The hypergamy hypothesis: much more than you wanted to know
astralcodexten.substack.com
astralcodexten.substack.com
The author says:
> I know many rich male Google programmers, but I have never seen any of them […] marry a beautiful hillbilly from West Virginia
Ok, how about a Facebook engineer who married a woman that grew up in rural East Tennessee? Is that close enough? I would say the author’s observation is more due to the limited crossover between FANG engineers and the rural southeastern U.S. than any sort of innate principles of attraction.
Curiously, my wife is four years older than me and had no interest in moving to the west coast for a so-called “higher status” job. I realize this is anecdata, but already it contradicts the two main premises of hypergamy (men marry younger and women want higher status). In fact, it took quite a bit of compromise for that move to occur, and from my perspective it had nothing to do with class or status either—my motivation was that I am interested in tech and the Bay Area is (was?) the geographical location of the most interesting jobs in that industry.
More to the point, next to the trouble of them meeting, there is also a pretty big cultural difference [1] between these states. A FAANG engineer is probably closer in their views and interests to a cashier working in SF than a similarly positioned businessman in rural Texas.
[1] Note that this is an uninformed opinion from across the pond.
This is the weakest counter-argument I've read in years.
Anyone with a minimal amount of comprehension would've understood the point being made.
I don't think many people have checklists where they evaluate potential partners based on education, income, looks and so on and consciously choose the best match. People just fall in love.
The social classes just don't really mix that freely and it is not surprising people tend to stick to their own class. Yes, you can find all kinds of people on Tinder but most relationships don't start there.
Relationships are often build on shared goals and having things in common and having similar social status, class and income helps.
If that kind of thinking were helpful, I think we'd have evolved to have a very accurate guess as to what the majority of our preferred demographic finds attractive - but apart from psychopaths, most of us don't. the optimal mating strategy doesn't actually seem to be to work to approach some generic ideal, but to be most authentically and extremely oneself, then filter out everyone who doesn't like that. It's intuitive why looking too seriously at averages distracts from that project.
e.g. all of the ladies Tiger Woods, or David Letterman, etc., was cheating on their actual wives with. The President of the US used to sleep with famous figures like Marilyn Monroe, or occasionally chubby interns.
Jude Law married the model / actress Sienna Miller... but got caught sleeping with his kids' fairly plane-jane nanny.
You marry on your level to be around that person, but that doesn't mean you're not sleeping with cocktail waitresses and bar floozies.
It feels like this article is portraying women as creatures bound to their nature and men as unchanging monoliths.
you can't look at electrons without some sort of bias; such is the nature of all research.
however "data is biased", and the implied "statistics are racist / classist / sexist" etc., is most often used by those who don't want to see what the data lays out, and have no other way to discredit it.
Indeed the whole article fails to identify gender roles and cultural norms as the source.
It also uses the term "market value" as something natural and inevitable. There's a lot of hidden bias here.
And people seek young partners with large breasts. That's not a behavior specific to men. How many men do you know that look for a woman with money?
> 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.
The fallacy here is in the last sentence. This assumes the only possible cause for having perfect correlation, would be men not caring about looks. But there are more possible reasons: for instance men could prefer looks over class, and women prefer some other quality over class as well; the result is that both genders equally often marry below class. The data in the article seems to confirm that, because women prefer marrying up wrt income. So it might be like in the song; daddy's rich and mom is good looking.
Sure, it could be that people marry by IP address, or ZIP code, or name first and foremost (over looks, class, income and education!), but it seems highly unlikely.
It's not really that hard, and even mentioned in the article: Make a lot of money, meet rich men over hors d'oeuvres at a vernissage and once you talk about money, simply lie and understate your income.
Win-win situation if you ask me.
Good looks are a function of 1) Genetics, 2) Effort, and 3) Money -- pick two.
Like, if you ain't naturally gifted it takes a bunch of time and cash (clothes, gym membership, makeup, expensive haircuts, etc.) to compensate -- but you can. Lord knows I'm a walking, talking ogre but can pull it off by putting in the effort.
But lots of effort requires the time and ability to invest the energy -- which implies money -- and then there is the literal 3) Money, which aside from clothes and makeup is also things like plastic surgery, teeth whitening, etc.
I do think that more research into artificial wombs is needed.
To skip the main controversial topic, I find it interesting (and sad) how in many developed countries, we've left men behind in education (eg. mine, slovenia, 50% more women than men in uni of ljubljana), and nobody is bothered by this. We have a bunch of "get women into stem" programmes and promotions, but a part of stem is the only field where men outnumber women in the university. If it was the opposite (more men in colleges), we'd be hearing a lot more of this topic, but now this always gets ignored.
You do realize that, for example, a husband could legally rape his wife in any US state until the 1970s? This wouldn’t be illegal in every state until 1993!
Let me reiterate that: there were people in the United States of America who did not have any legal protection from rape until 1993.
Subjugation of women (and of minority groups) is not some mythical injustice and it’s not even a distant injustice.
We’re talking about thousands of years subjugation and vast amounts of progress being made in the last 50-100 years. It’s insane to refer to this as “never” been about fixing real problems.
No disagreement with the rest though.
Now that you mention it, though, my problem is with the word subjugation, which isn't an accurate descriptor of what was happening 200,000 years ago when we were living in small bands in the woods, starving, being hunted by animals stronger than us.
But hey, I suppose you never know.
Edited to be sure not to distract from the actual thrust of the argument :)
I mean, who measures at which point "women and minority groups" are not subjugated anymore? Is there any incentive for this moment ever coming to pass?
By the way, I'm not even against whatever progress was made. I do question whether the progress created actual improvement, but in truth I do not really care.
Feel free to argue that affirmative action was a mistake or is complete or has overshot its goal, or that it’s used as a tool of corruption in some instances, but you are simply incorrect when you suggest that these reforms originated out of some spontaneous ambush on reformers’ “enemies.”
get a good degree, have a good career, be set for life
but now... you could take 3 month training for a blue collar job and make the same money or you could do your own business which is easier than ever (
1. we're wealthier/more developed, you could put together a business plan and get money
2. the internet = low barrier to entry
why woman go to university?
Sometimes people just want to learn. Sometimes they think that learning can help people and _that_ is what they really want.
Nothing stops you from buying books about your favorite topic and using your personal time to get a deep understanding on said topics
> Those people are essentially forced to discover said enjoyment through years of mandatory education where that exists.
it's working wonders for modern generation
I would not care about her job, but a large difference in cognitive ability makes a relationship quite hard in my experience. Not only is it harder to grasp/explain complex situations, it usually also comes with stark differences in emotional control and interests. It will also make arguments one-sided, as the more intelligent party will usually be able to argue their position better, which will lead to frustration for either them (if the partner is refusing to change their opinion regardless) or their partner (if they give in, unable to argue).
The numbers would seem to not support that everyone can marry above average. But what's above average to one person is below average to another so there's far more room for everyone marrying a person who fits their desires than a naive analysis would show.
Attracting other people is a skill. Growing and maintaining a healthy relationship is a skill. Put in the 10,000 hours if attracting specific qualities in a partner is a high priority.
But the point was that if you're blaming other people or something like hypergamy instead of improving yourself then you're just looking for excuses.