How Your Hometown Affects Your Chances of Marriage
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I have to imagine that reasoning occurs more often with those from smaller towns than those from the big city.
I think I would respond to this viewpoint with a CS analogy. You can do a comparison based sort, in which you really don't have an absolute sense of the final sorted position of any object just by looking at it, or you might know extra information about the objects being sorted (e.g., they're integers), in which case you can do something like a counting sort.
With finding your spouse, I don't think a naive comparison-based sort is necessary. You should have a feeling for how solid the match is just on the basis of the match alone. You can estimate the value of that match without necessarily having to compare it to all other possible matches one-by-one.
Of course, experience and wisdom in life are tremendously helpful in this regard. But at some point you're going to just have to make the call yourself.
It makes a few assumptions (that you can boil your fitness function down to a single, comparable value; that you can accurately recall the previous "highest" score; that you can accurately assess the number of relationships you'll be able to have and evaluate).
With that, it boils down to: Date 36.8% (1/e) of your final number, then marry the first person after that who is the "best so far".
It also only models a "one way choice"-presumably in actual application, both sides would need to jointly agree.
It's not exactly an executable algorithm.
This is even noted in the other article: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/03/upshot/the-bes...
"Here, better or worse is measured by the household incomes of children in early adulthood. This makes New York look worse than it would if individual incomes were used, because it, along with Northern California, has some of the lowest marriage rates in the country. Manhattan is actually better than most of the country at raising the individual incomes of poor girls. Marriage rates, too, are strongly affected by where children grow up."
But that seems to essentially invalidate broad swaths of the original article, instead of merely being mentioned in the last paragraph in regard to just two areas...
There are still probably some interesting outliers, but it looks like they're not the ones discussed in the original. For instance, I noticed that LA county, one of the listed lower-income-causing ones in the original article, is indeed 4 percentage points less likely to marry. But then I saw that it's neighbor, Ventura County, is both 3 percentage points less likely to marry by 26 and has households making 7 percent more at age 26. That's potentially interesting. Doubtless there are others that are more likely to marry and also lower income...
I originally picked up on this because I looked at a county whose population is dominated by a very poor, drug ridden city populated almost entirely by black Americans, and was surprised to see that that county may count as a "liberal" area.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/09/26/351736134/...
> 16% of white Americans aren't married by the time they hit 25, whereas 33% of black Americans aren't married by that same age.
That seemed way too low considering the median age of first marriage in the US is now approaching 30. The stat you quote is actually 16% of (non-Hispanic) white Americans and 33% of black Americans who are 25 or older are not married.
Wonder why?