Attraction Inequality and the Dating Economy (2019)

The dating economy is quite painful, and there likely is inequality of attraction, but the author does make an incorrect usage of their own evidence.

"If these findings are to be believed, the great majority of women are only willing to communicate romantically with a small minority of men while most men are willing to communicate romantically with most women. The degree of inequality in “likes” and “matches” credibly measures the degree of inequality in attractiveness, and necessarily implies at least that degree of inequality in romantic experiences. It seems hard to avoid a basic conclusion: that the majority of women find the majority of men unattractive and not worth engaging with romantically, while the reverse is not true."

The 'like' #s that the author quoted and Gini coefficient measured outgoing likes, not incoming likes / total matches. So for Hinge at least, the takeaway isn't that "women are only willing to communicate romantically with a small minority of men" but that they are willing to initiate a conversation with only a small number of men.

Likewise for the OKCupid blog post the author used as evidence, the blog post demonstrated that women viewed only a small fraction of men as highly attractive, but also showed that women still responded to and and went on dates with men they ranked as not as attractive. The latter the author of this piece ignored.

This is a very interesting topic and it is worthy of discussion.

One thing to point out is that women tend not to couple down-status. Combined with the fact that more women are getting degrees than men further reduces the pool of available males. It isn't clear what impact this will have long term.

> The institution of monogamy is itself a “redistributive” type of policy: like capping the income of billionaires, it caps the total allowed romantic partners of the most attractive, so that unattractive people have much better chances to find a partner.

This seems like an odd take. Monogamy is not dating equity for ugly people, it is a social construct evolved to give children an advantage over the long run. One of the biggest barriers you could have to over come is to come from a single parent home. There is copious data on this topic.

We're only a few generations away from multiple (3+) generations living under the same roof. I suspect with the rate that real estate prices and raw materials are increasing compared to the wages paid to laborers, it won't be but another generation or two before we're back in the same situation. Adult guidance is probably the most important thing, here, not necessarily a specific 2 parent household.