I don't have any data but I would assume that's the case now. I believe previously women also got remarried at the same rate as the men. Now I suspect divorce rates will skew this more towards the men getting remarried (small pool) as the cost of remarriage is nothing for these men.
It’s an interesting post but the concept of hypergamy is very different than the one I’m used to reading about. In the redpill manosphere hypergamy is more about the type of man a woman will choose for sex vs the type of man she will marry. Beta bucks(good provider)vs Alpha fucks. It’s a woman’s duel sexual strategy. Women will marry a man of equal or lesser status if he is a reliable dependable provider but will cheat and fuck a man who is culturally more masculine or exciting. This understanding of hypergamy goes along way in describing why women cheat and marriages fail. When I saw title of the post I was hoping Scott would be critiquing the manosphere.
Yeah the hypergamy he described in the op doesn’t have much explanatory power.
You know of any good manosphere sources as of now? I used to read Roosh and Heartiste before they went nazi.
I’m mostly familiar with The Rational Male series by Rollo Tamasi, but Bruce Bryans is pretty good and more succinct. But also the Book of Pook is also good. Start with “The Secret of the Jerk” and “Be a Man” chapters.
https://bookofpook.com/
Also “Blue Valentine” and “The Tao of Steve” are two good “redpill” movies. The Tao of Steve is a cautionary tale for redpill men that take things too far and for too long.
I suppose one could argue that the conclusion that women choose husbands more based on income than on status supports the "women marry beta bux" thesis of the redpillers --
"beta bux" being a man who is higher in income, but lower in status. The "choose for sex outside of marriage" issue is beside the point, because hypergamy has always been about marriage choices, not short term sexual ones (although I know that the red pill sphere uses it in the latter way), so it's not really something that is studied, I'd think.
I'm not able to figure out what is meant by "high status" there; the way it is used seems to be something like "top beef sires" if I'm using an agricultural metaphor:
https://www.icbf.com/the-most-used-beef-sires-the-suckler-herd-this-spring/
They don't seem to mean "most intelligent, most cultured, most achievements", it's all about "has the Bad Boy energy and big dong because women are shallow and only care about that". It reminds me of that Stonetoss cartoon:
https://stonetoss.com/comic/macho-man/
What men think women want, and what women want, aren't the same thing (same goes the other way: what women think men want, and what men want, aren't the same). The people truly impressed by your big, big bulging muscles and gains are not women, it's your fellow lifting bros.
Do women like handsome, sexy guys and would take them if they could get them? Yes. The same way men like pretty, sexy girls and would take them if they could get them, but somehow it's only women that are cheaters for that preference.
I think a more steelmanned version might be that women like men they find attractive, where attractive also includes things like "exciting" and "romantic." That women tend to marry men who are good income providers, which is a separate criteria from the men they are attracted to, seems to be a source of contention.
I don't know that "high status" is a meaningful construction here.
This is a good steelmanning. I would also add that the man may not be a good provider but a good father to children from a previous relationship. The manosphere calls this retroactive cuckoldry. A big reason the “redpill” is popular is because men particularly young men are oblivious to all this.
Men end up getting blindsided by women that marry them but don’t particularly like or respect them.
Yeah a lot of the redpill stuff is not really my thing, but this is absolutely a phenomena that leads to a LOT of angst.
I had a lot of dating success and partners (mostly serially) from ~16-25, and have long been happily married.
But two women I dated for over a year, in retrospect were never really very into me sexually. One of them I got engaged to briefly, and one of whom chased me for literally YEARS before she finally landed me for a while.
In both relationships things were hot and heavy at the start, and there was a reasonable amount of sex. But in both in retrospect they were with me for totally non-sexual, non-romantic reasons.
Luckily a lot of my other relationships and my marriage are more genuinely based on romance. Though even there, as amazing as the marriage and its sex life are, sex is still a much larger portion of the "relationship pie" for me than my wife.
I'm not even sure how to measure "high status". Is a full-on computer geek who owns a software company and who walks around in a bathrobe all day "high status"?
What about a plumbing contractor, union standard 1 1/2" of crack exposed at all times, but who rakes in the ducats?
I think “ high status” is a relative dependent on the needs of the woman. A woman might marry a higher status but boring rich and powerful nerd but then go out and fuck a high-t exciting gang member or biker. The redpill is about helping men become the kind of guy that fulfills a woman’s hypergamys duel sex strategy. A good looking exciting high earning loving father type. This is very difficult to do. That’s why most redpill evangelists discourage marriage.
It is hard to be both stable AND exciting. You need a fair amount of dedication and a LOT of conscientiousness to pull that off.
Also, what men and women say they want is often very different from what they really want.
My mating success went up considerably when I learned to ignore what queens say and pay attention to what they do.
I don't think there is a consistent definition of high status. Or if there is, it's a hilarious caricature of masculinity: think Patrick Bateman as a role model. Actually, that's pretty literally what Andrew Tate is.
Which has lead to weird situations where I'll hear people call Will Smith or Bill Gates a beta and, I mean, by any objective measurement they're both among the highest status people on the planet.
But as far as I can tell, "high status" or what the modern red-piller is selling is:
-Make as much money as possible
-Be ripped, ie six-pack
-Have "social status" meaning whatever will win influence on Instagram
-Be as sociopathic as possible, ie "frame"
But it also kind of makes sense. At the practical level, they're not selling anything Jordan Peterson wasn't selling, they just stripped out all the Boomer "responsibilities" and replaced it with the fantasy of the rich playboy lifestyle and placed all the blame on women. Of course that sold better to young, frustrated men.
And we're stuck with it because, well, I won't say it works well, but it works better than anything else people are selling. Sheepish admissions that women might be attracted to men based on on their income and fitness, rather than just their character, is not going to outcompete conmen who are selling the bejeezus out of a male fantasy that makes James Bond look tame.
Bill Gates and Will Smith are beta because they are extremely rich but considered nerds or bitches by redpill guys. Would any woman even look at Bill Gates if he weren’t rich? Will Smith is bullied and cucked by Jade all the time.
Even outside of the modern 'red pill sphere' stuff, looking only at marriage and excluding all the mistresses high status men historically had seems to be missing the point; If one wants to try and look at an 'objective' line between relevant relationships and irrelevant ones, children make the most sense as that line, since that's all evolution cares about, and plenty of men have had children with mistresses.
I realise that it's very comforting for men who can't attract a partner to think that even if they did get one, she'd just be a cheating whore spreading her legs for the Alpha bad boy with a harem, but it does get a little tiresome.
Do some women cheat? Yes. Do some men cheat? Also, yes. Humans of both sexes like sexual novelty. Not all marriages fail because of the cheating wife, sometimes it's the man is to blame. Sometimes both. "Marry in haste, repent at leisure" is a saying for a reason.
And honestly, if my choice was "guy who is relentlessly jealous and suspicious and thinks I'm just waiting for the chance to cheat on him", why would I even bother with that guy in the first place?
I’ve only listened to the audiobook version of these sources so I haven’t seen the bibliographies but they say the concepts are developed by evolutionary and behavioral psychology backed up by crowd sourced anecdotal evidence collected over twenty years on Internet forums. This quote from Sheryl Sandberg sort of sums it up.
“When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them. The things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home. These men exist and, trust me, over time, nothing is sexier.” ― Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
And the same advice is reasonable for a man. Date all the crazy hot party girls and then find someone who isn't going to ruin your life. It's just that no one is writing reasonable books for men to read that aren't hyperbolic T-dosing PUAs
It's the old model of men sow their wild oats when young, then settle down to marriage and a family with a different kind of woman to the one they were playing around with.
Nowadays women get the same chance. I don't necessarily think it's great for both sexes to run around like this, especially as there seems to be a pattern of cohabitation not leading on to marriage (e.g. that linked article in another post about Sean McElwee; he was living with his girlfriend for seven years, then broke up with her - and seemingly went on the 'now I'm free I can date the hot girls' spree, though that might just have been bravado). Seven years is long enough to be a marriage, so why didn't they marry?
I was a bit unkind to the guys above, but I do think it's more reassuring to the bruised ego if you can phrase it as "it's not me, it's them" - I'm a perfectly okay guy but women don't want men like me until they hit the wall and need to find a sucker to pay for them while they cheat on him with the chads.
People need to be sold a vision of why marriage is useful and valuable. In Canada, at least, we don't have to get married so that our partners can access the supreme luxury of medical coverage. I can see a couple of reasons:
- Marriage is hard to dissolve so maybe you'll stick around and enjoy the benefits of a partner in old age when you can't go around screwing hotties on Tinder
- ...
- The financial business/property arrangement side of things
- Having children with the same last name or something
At least in Canada, we don't need to get married so our partner can access the supreme luxury of a medical insurance policy with a $15k/year deductible so there's another point against marriage here (and maybe for marriage in the US)
Maybe some part of him knew they wouldn't be together forever and he didn't want the absolutely massive financial implications of divorce? There's definitely a category of relationship that's way better than being single but not good enough for life partnership, and depending on how much time and energy one has for looking for a better one vs. eg. focusing on career advancement, it doesn't make sense to break up.
My understanding is that the original scholars who pushed the dual mating strategy have changed their minds about it.
https://datepsychology.com/why-dual-mating-hypothesis-research-has-failed-to-replicate/
I think there is probably just one female mating strategy, which would be competing for Alpha Bucks.
If Alpha Fucks/Beta Bucks was truly a female strategy, we would see a LOT more genetic cuckoldry in the data before birth control was invented. But cuckoldry has always been pretty dang rare in humans--less than 2% or so.
Thanks this is interesting. I think this is a huge problem with social psychology. Almost nothing seems to replicate. I’m just not sure how gender dynamics and human relationships can be tested in a lab or with a questionnaire. I think it’s similar to Freudian psychoanalysis it’s not really taken seriously by professionals but is still sort of has some practical utility. The Alpha Fucks/Beta Bucks redpill relies, for better or worse, on crowd sourced anecdotal evidence. I agree it certainly isn’t the skeleton key to understanding women, however it’s certainly a helpful and useful concept to keep in mind in real life.
Also the manosphere talks about retroactive cuckoldry. When a man marries a woman how has already had children with another man. Divorce and remarriage is very common these days. So you have women marrying there sexy alpha then divorcing and settling down with a more reliable beta.
Women aren’t necessarily even getting married to a “good genes” alpha they’re just getting pregnant by him then desperately finding a beta bucks guy to marry and raise alphas kids.
Looks like around 15% of men are step dads (https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2011/01/13/a-portrait-of-stepfamilies/). So more common than cuckoldry, but still uncommon overall. Granted, the data only cover married people, so I'm not sure how it applies to cohabitating but unmarried couples.
Women are less likely to get remarried after divorce than men are, so marrying an alpha, then divorcing him and marrying a beta seems like a bad strategy? (In 2013, some 64% of eligible men had remarried, compared with 52% of women. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2014/11/14/chapter-2-the-demographics-of-remarriage/)
I'm not sure how I could find data for the number of women who have kids with a man they didn't marry, then marry later on. I'm looking at stats for single moms. (https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/04/25/the-changing-profile-of-unmarried-parents/) It looks to me that around half of single moms have never been married, and around half (not necessarily the same half) are not currently cohabitating with anyone. It seems like a pretty bad reproductive strategy--a less than 50% chance of even living with (much less marrying) that reliable beta after having kids with someone else?
The rise in single motherhood doesn't seem to be a deliberate cuckoldry thing, where a woman specifically plans to have kids with one type of dude and have another type of dude raise them. If I had to guess, I would guess that it's a result of both men and women wanting sex without commitment and having oopsy-babies. If men indulge their greater socio-sexual desires (i.e. fucking a variety of partners), as per the redpill, more babies out of wedlock would be a natural consequence, even if women are all competing for Alpha Bucks alone.
The twist that I always got caught up on is that the guys saying that absolutely want to be hypergamous, but just about looks and whoriness than money and education. The vibe I always got from these arguments was that they wanted to be sex-hypergamous, and it always felt like a silly double standard. Yes, you want the best mate possible, women may just have a different dimension on which they choose than men.
The MRA have some points, but any movement that is as focused on "women cheating" as much as they are really is missing some basic facts about the general nature of male/female relationships.
Women cheating is a HUGE deal, as raising kids that aren't your own involuntarily isn't something they need to worry about but men do. But they are also so much less likely to do it, especially in an otherwise happy relationship.
Do you have any stats on that last assertion?
You don’t think women are less likely to cheat? Not sure where you would get reliable results in cheating data but I would be blown away if it were true men cheated less. I would bet at VERY heavy odds.
I mean, heterosexual sex requires 1 man and 1 woman, who do you suppose all those cheating men are sleeping with? unless your model is that single men have no sex while single women sleep with married men??
In general my presumption for anything heterosexual is that things are roughly symmetrical, and while that's a weak prior on my part, you haven't presented any evidence, only your personal disbelief.
Unattached women and/or women in open relationships/sex workers.
The idea that coupled women are as interested or willing to cheat as couples men is farcical to anyone with the vaguest sense of actual hetero relationships.
Next thing you are going to tell me that gay men don’t take better care of their appearance than hetero men.
Really? I find this assertion to be extremely surprising, and I usually scoff at the MRA crowd
I think you are over-simplfiying the "rich people meet poor people all the time".
First, how do they know? in apps, Status markers can be different for different classes/cultures. Is it an expensive car? a trip overseas? I mean, it is all abstract, no one is saying "I swiped right because I estimated he/she makes 180K a year".
You just, kind of, look at the clothes, the setting, and how they make you feel - and you just feel better about things that match high status for your class/culture - that are status markers for you.
So, for example, a googler would have pictures from trips abroad, and a girl from the Appalachians (to be stereotypical) would be looking for a big truck.
Secondly, even though rich people meet poor all the time, they don't meet them in social settings. Most people don't chat with the cleaner in the office, or the cashier at the shop.
The people they meet in social settings are much more likely to be from their own class.
Rich people meet poor people probably more than middle income people do (in big cities anyway). They just don’t marry the help.
Nowadays the help is also on dating apps, so you don't need to be rich to meet them. Many of my matches are live-in domestic helpers.
Did you notice a class difference?
Not particularly
are you actually rich? Obviously anybody can be on dating apps.
In any case this doesn’t invalidate the idea that the top 1% or .1% don’t marry the cook.
Googlers will also list their job as "Software Engineer", and some apps even explicitly have an income field for people to filter on, though that seems like it invites gold digging rather than matching like for like (and class is often more about familial wealth than current income)
"So it seems more like neither gender cares about looks than that both do.
How do we square this with the fact that obviously men care a lot about whether women are attractive or not?
Also, rich people meet poor people all the time. Poor people are their secretaries, servants, waitresses, and Uber drivers. Sometimes they have casual sex with these people. They just don’t (usually) marry them."
Yes,that's pretty much it. I won't say all wealthy/high-status men did it, but traditionally there was always the mistress for looks (and other things, intelligent conversation and social ease are also part of it) while you married a woman of your own class/status as wife and mother.
There's an anecdote and I can't remember the exact details, about a king being rebuked by his confessor for taking mistresses instead of remaining faithful to his wife. The king arranged that the confessor should have partridge every day for dinner, and after a while asked the confessor if he was tired of it. Upon being told yes, he would like to eat something else, the king said "The same way you are tired of eating the same thing every day, even though it is the best, is why I take mistresses".
Um, Scott is the person who wrote that question. I get the feeling you did not read it very carefully mr ratking, I didn't point this out the first time I saw one of your comments do this but two is too many.
What about the supposed female tendency to get useless degrees for their 'educational attainment'? A woman with a four year degree in gender and women's studies is less educated in absolute terms than her boyfriend who got a two year in cybersecurity, and also earns less money. Of course, they might not bother to marry - she'd lose her health insurance.
Yeah, schooling and education aren't synonyms.
"Class" already incorporates the difference between a women studies and a cybersec major.
Unlucky recepients of welfare queen degrees who didn't make valuable connections in college and don't have family support, will graduate with $40K+ student debt, get a part time job flipping burgers, get pregnant, and live off child support and welfare. A cybersec boyfriend will outclass her.
I have exceptionally bad news for you about how humans assess class and make reproductive choices.
Reproductive choices? Yes. Marriage choices? No. The above article boils down pretty much to "heterosexuals marry within their class."
I'm not sure what about my original comment prompted you to make yours, but it certainly wasn't the point I was actually making. Let's just pretend this never happened, shall we?
Gays also have higher libidos, which maybe a part of explanation why partner's income is less significant for them.
That is true of gay men but not of lesbian women; should be easy enough to check if lesbian partnerships are similarly less contingent on matching class.
> ... the entire distribution is equal-gamous
If you're making up a term, you might as well say "iso-gamous".
I like this...! I hope we can make this term a Thing
Has intelligence been studied? Personally, I care more about that than income, class, or education - though I’m sure there are correlations.
I’m the guy who wrote that negative review of Richard Reeves book that Scott mentioned above [taboo.substack.com/p/reeves]. I wanted to give a little context for that.
There’s a lot of good things about the book, Reeves brings up how dismal family courts are for men, how the American Psychological Association has defined masculinity as pathological, how the government is failing to take action on many of the crises affecting young men. But he had some faulty interpretations of the education data that ended up leading him to victim blame boys for the education gap. I dug into the data on that in my review and have a forecast coming out soon on college enrollment.
As a gay guy, a pretty obvious fact about gay dating is that you're already forced to be selective on a rare trait, namely *being gay*, which leaves a lot less room to be selective on other traits.
You might prefer a partner of the same social class, but the usual routes by which straight people meet such partners --- university classmates, work colleagues, friends-of-friends, etc. --- are only ~5% effective if you're gay. So typically you're forced to be more open-minded about meeting people outside of your immediate circles (or shifting your social circles to be mostly gay, i.e., joining the 'gay community', which amounts to the same thing).
This predicts that gay relationships will tend to look more heterogenous (less selective, more like random cross-assignment) on any other axis you care to choose: race, class, education, age, religion, and so on. Many of the other explanations (gays being more likely to meet through cruising, apps, etc) seem to me to be epiphenomena of this reality: not wrong, but fundamentally downstream of the basic math of the situation.
This is a very plausible explanation to me, and I wonder if it applies to highly-endogamous small groups. Do Orthodox Jews have more heterogeneous pairings than other straight couples? What about Mormons outside Utah? What about black women in areas of the country that are only a few percent black?
Absolutely true for insular religions - for them the relevant 'class' is "goes to the right church" and the tolerance for income disparities is higher. That's one where you'd have to study Father-in-Laws, though, because the extent to which religion matter enough to dominate is going to correlate strongly with cultures where women are expected to be stay at home mothers and won't really have an income of their own to look at.
I’m not sure you can assume no class-attractiveness correlation in general, but in particular in any dataset going back to the 19th Century there are going to be fairly substantial class-cosmetics and class-soap correlations.
More relevantly, education level is a terrible proxy for social class unless you very carefully rank it by institution (and institution class, not institution quality, to avoid putting MIT above Middlebury); you’d want either parents’ education level or grandparents’ income.
Insight from a friend: perhaps women are still hypergamous on education, but the crashing marriage rate may be disguising this fact? Perhaps women are still, on average, discerning on education status but many are not marrying partly for this reason?
IMO other factors like the illusion of choice and the assumption that they need to be farther along in their careers to properly raise a child are bigger factors. However, it seems plausible hypergamy on education must account for the decline in marriage partially.
Many men view female education as a negative for marriage. When they meet a social worker, rather than thinking wow, she has a masters, they think wow, 100k in debt, next. It’s literally a reverse dowry.
TLDR: IMHO, the people who ACTUALLY USE the word "hypergamous" who you will encounter at a bar or family gathering are men who WANT TO BE hypergamous, but for hot ladiez and not education, but are unable to so they seize on this word as a pat explanation.
Something that is hinted at but not really satisfied is that the people who use the word "hypergamy" are not usually making strong intellectual points. The PUAs and MRAs on reddit from 8-10 years ago were complaining of female hypergamy where it applied to not dating them and instead dating interesting chads who had money and big dicks, while complaining that they could be "male hypergamous" and get laid by a different woman every night of the week.
And also, I feel like something is missing... In my experience, there is a LOT of dating activity that isn't captured in the studies that you have access to. My dating career in Toronto was flush with a lot of dates that I had no real right to, simply because I was a moderately successful man in a city full of highly educated women who would never date a man with a blue collar job, who can talk the talk on Tinder.
And if you come to a nearby Canadian city of Hamilton, Ontario, you see a lot of moderately attractive men with very unattractive women. The educated people (women) flee to Toronto and set up an unequal dating pool there, and leave an unequal dating pool behind in Hamilton.
----
How I prefer to use "hypergamy":
- hypergamy == dating up for any reason
- people who are highly sensitive to the dimension of which they are being hypergamous and who STRIVE for it
Why? Most of the time I encountered the practical usage of the term was in complaints that women were "branch swinging B***s" who would leave you for a better man at the drop of a hat. There were very few reasoned arguments.
This is not where the "red pill"-whatever is today.
As far as I can tell, most of the self-pitying types went on to form the incel subculture or variations thereof.
Instead, most of the current stuff is this self-improvement "hustle-grind" thing that's basically selling a caricature of masculinity as the only solution to dating problems. On the upside, there's not a lot of self-pity anymore, instead there's a heavy focus on making money and losing weight and judgment of people who can't. On the downside...they're basically selling Patrick Bateman to young men as a role-model.
But yeah, the "hypergamy" stuff isn't Mystery anymore, goofy as he was, it's Andrew Tate.
The problem is that it's a time bomb - modern red pill basically sells the idea that if you're not a top 1% male you're a failure, and also that everyone can be a top 1% male - its a very unstable culture and I expect it to be co-opted by another ideology in the next decade as young men get a little older and confront reality. On the other hand, this message can be sold indefinitely to new cohorts of young men as they enter adulthood, so it's possible it will be stable in its appeal but not in its adherents.
Great point! I guess it's better that the incels split off? I took what I could of value from some kind of male-viewpoint-centric movement and then moved on so it's been a long time since I checked in.
I wonder if humans are so moldable that we should worry about people receiving messages on a spectrum of outright toxic -> suboptimal -> little messages or guidance -> antithetical messages that are against their interests. That's kind of how I see the problem of the aimless man these days. You have incel toxicity -> PUA/biz-fluencers/real estate agents -> no messaging received -> positive feminist ideas -> anti-male rhetoric from angry women
/shrug
I was a red-pill Reddit guy 8-10 years ago. Still am in a way, though I'm now older and married and Reddit banned most of the interesting subs.
It wasn't that my worldview was "molded" by the red pill internet. It merely gave me a vocabulary to describe a reality that was already clear to me by 10th grade. Call it my "lived experience" if you will. What I saw was that the liberal feminists(and also conservative Christian moral purity people) seemed to be living in an alternate reality, while the red-pill people described it as it was.
This question is pure curiosity; I am not trying to make a point.
What does your wife think about the redpill stuff? Do you and her broadly agree/have the same worldview?
I wonder if there is more hypergamy in religious communities, small towns, etc. not so much because they’re more “traditional” but because there are more opportunities to develop strong social relationships across class lines when you go to the same church and live in a town of 10k people vs if you are secular and live in a large city. In the latter case, you’re almost assuredly meeting someone through work or friends (which would strongly increase the odds of people having equal educational/income) or apps.
Small towns do have a lot more social mobility, and some nicer way of saying "lack of options" is part of it. It's also true that both relative and absolute wealth disparities and cultural differences are much smaller. It's hard to live in a town of 2,000-10,000 people and have very different cultural expectations. There also just isn't the means to have 1000X the wealth and income as other people, usually not even 100X . Frankly, even 10X above median is rare. I live in a fairly rural area, and could probably name most of the people who make more than $500k/year - their names are often on car dealerships or other businesses.
Alternate hypothesis: marriages sort by g (general intelligence), which is correlated with education, income, status, and attractiveness.
+1 to investigating this.
Footnote 8 suggests that "educational attainment, income, etc - are proxies for some underlying value that suitors are able to assess more finely than the statistics." My immediate reaction is, do you mean IQ?
g is going to be a big one, but I also think there are other stable selection targets like health and motivation/ambition - it seems likely that despite the extreme novelty of the age in some ways, reproductive selection is probably mostly unchanged by these novelties insofar as the targets of selection. Much more so, however, insofar as these targets/traits are represented by individuals - displays of wealth, makeup, Instagram, etc. are going to alter what appears healthy/intelligent/capable far more rapidly than humans are going to start selecting for other factors.
BS. If it were true, iq-catch.com wouldn't die.
Extemely few women want IQ 130 guy who solves puzzles brilliantly, they want income that IQ 130 can deliver.
The negative selection effect is the dominating one. No-one* feels comfortable spending a lot of time with someone more than 1 SD away in thinking ability. And that tendency is enough to drive the statistical correlations.
*I predict a general study of spouse IQ will show <15% of couples are more than 15 points away from each-other, and less than 1% are more than 30 points different. An ACX survey would be <30% and <7.5% respectively, since it skews high, and >50% of marriages are between two people of around 100 IQ who don't read ACX
Being able to "deliver" is still correlated with IQ.
High IQ failures exist, but they're not the norm.
This is my hypothesis as well, but I'd love to see it tested. I know it's true for me--I find it difficult to make conversation with people who have below average IQs.
That being said, there's a stereotype that men like dumb women. There's also a stereotype of dads being dumb and incompetent and their wives running the show and taking care of everything. So I could see the data going in either direction (either men or women on average being hypergamous for g)
Men are socialized to focus and excel at a single thing, while women are socialized towards multitasking. Running a household is multitasking, so the wife leans all the skills needed to, for example, clean Ketchup off a counter. And then the husband looks fooling when he can't do any of the 17 things he never bothered to learn because he was focused on being the best [job], and emotionally supportive spouse, and Football fan. Different application of same g.
On the flip side, dumber people are easier to control, and some people (of both genders) want to be in control, rather than have an equal partner (and/or they don't value the partners g, so they filter for higher beauty and/or wealth).
My understanding is that it's the difference between stated preferences and actual choices.
Virtually every large study - some cross-cultural - shows that men will rate looks a bit higher than women do whilst women rate financial resources a bit higher than men do. However when you look at actual relationships/marriages, you find evidence of assortative mating. People are pairing up with those who are similar to them. The highest correlations are in social status, education/intelligence, political and religious views, etc.
Off the top of my head, hypergamy is driven by the characteristics that make women hypergamous (focus, drive for security, etc.), rather than the money or education per se. that I, hypergamy is a proxy for those characteristics.
I haven't read the post in full because I got confused right away. Doesn't 'older, more educated men marrying younger, less educated women' solve this? Why doesn't that let you to have both absolute and relative hypergamy always even with everyone getting married, it's just that the men get an education first, marry when older, women marry young first, get education later?
I believe he addresses the age thing in one of the footnotes.
I propose an alternative conjecture for women marrying down and I'd be curious to the extent that the data supports or refutes it: education matters less than it used to. It was only ever a proxy for the things women actually cared about (income, social class, etc) and we are in the early stages of the correlation starting to fail. I'm not saying it's already failed (although maybe it has) but rather it's lost momentum as a signifier. The most successful people of my generation in my family are among the least educated, maybe we're an outlier but I suspect we aren't.
As for the lack of rich white Google programmers marrying stunning girls from the class fringes, you yourself posited the most likely answer some years back when you were living in Michigan: people self-segregate at an almost unbelievable that-number-is-so-big-you-obviously-made-it-up level. Going to university is the one chance (at least in America?) to really mix with people of even slightly different social classes, and the people who become rich Google programmers were busy studying and hacking.
Naively I would expect the trends and preferences to be for the "best" marriage in your social circle, which will be circumscribed and kinda homogenous. You don't marry the prettiest girl you've ever met, you marry the prettiest girl you know well enough to date and eventually marry. You don't marry the richest man you've ever met, you marry the richest man you know well enough that he asks you out and you eventually get married. I don't have to tell you that it's actually really hard (especially in crowds that put a de-emphasis on traditional gender roles) to pursue a relationship with someone, you just aren't going to go way outside your own tribe to find the "best deal on the market".
Personal anecdotes from one woman:
When I look inward at my character flaws, I find that I do care a lot about status in a partner, but it has little to do with income or education.
I care if my partner can make other people jealous. This can be through a combination of measurable qualities such as attractiveness and height, and hard to measure qualities such as charisma, interestingness, suave-ness, and involvement in the community.
I think it's possible that women could select for status, and that this would be undetectable in studies.
On the other hand, I do consider this a character flaw: I know in my brain that "ability to make other people jealous" is not going to make me happy in the long run!
Ma’am, I’ve been searching for answers for 11 years, and I think you just hit the nail on the head. Your vulnerable and introspective writing is a gift. Thank you.
I realize now I’ve been making the mistake of trying to advertise *competence in relationship*, when actually the heuristic most people live by is “will my involvement with this person spark envy in others”. Now I’m wondering how to advertise enviability. This strikes me as a perverse but rewarding social game that will yield more/better “dating” experiences but will lead both parties astray from forming quality relationships.
Looking inward myself, I can see that I apply the same heuristic, but the social praxis of what sparks envy in others is very deeply gendered. In many cases, just being found acceptable for touch and intimacy is hugely affirming for male-bodied people of their own worth, status, and enviability; we spend most of the time being implicitly or explicitly told our physical presence is menacing, burdensome, untouchable, plain, and unremarkable. I think this explains the gendered slant in behaviors of sexual solicitation.
This feels refreshingly honest. An additional piece to it might be that women are more susceptible to “advertising”/hype, due to their socialization being centered around consensus-building, and most advertising (not just commercials but media in general) being targeted towards them.
As a guy, it feels like a lot of women have been duped into wanting the guy who’s *most* X, where X is any given quality that’s been overly hyped by the mainstream, at the cost of us trying to be well-balanced people.
In reality, I think the actual best way to make anyone *actually jealous* is to be as happy as you can. Which I, (possibly arrogantly/naively), feel like I might have an actual shot at if not for corrupting influences.
I have actually gushed about how normal and reasonable my partner is haha.
I've gushed about a previous partner being well-adjusted.
It's a desirable trait for sure!
I feel somewhat like this is not what I meant. The fact that men seem to like beautiful women doesn't necessarily indicate that they're unusually susceptible to advertising, since advertising contains beautiful women. In the same way, I don't think that the fact that (one) women like(s) "high-status" men, where "high-status" is defined as some mish mash of traits that I think would make others envy me, necessarily has anything to do with manipulation by corporations.
In addition, someone's "status" is a part of their overall attractiveness to me, but like any type of attractiveness, it's not the only thing I base my relationships on. Maybe if I were looking for a fling it would have more of an impact, but since I'm mainly looking for relationships I value the things that I imagine most people value: compatibility, kindness, trustworthiness, the traits of a well-rounded and good human being.
It seems implausible to me that an attraction that’s explicitly based on “what other people envy” *wouldn’t* be corrupted by external influences. I mean it seems true just definitionally speaking.
I didn’t mean to imply men are immune to the same effect. But I have lost a couple friendships because they didn’t like the girls I was in a relationship with. I feel like women prioritizing romantic relationships over friendships is rare.
If feel like all the conclusions are about actual marriage outcomes in modern society rather than underlying preferences (which is fine! Outcomes are important, revealed preference is interesting!). But I think a lot of the thinkers you're responding to here are talking about the more basic evolutionary impulses that in practice get tempered by societal pressure/increasing age of marriage/long term planning for child success.
You could have also written a post about how everyone says men are naturally polygamous, but that in Western Europe and North America you find very few instances of men actually legally marrying multiple women.
I work in anti-fraud and identity theft and can speak on that angle, although I think its a small contributor overall to what you are interested in here. You state that scam artists are mostly women trying to scam men. This is not actually the case. Its mostly men scamming both genders, though women (or at least female voices) are very useful for actually accomplishing the fraud, they aren’t strictly speaking necessary, especially now with AI advances. Fake AI generated women, both photos and voices, slammed into the romance fraud world like a tsunami in the last 6 months. The reason this feels like its primarily an area when men are the primary targets is simply b/c there are many more men than women on dating sites and replying to personal ads etc than there are women. Women honestly looking for a relationship tend to succeed much faster than men and use online tools less, so the mark pool is mostly full of men. While the majority of romance fraud victims are in fact men, from my experience when women are taken by it they tend to lose more money, are harder to convince it’s a fraud, and generally have fewer defenses against manipulation. They skew older as well.
All the dating site data is ruined by this reality. You mention a baseline of men sending low quality “want to bang?” type messages possibly confounding the data. While its difficult to know exactly what the numbers are, I would speculate that automated romance fraud “fishing” messages outnumber them considerably. The majority of the messages all men receive on dating sites from “women” are fishing bots from romance scammers. The footnote with the anecdotes from the woman trying to use Christian Mingle, and her confusion with the experience, pattern matches automated fraud-bots. When she mentions men not responding to her messages, or her replying to men but then they seem to disappear is explained by those “men” not being real. These are likely fishing messages where an actual human is not available to pick up the mark for a number of reasons, most likely the bot has been abandoned but is still running mindlessly as CM has bad automated enforcement processes against bad actor accounts. Or based on her replies she was written off as a bad prospect.
None of this really speaks to the subject of hypergamy in any meaningful way, but it does explain why the messaging data from dating sites is worse than useless.
(Romance frauds are among the saddest professional experiences I have. Most other marks are vulnerable to scams due to a combination of greed, stupidity, arrogance, and entitlement. Romance fraud victims are often just lonely and inexperienced with the opposite sex.)
I have no idea and the sites themselves are pretty uncooperative with private investigators. I suspect its to hide the number of their own bot-accounts which arent used for fraud per se but to hide the massive gender disparity of authentic accounts. The only real data we have is from Ashley Madison getting hacked back in '15 revealing something like a 900-1 male/female ratio.
That's very informative, thanks. (I had not thought hard enough on the problems of using messaging data from dating sites to say something meaningful about male & female mating preferences.)
If you ever write a blog post somewhere talking about your experiences with your work, I'd be super interested to read it. If you ever write something up somewhere (or have already written something) please send me the link!
When we say men want beauty in women, I think that mostly means youth!
So doing stats on some objective measures of beauty misses what's really going on.
I know, statistically insignificant, but my fat, dorky computer geek friend (the one who said that programming can be learned in a couple of days) has been married for some decades now to a black lady.
My friend also is very rich, and a high school dropout, so he's a statistical outlier in pretty much everything he touches.
Not wading through 137 comments to check if others have brought this up, but is the drunk searching for his keys under the lamppost issue in play?
We can check marriage data because of licenses. We cannot check common law marriages, long term dating where both sides are happy but they don’t want to get married, casual dates, or hook ups.
This. 100% this.
To some extent you can use whether a couple has a child as an alternative measure for a strong relationship. Far from perfect for obvious reasons, but in this day and age probably a better proxy than yes/no marriage license.
Honest question: income is relatively easy to measure, but how does one determine who is "more educated"?
If someone has a BA, Summa Cum Laude in Deep Thinkin' from Stanford and put off grad school so they could get paid the big bucks to Think Deep Thoughts, are they more or less educated than someone who stumbled through a masters' from a third tier State U?
Does having a law degree from a US law school (juris doctor) make you more or less educated than someone who has a masters in social work? Where does an MBA fit in?
You get the idea. Social status and attractiveness seem even harder to quantify.
Back when I was on dating sites I tended to discount even PHDs in grievance studies, as not that compatible or smart.
Studies mostly just bucket High School / associates / Bachelors / graduate degree (sometimes splitting up Masters and MD and JD and PhD, but only if focused on that end of society because the numbers are small)
I agree that this is an imperfect mapping and university quality matters quite a lot too, though I don't think too much is lost by grouping all graduate degrees together (PhD is much lower earning but higher intellectual status than the professional degrees, but it roughly averages out)
Yes, I agree, it was much more! Drenched in dense data! Thank you for this effort.
It got me researching into mating strategies in China where I was busy being assembled for 13 years along with iPhones and I learned a little about how much I didn’t know about Chinese culture and its persons. Specializing in couples I discovered how dismal the marriages were—mirages.
I note (did I miss it eyes dizzy with data?) you had nothing about China and I think that will be different in terms of the education hypergamy where it definitely seems to be big time.
Have a view:
CHINA’S DATING APPS ARE SWIPING RIGHT ON SNOBBERY
In China, where education has become the ultimate marker of social class, match-making platforms are helping users screen out graduates of inferior colleges.
https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1006892
And remember China now has some 30 MILLION MORE MEN THAN WOMEN, whew and the trend is 50 million in 2050. https://blog.gitnux.com/china-gender-imbalance-statistics/
I know single Chinese men who are having to take things in hand, ahem, and things are definitely desperate. And the single women are also taking things in hand and seeking those Beachboy Good Vibrations it seems:
HOW WOMEN ARE RESHAPING CHINA’S SEX TOYS INDUSTRY, LITERALLY Sixth Tone, by Yang Caini, May 10, 2023 https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1012845
And the Sheng Nu “Women Leftovers” is a testament to women refusing to bind their feet but choosing to walk away upright.
REVIEW: THE 'LEFTOVER' WOMEN SHAPING CHINA RNZ, by Jeremy Rees, 23 February 2023 https://www.rnz.co.nz/stories/2018654955/review-the-leftover-women-shaping-china
Stay in a permanent partnership if you have one; or get one if you don’t.
“It is a striking fact, for example, that mortality rates in the United States for all causes of death, and not just for heart disease, are consistently higher for divorced, single, and widowed individuals of both sexes and all races. Some of the increased death rates in unmarried individuals rise as high as ten times the rates for married individuals of comparable ages.” A Cry Unheard—New insights into the medical consequences of loneliness by James J. Lynch.
"What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” Fyodor Dostoevsky
> no tendency for ugly rich people to marry attractive poor people.
I know Netflix recently had a documentary on Anna Nicole Smith, and it's hard not to think of her marriage to that rich guy on death's door after previously marrying a FAR lower class man.
"But as long as this is still uncommon, the norm against it persists and women who earn too much have a hard time."
I'm amazed that "women earning so much money" would be considered a problem for women, as opposed to men and boys falling behind in the education system for 40 years and artificially delaying their income/career progression being a problem crying out for rectification? (I dunno, unless the argument is just that women have biologically superior work ethic, in which I would like to know which of our other social policy institutions accepts outcomes predicated on Sex A being innately superior at a given task to Sex B.)
I think this elides the fact that attending college is a class emulation process. So you do know rich men who date a beautiful woman from rural West Virginia, provided she completes government subsidized finishing school.
Also, didn’t many famous CEOs marry their secretaries?
Maybe in the 70s, when there weren't that many highly educated women available.
I cannot find it right now, but IIRC, Gary Becker had a piece long ago that looked at how different immigrant groups educated their children back in the day (late 19th-early 20th Cs). I don't recall the findings precisely, but from what I remember, both Irish and German immigrants gave their daughters more formal education than their sons because the latter learned skilled trades and could support a family that way. There were very few occupations open to woman that enabled them to support themselves reasonably (while they were they remained unmarried) and these required formal education: at that time, it was essentially school teacher and eventually nursing for women. For men, plumbing, carpentry, masonry, etc, which were learned outside of school.
To the extent that it remains the case that men can earn more than women with less education, this is one plausible reason for women's having more schooling than men (see Zuckerberg & Chan)
To the extebb
> They want someone who shares their norms and values.
I think this explains the class correlation right here. Your “class” isn’t your income+education, it’s your upbringing, which is tied to your -parents- income+education (or even your grandparents). Recall Fussell on Class: suddenly making a lot of money doesn’t make you upper-class, it just makes you nouveau riche.
Even with the rise of online dating, people generally marry people from within their own IRL social circles, or people they meet online who could plausibly become members of their social circles. This goes for marrying up as well as marrying down. As hypothetically appealing as marrying a Hollywood starlet might seem, in reality it would mean completely upending my life. People want the highest-status “normal” partner they can find, for whatever “normal” means to them.
Here's a bit of extremely broad anecdotal evidence based on my lifelong experience with school teachers (grand- and great-grandparents, parents, dating partners, colleagues, friends, parents friends, etc.) At least here in the U.S. public K-12 teachers are expected to have considerable education. In some school districts (e.g. in districts here in Washington State) they're expected to accumulate additional degrees or even advanced degrees just to keep their jobs.
In my experience most of these teachers have more education than their partners, most of whom have no more than a bachelor's degree. They typically have similar or lower incomes than their partners.
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While we're at it, I think there's now probably enough accumulated data, both from dating sites as well as census and other demographic sampling, to see if "evolutionarily determined" hypergamy applies to same-sex relationships.
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Finally, consider the common phrase among men that some prospective partner is "out of your league." Compared to the surprising infrequency of women who claim they're out of a prospective partner's "league." One tends to wonder how much of the male experience of "hypergamy" is internalized? If one's reaction to a prospective partner is "she'd never give me the time of day" then is *she* the one making the "hypergamous" decision?
"If one's reaction to a prospective partner is "she'd never give me the time of day" then is *she* the one making the "hypergamous" decision?"
Attractive women tend to report receiving a lot of attention from less-attractive men.
Sure, but isn't that how the law of averages works?
I should have mentioned that it's really common for (mostly) men to say "he must either have money or a big d**k to wind up with her."
See also a complaint raised in the 1920s that "[Broadway] showgirls only date millionaires." And the observation that couldn't be true because in New York in the 1920s "showgirls" outnumbered millionaires by something like 100 to 1.
Finally, back when I was blogging about relationships another blogger said "take two women with equal personalities, most men are going to go for the prettier one." Which, sure, fine, maybe so, but I posed the counter question, which went unanswered: "if you take two women of equal beauty, most men are going to go for the one with the better personality."
Similarly, in the context of "hypergamy," if you take two men of equal "wealth," will women really just say "guess I'll just have to flip a coin?" Or will they evaluate other qualities?
And, again in the same context of "hypergamy," if given a choice will women on average prefer a man who's an abusive a**hole over someone who makes half as much but isn't?
The point being that we've got lots of stories about how men and women choose partners. We even have stories about the peer pressure they get to make certain choices (never rule out social pressure over "biological imperatives.") But a survey of the neighborhoods I've lived in (again anecdotal but I've lived everywhere from slums to ultra-wealthy neighborhoods) "hypergamy" markers on dating sites don't seem to play much of a role in the long-term outcomes.
While the discussion of education is interesting, it's not at all a central component of what I'd think of when discussing hypergamy. I've never heard red-pillers say "the secret to success with women is getting a Master's degree, even if it's in a low-paying field".
A more central example is something like this chart (https://rudd-o.com/archives/female-hypergamy-in-a-single-chart/@@display-file/picture/The%20post-sexual-revolution%20sex%20dynamics.jpeg), where women see the average man as below-average in terms of attractiveness. Women obsess over the top decile of men far more than the reverse, leading to an exceptional gini coefficient where a small amount of men have a huge amount of sex, while the rest of men get table scraps. This has always been the case throughout history but apps like Tinder have amplified it. From this study (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/367325876_Sexual_loneliness_A_neglected_public_health_problem):
> The distribution of the number of sex partners among American heterosexual men was skewed already, but in just ten years, the distribution of sex partners among men became even more skewed. During the same time, there was no such change in the number of sex partners for heterosexual women. Sex is concentrated within a small, yet sexually active, group of people. In one study, it was reported that the 5 % of the population with the highest number of vaginal sex acts (penile-vaginal-intercourse) accounted for more vaginal sex acts than the bottom 50 % of the population with the lowest number of vaginal sex acts. 4 Using the Gini index, it is found that the distribution of the number of sex partners both for men and women throughout their lifespan is as unequal as the distribution of wealth among the most unequal countries in the world (South Africa Gini 0.63 in 2014 and Namibia Gini 0.59 in 2015).
Also, I'd echo what a few others have pointed out: while the latin root of "hypergamy" technically refers specifically to marriage, people (at least non-academics) use the term in reference to relationships more broadly.
"Women obsess over the top decile of men far more than the reverse, leading to an exceptional gini coefficient where a small amount of men have a huge amount of sex, while the rest of men get table scraps."
Is that your opinion or a rendering of the usual red pill opinion?
It's an obvious fact RP points out that I agree with, which is evidenced by the study I linked.
I find it quite strange to worry about the distribution of the number of lifetime sexual partners. Is this something you find important for yourself?
In the linked study, my guess would be that the trend towards increasing numbers of lifetime sex partners in the top decile and decreasing numbers in the bottom decile is caused by different factors, for example the availability of dating apps will increase 'success' for attractive men who want to have lots of partners, and the global increase in time spent alone at home for bot sexes will decrease it for less motivated men. I think it is very unlikely to be caused by some very attractive men 'stealing' partners from less attractive ones.
Anyway, my impression is that most people, men and women, prefer to have a regular partner at some point, and since there are roughly equal numbers of men and women, well, it works for most people!
>Speaking for myself, my number of lifetime sexual partners is currently 0 and yes, I would value raising it to 1 even if I would not get regular partner (but not at all cost or in every circumstances). I guess sex is one of the notable experiences that one can find in life.
Sure, of course! But I understand that you are (very!) interested in your number, not the distribution of this number for the American population. My impression was that some people were kind of 'jealous' that the maximum number of partners seemed to have increased, and I find that a bit strange.
>So this is where the difference is, you are simply replacing *attractiveness* by *motivation* as the decisive distinction between the men who have a lot of sex and those who don't (while also acknowledging that the big sexhavers must also be attractive). There must be some truth to this but it is almost certainly not the whole story.
I agree with you, that was a huge oversimplification. I think that the vast majority of men and women are physically attractive enough and that the main barriers are usually behavioural, but that does not mean that these barriers (shyness, poor social skills, etc.) are easy to overcome.
>And the share has decreased so something must be "working" less and less (which may or may not be a bad thing, perhaps those couples were oppressive after all).
My impression, which is 100% anecdotal, is that this is partly due to the fact that people can afford to live alone, which is more expensive than sharing, and are less tolerant of problems in relationships. Just an impression though.
>I find it quite strange to worry about the distribution of the number of lifetime sexual partners. Is this something you find important for yourself?
Everyone should worry about sex distribution, if not for themselves or their children, then at least for wellbeing of the society they live in. Sex is extremely, overbearingly important for most men, to a much greater degree than it is for women. A bunch of aimless, sexually frustrated men is fodder for political violence, chaos, and revolution. As someone who generally likes modern society, I'd like to preserve it from dangers like this.
>I think it is very unlikely to be caused by some very attractive men 'stealing' partners from less attractive ones.
Sexual competition among men is typically a zero-sum game outside of things like prostitution.
>since there are roughly equal numbers of men and women, well, it works for most people
One man pairing with one woman is not the natural state of human existence. It only ended up that way for most of history because all major religions understood that severely unequal sexual access is a Bad Thing for society. Now that religion is in decline, we're reverting to humanity's normal state of sexual competition, which is one of *extreme* inequality with a few lucky men at the top having large harems, and a bunch of frustrated sexless men at the bottom causing problems.
>Everyone should worry about sex distribution, if not for themselves or their children, then at least for wellbeing of the society they live in. Sex is extremely, overbearingly important for most men, to a much greater degree than it is for women. A bunch of aimless, sexually frustrated men is fodder for political violence, chaos, and revolution. As someone who generally likes modern society, I'd like to preserve it from dangers like this.
Yes but that is not the distribution of the number of partners, this is specifically about people not having partners (which I do find important for these people and society!)
>Sexual competition among men is typically a zero-sum game outside of things like prostitution.
I really don't think that's the case.
For people in stable 2-person relationships, well, obviously no man can monopolise many women.
For hook-ups, that would be the case if women had a predetermined amount of sex they wanted to have, and any hook-up with one man reduced the number of hook-ups available for the others, but that is really not how women's sexuality works.
I'm not saying there isn't competition, there definitely is, but I really don't think it's close to a zero-sum game.
>One man pairing with one woman is not the natural state of human existence. It only ended up that way for most of history because all major religions understood that severely unequal sexual access is a Bad Thing for society. Now that religion is in decline, we're reverting to humanity's normal state of sexual competition, which is one of *extreme* inequality with a few lucky men at the top having large harems, and a bunch of frustrated sexless men at the bottom causing problems.
Absolutely not. All human societies, with or without a major religion, have or have had some kind of arrangement with stable couples or stable polygamous pairing. There has never been extreme inequality historically (and we have the genetic data to prove that!). Some animal species have no permanent pairing, such as cats, others have long-term pairing, such as wolves. Humans are clearly in the latter category (we call it falling in love!), most likely because it usually took two parents to raise a baby successfully.
>For hook-ups, that would be the case if women had a predetermined amount of sex they wanted to have, and any hook-up with one man reduced the number of hook-ups available for the others, but that is really not how women's sexuality works.
I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here, but men want sex vastly more than women do. A woman can get sex easily by just propositioning men, whereas for men the process is much more involved. Women are the bottleneck for sex, so a few lucky men monopolizing sex does indeed other men are having less sex. At the micro level a woman might have more or less sex depending on certain factors, but at the macro level it really is a zero-sum competition between men.
>There has never been extreme inequality historically (and we have the genetic data to prove that!).
The genetic data proves the exact opposite, actually. For instance, here: https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success
The fact we have so many more female ancestors than male ancestors is a clear indicator that there were often a few lucky men with harems, while others got scraps or nothing at all.
A bunch of aimless, sexually frustrated POOR men is fodder for political violence, chaos, and revolution.
Fixed that for you. I don't think that the modal 30-year-old virgin that wants a sex life and a partner and all that is willing to risk being maimed, killed, or long stretches of prison time in some kind of Incel Rebellion: he's middle-class and has too much to lose to go for broke and try to overthrow the system by force.
Yes, we've got crazy mass shooters - but do we have crazy incel militias training in the woods for the Beta Uprising? If they're out there, they're keeping an extremely low profile.
>Maybe this isn’t as common-sensically wrong as it seems. I know many rich male Google programmers, but I have never seen any of them marry a stunning black girl from the ghetto. Why not? Wouldn’t the hypergamy hypothesis pronounce this a good deal for both of them? He gets a beautiful wife, she gets a rich husband? And it’s not just a race thing, I’ve also never seen them marry a beautiful hillbilly from West Virginia, or a beautiful farmer’s daughter from Modesto. I don’t even really see them marry a beautiful girl from the suburbs with a community college degree.
That kind of thing (minus the interracial aspect) used to be more common in the past. Today it wouldn't fly since that kind of marriage is likely to end in divorce and the high-earning man will wind up paying a boatload of "child support" money even if he managed to get joint custody.
Also, status is not reducible to income/education. On the Big Bang Theory, Leonard was
"high status" in that he had high educational attainment and medium income, and was by this measure higher-status than low-income/low-education Penny.* But initially she rejected him as too unattractive for her.
Indeed, perhaps a more realistic version of the Big Bang Theory would have Penny continually blow Leonard off. Finally once she's forty-five with two kids and a baby daddy in county jail, she inquires into Leonard only to learn he married Leslie Winkle, moved out to the suburbs, and has one child. A few days later she sardonically complains "oh, where have the good men gone."
*Yes, this is a work of fiction, but we all know guys like Leonard IRL.
The Big Bang Theory is interesting because it reflects some weird pop culture idea of the way the world works that is completely and obviously unrealistic.
The male main characters are all successful, especially considering their age. Penny is a waitress and a wannabe actress. So why does Leonard share an apartment with Sheldon (who is the most successful of all, he's a genius), while Penny has an apartment of her own in the same building?
In real life, even if Leonard felt super awkward talking to Penny, he would still be aware of the fact that he is more successful than she is. There is hardly any indication of this in the series.
The characters in Big Bang Theory are like overgrown teenagers. The viewer is supposed to accept the premise that they have the same social "status" vis a vis each other they would have if they were still in high school and going to the prom (Penny is cool, because she's hot, the others are not cool).
I could totally see Leonard and Sheldon sharing an apartment given how expensive LA real estate is. Penny having her own apartment is unrealistic unless she had some source of familial wealth.
"In real life, even if Leonard felt super awkward talking to Penny, he would still be aware of the fact that he is more successful than she is. There is hardly any indication of this in the series."
It does come up later in the series, Leonard mentioning that Penny has a lot of credit card debt and that he doesn't think her acting career is going to go anywhere.
I think the way they see one another is fairly realistic. Penny sees Leonard as just another middle-class man, it's not like he drives a Mercedes or anything, and a short, awkward one at that. Whereas she imagines herself having a future as a millionaire actress on the covers of magazines. Leonard knows he's smarter than penny, but he knew the same thing in the 11th grade. He knows Penny's not looking for a provider or a good father to her children, she's looking for someone who can be sexy now, and on that front he still feels like a loser.
Aren't Sheldon and Leonard supposed to be faculty members at Caltech (according to Wikipedia, Sheldon is supposed to be a senior researcher)? Are such people really paid so little that they have to share apartments like students?
There is a difference between the way a 11th grade boy views the hot girl in his class and the way a 30 year old professional views the hot waitress at the Cheesecake Factory (even if the 30 year old is very insecure around women and finds her desirable). That's the difference the TV series ignores. (Besides, how does Leonard know what Penny is looking for?)
"Everyone’s first goal is to marry the highest-class person they can, but women prefer husbands whose class is lopsided towards income, and men prefer wives whose class is lopsided towards education."
This model plays out frequently in rural areas. Women with 4 yr Elementary Ed degrees from Cowtown Teachers College are, I suppose by the metrics of these studies, more educated than the electrician or contractor type they usually pair off with. As a teacher, she is definitionally middle class whereas her contractor husband is "high prole" (using the Paul Fussell groupings). She knows he carries status and money, and he knows she was able to get a 4 year degree so she probably isn't gonna act like she's on the Jerry Springer show. As you say, they have both prioritized the part of class that actually matters to them. And at this level, her time at some podunk directional school doesn't make their interests or worldviews incompatible.
I assume when you move into elite urban enclaves, you'd see a reskinned version of this with women from upper middle class backgrounds with JDs and MAs marrying guys from lower middle class backgrounds who dropped out of college to enter tech fields or have bachelor's degrees that led to lucrative jobs in finance or engineering. But it does seem like the chance for her education to have altered her worldview and values is much higher having spent 5-7 years at a real school with an academic focus, making that class dip a bit trickier to navigate.
"her time at some podunk directional school doesn't make their interests or worldviews incompatible"
As someone who attended a podunk directional school, and then a highly prestigious law school, I think this is a bad assumption. People definitely get socialized into elite assumptions at Directional State (and perhaps to a greater degree than at the elite school, where people feel comfortable assuming you already know the score), even if they don't actually get the elite markers. The struggles between teachers and parents in much of downscale America show how this plays out. Those teachers aren't prestigious at all by the standards of people who went to elite schools, but they have often internalized a model of the world closer to those elites' than those they live around.
The obvious counterargument to this is "well I don't see students rioting over speakers at Directional State," but (1) those campuses get fewer notable speakers and (2) the students are more likely to have distractions like *jobs*, and (3) they're less likely to live on campus, so the pressure cooker effect for activism doesn't work as effectively.
It's possible this happens at Directional State but is largely invisible because the cohort who DO substantially update their worldview aren't going back to work at Cornfield R-VII Intermediate School and rejoin rural/exurban life. I'm sure there are smug post-modernist sociology teachers at Directional State, but noone's coming home to their 10K pop county seat advocating for prison abolitionism or telling the school board to integrate concepts from queer theory, and she's definitely not telling her new boyfriend whose dad owns the contracting company and runs a bunch of mobile home parks that property is theft. Or taking the politics back out of it, if her worldview was changed enough that she became engrossed in some form of performance art or niche hobby or social cause that would alienate her non-college potential boyfriends, she is also likely to be trying to make it in the city where those pursuits are possible.
And as you allude to, these students often have too many pre-existing life experiences and obligations to fully absorb any cultural weirdness, nor to re-orient their perception of their own social class position.
...this seems like a higher-class version of an often-found effect investigating the attitudes toward public welfare among those who are just an inch or so above being very poor themselves. They often score lower in their acceptance of such policies than solid middle & higher-class people. We cannot look into the heads of people who answer surveys to find out how they think, but the usual suspicion is that they are more determined to signal that they are not "those people" than social strata that are secure in their non-poor status.
Just my 2 cents: are there any Cowtown jobs available to Ms Cowtown with an education available in Cowtown?
It's quite likely that Cowtown's vocational training options are welding, electrical, bricklaying, and hairdressing, and all the hairdressing spots have been taken up by a bunch of girls who were mean to Ms Cowtown in high school so she needs to go out of town to get a qualification for any other local job (teaching, nursing).
Ms and Mr Cowtown could be high school sweethearts, it's just that Ms Cowtown doesn't have the local vocational training options that Mr Cowtown has, and she doesn't want to be a janitor, so she goes away for a bit to come back as a qualified teacher.
I agree that's how it plays out, and it's why I don't think her education makes very much difference to her dating targets. Her education is transactional and vocational just as much as the men's is, and it's seen as getting a certificate not as social advancement. In rural areas a responsible/timely/punctual-but-unskilled male can make $25/hr with a road and bridge crew while her best bet out of HS is a $12/hr clerical job. She had to take a few semesters of Spanish and some History or Lit class en route to being a nurse or counselor and now has a 2/4 year degree her boyfriend doesn't, but that education was socially irrelevant.
You identified it in section VI. The people who care about this started noticing it on dating sites and from PUAs. There's not very significant hyperGAMY; per your point that people generally have to live with their spouse and prefer to mate as assortatively as possible. The thing PUAs and bloggers and social critics and the terminally-online college age youth who read their thoughts are noticing is hyperLAGNY (sex having, not marriage). There is a very strong effect, which you mention regarding the wealthy and the stereotype of affairs with servants, of women being sexually available to men of higher status. It's just that those men rarely repay the favor with marriage.
Comment from a former female coworker to me (a male):
"I've seen a number of smart male friends marry dumb women. I've never seen a smart female friend marry a dumb man."
IF this observation is applicable to the general population, one presumes that men are more likely to forego intelligence in a spouse for physical attractiveness than women are.
I took it as a compliment as my wife is more intelligent than I am.
For what it's worth, my female coworker was likely an XXY person who exhibed a mix of male and female physical characteristics. She identified as a woman, was a strong feminist, and was extraordinarily intelligent.
You can't just take a snapshot of who is married to whom and who is unmarried. You have to look at it longitudinally.
Many agrarian societies managed to be relatively hypergamous because younger women would be married to older men and status increased with age.
(are these studies counting widows?)
Hrm.... Regarding the differences between same sex and opposite sex couples... one obvious possible difference is available population/selection size. This suggests a possible question to ask: How do things look if we look at same sex couples where both partners happen to be strongly bisexual, and thus the fact that they're a same sex couple is more likely to be a "just happened to work out that way" thing rather than either specifically searching for same sex partners. Would that subset look more like the tight assortment of opposite sex couples or the looser assortment of same sex couples?
On the looks point specifically, I think men do a good job of deluding/realizing (I like to think it's the latter) that the person they're into is good-looking after they fall for them. No one is like "I love her but she's a 3 at best" despite the fact that there are obviously 3s in this world.
More like: she may be a 3, but at least it’s compelling evidence I’m not gay.
Just my cynical take, as a bi dude who’s been disparaged as gay, by guys married to 3’s...
I think people get attractiveness wrong, it’s not just about your body. You might think she’s a 3 from afar, but if you’re old friends who start dancing at a wedding, or you go to sing Karaoke and she nails your favorite song, or you both get stranded waiting for a bus on the first warm day of the year, your perceptions will change. Some people are so outstandingly attractive that you know right away, but for most people it’s that mix of circumstance and personality.
Excellently put
Doesn't everybody do this?
My husband is cute but it wasn't love at first sight or anything. Once I got to know him he became the sexiest man alive in my eyes. As in, his physical attractiveness increased substantially. The longer we're together, the sexier he gets.
Interesting, but I find it hard to trust the studies' conclusion if they don't account for age gaps (which correlates with income gap but maybe less so with class).
Also the term "class" has to be defined better, and I'll bet it means different things in the British study and the US study.
I've gone to great (heroic) lengths to make myself my attractive, and pursued women in lower socioeconomic classes for casual relationships but I would probably never marry them.
I guess that probably sounds crass but my point is, marriage is FAR from the be all end all of the sexual marketplace. Whereas, marriage is a social and economic arrangement as much as a sexual one
In the short term market looks dominate for both sexes, obviously.
Out of curiosity, did you specifically "pursue women in lower socioeconomic classes for casual relationships" or did you also chase women from (I suppose) the same, higher, class as you?
Both, and for relationships I really only am compatible with educated women. But when optimizing for one thing (say beauty/youth) you often sacrifice other things. I've dated a lot of waitresses...
My wife has a higher level of education than I do, but she also tells me that I'm one of the smartest people that she's ever met. She also makes more money than I do, though that wasn't always the case. I'm curious how much relative IQ plays a role and how it compares to the relative education of couples.
That's a good point, education is a terrible proxy for IQ. Women are being more highly educated, but their distribution on the IQ curve is still where it was.
The key for men is having at least some ways to gain money and status that are NOT tied to the increasingly female-oriented college/government/corporate realm to which a certain variety of the smartest men will never be suited.
I definitely agree with this - I tend to advocate for a sense of identity that is far more aligned with stoic/zen values than external frames of reference. Neither money nor status fit that bill.
I like what Sam Harris pointed out - that ultimately we need to be more process oriented than goal oriented, because the goals are transitory and the process is ongoing until we die. Objectively if we are content in our processes, we don't need to achieve the goals we persue in order to be content with our day to day lives. Achieving those goals still matters, obviously, but that is a secondary result, akin to reaching for the stars in the hopes of touching the moon.
Fwiw, I (a woman) am pretty sure I don’t care about formal education, but the minute I realize a man is less intrinsically intelligent than I am, I instantly lose interest; it’s entirely involuntary, like a switch flipping off. I realize this may be silly or counterproductive--IQ isn’t everything, and many very good men aren’t as smart as I am--but once I know he can’t keep up mentally I feel like his mom or something. Yuck.
*nods* I can see this. So much of who we are attracted to involves our own sense of what we want from a partner - and I have often found that its those who lack self confidence that prefer to have partners that are better described as accessories. I would guess that self-confidence, like EQ, tends to correlate with fluid intelligence as well.
So who knows, there might be that "exception to the rule" out there, but my guess is that your right match matches your "instinct" of attraction. My guess is that there has to be a "proportional gap" in relative IQ for couples, regardless of which one is ultimately smarter than the other. How much of a gap is "too much" for attraction to be mutual... that would be interesting to find out!
I know Scott briefly touched on this in the footnotes, but I think age difference is a factor. Stats on age differences would help, but to take a fairly extreme case where the man is 30 and the woman is 23,
- it’s more likely that he earns more
- it’s more likely that at that moment, he has a higher degree of education
- it’s likely that he perceives her to be pretty (say, compared with his college cohort and work colleagues)
- in a vague way, his age confers status on him besides money and education
Later on, everything could change, but for now, they can in a way “play act” that he is immutably higher-status and she is immutably gorgeous.
Something I saw a few years ago that has always stuck with me:
"If you ask women who they would prefer as a mate, [a famous movie-star] or a waiter who looks just like him, most women will choose the movie-star. If you ask men who they would prefer as a mate, [a famous movie-star] or a waitress who looks just like her, most men will choose the waitress."
Presumably, women choose the movie-star because they're attracted to status, while men choose the waitress because they seek respect, which they are more likely to get from a waitress than a famous movie-star.
Even in atomized cultures like that of the 21st century United States, marriage usually implies one is joining an extended family, and extending one's own family. Even when children aren't planned, but even moreso when they are. This matters. To varying degrees, but on average, a lot. This is somewhere between the explanation of and the definition of in-class homogamy.
I'm fairly confused by the "men and women are equally and highly class homogamous, therefore nobody cares about looks very much" point. This argument seems to assume that both (a) class and looks are the only [relevant] dimensions on which people vary; (b) people are willing to trade off between these.
That seems...plausible..but not necessarily true? Here's a sketch of a different world which shows the class-matching but has relevant asymmetric looks preferences:
- Everyone marries only within their social class; to do otherwise is unthinkable.
- People within a class vary on many dimensions: looks, but also sense of humor, kindness, ability to cook, willingness to share household chores, etc.
- So within each class there's still a spectrum of mate quality.
- Men care proportionally more about looks, women proportionally less.
- So within each social class, funny men who are gentle and will share household labor tend to marry more beautiful women, unfunny jerks tend to marry less beautiful women, etc.
The study with better-when-wife-is-prettier results is n=82 pairs of mainly students. I wouldn't put that much faith in that. https://sci-hub.st/10.1037/0893-3200.22.1.135
I suppose that marriage data is easier to get than dating data, but it's still looking at the wrong thing, IMO. Marriage (in most countries) means taking on a huge legal responsibility, and if you're marrying down in terms of income and class, this incurs serious financial risks if things go wrong. And people know that they often do.
Casual sex (mentioned in the post), on the other hand, is wrong for the opposite reason: of course people want to have casual sex with beautiful partners, and of course their income has little to do with that.
I would say that the relevant notion would be dating, defined as spending lots of time with the person and perhaps (but not necessarily) living together; this is the level where you care deeply about what the person is like outside of bed, but you are not taking on serious financial risks by being with that person, so this should give a less skewed picture of preferences. I have no idea whether this kind of data is available, though.
Attractive people make more money. That eases the discussion.
Doesn't your analysis forget how people mingle? People tend to clump together based on the same interests, schools or proximity. This tends to re-enforce class. As a rich "ugly" male is unlikely to cross pass with a stunning "ghetto" woman. Therefore you tend to trade off between partners within your social group.
Hasn't the real concern been that dating apps break this limit social grouping such that woman have a larger pool of men to draw upon for relationships, resulting in the top x% of men getting a disproportionate amount of the female population. This mismatch allows for the mento have lots of short term relationships, and burns out the women on men and dating or they only turn to men outside the x% after their used by date. Isn't that the fundamental concern people have about hypogamy?
Hm, I will probably get some backlash for that, but here it goes anyway:
I would like to know how "same status" is "calculated"? Because it is mentioned multiple times, that "today" women outperform men in education and so their status got higher. And well... yeaaaaah... but in what areas? In most "western countries" it is still the norm, that men/women study quite different stuff. Men are most commonly found in "hard sciences" like IT, Engineering, Physics, ... - women on the other hand are often enrolled in some "social studies", Philosophy, Drama, ... (the medical area is a special case here)
Are degrees in those field "similar"? Yeah, the woman with the degree in African Studies marries someone with a degree in Mathematics. So they are "the same status" ... but are they? And how does the different income of those two come in effect later?
When I lived in the US, I used to buy the NYT. It has an engagement section and it was pretty clear that it was all Finighan-Coleville 3rd marrying Webster-Carringtion 2nd, and so on. Sometimes you would get a Jewish name. I don’t recall much inter racial engagements although that might be different now.
There was often a pedigree attached (son or daughter of this Ambassdor, or that justice, or that academic) on both sides.
Seems that that eastern elite class definitely intermarries. Whether the well paid google engineer is as fusy I don’t know, but in strict Marxist terms he’s a proletarian
The NYTimes announcement is free but they only do announcements for couples that are high achievers or from prominent families…so they have to choose your announcement. I did opposition research for politics and the opposing candidate had a NYTimes wedding announcement and it made oppo research very easy because I had birthdates and middle names and college attendance and mother’s maiden name etc…had the guy been a Santos I would have easily disqualified him…be careful what you wish for. ;)
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May 25th, 2023, Thursday Morning, Index Number 1905:
I know several men who have wed twice, had two batches of children and for both wives it was their first marriage. The second time around the wife was considerably younger than the husband.
Is this so rare that it can be disregarded? Or is this a workaround for hypergamy?
Great post! I wrote a response here: https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/potentially-good-news-for-marriage#details
I would add only one point to this extensive and cogent analysis. There has been a slow decoupling of education from both class and income over the past six decades. That's why educational homogamy has decreased, but not class & income homogamy. This has been caused by the huge increase in the number of people receiving post-secondary education, and the decreasing quality of that education. I recall a report several years ago that, in the U.S.A., 25% of baristas and 10% of parking lot attendants had earned a degree or diploma from a university or college. It's become somewhat of a standard joke that a bachelor degree in the liberal arts gives you the opportunity to work under the assistant manager who has a high school diploma, and the manager who has a community college diploma.
Not everyone marries. Pew reports that almost 40% of US adults are currently unpartnered. Looking at their charts, the unpartnered, whether male or female, lag behind their partnered peers on markers such as education, income, living independently, not being institutionalized.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-share-of-u-s-adults-are-living-without-a-spouse-or-partner/
Appearance may lead to romantic interest at the beginning, but other factors come into play with time, such as personality, character, behavior and compatibility. Doing well in a career corresponds with social skills such as good manners, the ability to handle disagreement, etc.
I am not certain that dating apps would increase hypergamy. Does anyone know how the apps select the profiles presented to the users? Talking with friends, it seems to me that different people see unique selections; it would not surprise me at all to know that some of the factors in the matches are connected to class.
And then, there's the fact that income doesn't necessarily match social background. A number of children of the really wealthy pursue careers that don't pay well, but are useful and socially respected, such as teachers, artists, nonprofit staffers.
The bit about looks seeming not to matter much was especially interesting. I'm thinking that it probably does matter a lot but it's mainly just about meeting some minimum standard. If your standards are lower then it might appear that looks "matter less" to you simply because more potential partners are able to meet them, even though you're just as likely as others to reject someone who doesn't meet your standard.
I wonder what correlation all of these have with the well-documented decline in birthrate in most developed economies (apropos of the referenced DeBoer's article), which also often tend to parade a population of highly educated and socially mobile women?
Thanks for the clear and enlightening post! I'm not sure I understand the swipe at (feminist) academics, though.
Setting aside that the quotations provided are from different authors and academics are known to occasionally have different opinions from each other, is there any contradiction in believing that freedom-restricting societal norms tend to be upheld when straight people systematically sort themselves into couples where the man earns slightly more than the woman, and tend to be eroded when queer people pair off with little regard for each other's economic background?
I couln't find any reference in the article or the comments to the issue of age, so maybe I'm missing something obvious.
But on my naive model, age is the missing factor here. I believe on average older men marry younger women, and since status, education and income all grow with age, while beautiy and attractiveness decline with it, I wouldn't naively expect any problem with hypergammy of all sorts even if women on average had more than men on every single factor. The question would be how do women stack up to men in terms of status at the time of marriage.
Per google, in the US the average heterosexual marriage has a man 2-3 years older than the woman. So yeah, even if the two have identical education and careers the man would tend to earn slightly more on average.
As most people compromise on their marriage choice sooner or later, reductive statistical analysis into this or that dimension of "revealed" preferences may muddle more than clarify.
Loosely checking David Deida... The broad spirit of female hypergamy apparently lies in looking for a superiority feature in a man to admire or appreciate. Largely, that used to be (and still is) status, wealth, physique, education - but if these factors become gamed or skewed too much, then a dude may show something else rather exceptional.
By the way, the topic of hypergamy was touched in the commentary to Scott Aaronson's blog, particularly around the posts #26-#52 here: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5171
Am I in a hypogamous or hypergamous marriage? Or is my marriage... iso-gamous?
I have a bachelor's degree and work in a white collar job. My husband dropped out of community college to work for his parents' restaurant--he's very smart and could have finished school, but the money on offer was too good to refuse. He makes slightly less per hour than I do, but makes more than double what I make per year because he works double my hours. (I have some health issues so I work part time.) All of my parents and grandparents are college-educated, but none of his parents or grandparents are. I grew up solidly middle class, approaching upper middle class (dad military officer, mom stay-at-home); he grew up working class (dad military enlisted, mom a waitress), although his parents' restaurant ended up being very successful and shot them into upper middle class when he was in his early 20s.
We're probably both solid 6s when it comes to physical attractiveness, if that's relevant.
I think we should make "isogamous" a thing, haha.
I wonder about an analysis that looks at emotional intelligence. We know there to be significant differences in physical ability between men and women. Do signals of emotional intelligence in a man (I.e., woman can be more confident to not get abused) allow for more hypogamy across other dimensions without increasing chances of divorce?
This is a field where 'Simpson's paradox' arises with a vengeance. Some subpopulations have hypergamy preference for females and 'education' of certain types can be both a relevant signaling and screening device. In my own community, ceteris paribus, the rule used to be that the husband should be one degree higher- e.g. wife has B.A, husband has MA. However, this reversed itself in the Sixties and Seventies when girls stayed longer in College but still could not enter the job market on equal terms. Now, there is more emphasis of enterprise, rather than education. A person with a diploma who has a start-up outranks a Lecturer with a PhD. This isn't pure income based hypergamy. It's more like a proxy for genetic or epigenetic contribution to future progeny.
In some Islamic countries- e.g. Tunisia, Iran- which previously had a 'bride price' culture- female education becomes a type of reverse bride-price or 'dowry'. Moreover, a daughter's earnings may become important for the parents. They would prefer a lower status 'live-in' son-in-law who may be 'blue collar'- e.g. plumber, cab-drive etc.- but this creates its own tensions.
We would expect heterosexual marriage (for the fertile cohort) to show either bride-price, or female hypergamy because of asymmetric parental investment. However, for endogamous groups, the Price equation militates for more complex solutions to the stable marriage problem. 'Education' itself might be part of that solution which explains why, in many fields, it correlates poorly with Income.
Studies comparing the education of married couples should distinguish between education levels at the time they met vs after they were married.
It is not improbable that in a significant number of cases women are able to indulge in more edu *because* they've engaged in the income hypergamy of marrying a man who "got a real job" and thus can afford her that luxury.
Even prior to marriage... it's harder for a man to continue with more edu under the assumption he might be able to marry someone who would be earning more and have that to fall back on.
Re the Christian Mingle footnote, a therapist who knew I hoped to meet somebody once advised me not to go on Catholic Match, because from what female clients had told him it was full of fetishists with a “Catholic school girl” thing... possibly the evangelicals are experiencing something similar...
Re: section VI, it seems obvious intuitively that a person's class affects how they present themselves, in a way that tends to make them more attractive to people of their class and less attractive to people of other classes—at least, higher ones.
For example, as a middle-class man, I don't find the way working-class women present themselves appealing. Positing two physically identical women, one working-class, one middle-class, I'm going to find the middle-class one more attractive based on how she presents herself. Not clear to me whether a working-class man typically prefers a working-class woman over a middle-class one, but I would think so.
A woman of a particular class's way of presenting herself as attractive is not very legible to men of other classes, I would say.
How would you define class?
I think hypergamy is still not a viable strategy for marriages insofar as marriages still almost exclusively require significant compatibility on a variety of meat-space axes that prevent a lot of cross-class, cross-race, cross-industry, and other cross-group pairings.
Cyberspace allows for total mixing and hypergamy along whichever axis people find most important. However, only hookups and flings are really low-cost enough in meat-space for this to take effect, and why Discourse(TM) on the subject of hypergamy often comes from terminally online hookup-interested groups. And why hookup apps are the ones that actually show this hypergamous effect where the top 20% of men have the attention of 80% of women and the other 80% of men are left fighting over the bottom 20% of women. Maybe this also explains the difference between gays (happy to hook up indefinitely) and lesbians (move in together on the third date), although this includes the caveat of not giving in to crass stereotypes etc. etc.
But when it comes to building marriage-worthy relationships, they come with a significant time and social cost. You have to share values to a certain degree, as Scott mentions. You have to get along with each other's social groups, to a certain degree. You have to get along with each other's family, to a certain degree. You have to be willing to commit to living in the same place with each other. You may have to agree on education and religious upbringing of children. All this adds up to lines of race, religion, social class, economic class, etc. not getting crossed all that much when it comes to marriage.
The problem with the first graph is that the column to the right doesn't actually represent hypergamy. It should show the women marrying 'up', and thus have an even larger gap at the top and the bottom.
Wow! This was a very awesome and interesting read. I think generation Z’s (who are currently the new 20’s) and all the few generations below who are reaching 30s are all starting to realise this now. It’s actually trending and I completely agree with the research 🔬 done on the dating apps. I can confirm as a lady that I am one of those who like to choose a provider. It makes us more scientifically happy as women. Whereas opposite and going for a ‘less financially’ individual it never was successful. It’s really attraction. It shows manhood and safety. Whereas we are warm and make a home 🏡 ☺️❤️ whether its 2024 or 1908. Womanhood never changes.
This was a good read. I wonder how applicable it is in non-western countries where expats often do pick up “beautiful” local women. My observation is that wealthier/more attractive men can pick up higher status and more beautiful local women, ie better education, better English, but not necessarily. Marriage prospects for lower status western males are much better, female hypergamy can be maintained and the western guy gets a hotter wife than he would have managed back home. Communities can form where the western husbands and the Asian wives can hang out and new types of status games can emerge.
I'm sure I'm not the first person to mention this, but we all know that "education" in the sense of bachelors>masters>doctorate just isn't a useful benchmark, right? It isn't distinguishing between an MSc in Mathematical Finance and an MA in Postcolonial Queer Media Communications
Indeed, and the philosopher in me feels like we shouldn't read too much into the arbitrary ontological boundaries we establish, especially as it pertains to these squishy, social concepts. That doesn't mean they're all wrong and useless, it just means we should continually look for issues and limitations in the data.
Do the studies account for relative age? I’m thinking of a couple where, at marriage, he is older and has a professional degree and is entering the workforce, where she is younger and has an undergrad degree and is three years out from starting her career. At the time of marriage, she is marrying up in income and education, and she will always be behind on income, but will catch up or surpass in education.
This is excellent. I just finished a deep dive on hypergamy myself, and it seems like we came to very similar conclusions. Mahin Hossain (above) brought this to my attention.
Absolutely phenomenal work.
This topic is a constant source of argument between me and my wife. What do you call a men that cares only only about beauty? What do you call a women who only cares about your income? Each of those answers has social repercussions, especially women's reaction to the latter. Women put a lot of stock in education but even more stock in the type of lifestyles their partner can provide. Think especially about atheles and their wives. I also think the marriage market has been distorted and all you have to do is look at the black community in the U.S.. my wife has more degrees than I do, however, I earn 2x her salary. My degrees are harder to get though.