Monthly Archives: August 2010

Human aversion to being overtly ranked makes them look too often for good matches, rather than just for good people. For example, kids choosing a college are usually overly concerned with finding a good “match,” when then should just focus on the best college that is cheap and conveniently located.

Similarly for relationships. Bryan Caplan tells me that although spouses tend to have similar religion, politics, education, wealth, and intelligence, their personalities are not correlated.  Turns out, there are no personality interaction effects for relation and life satisfaction: your personality and their personality matter, but not the combination:

Three very large, nationally representative samples of married couples were used to examine the relative importance of 3 types of personality effects on relationship and life satisfaction. … Using data sets from Australia (N = 5,278), the United Kingdom (N = 6,554), and Germany (N = 11,418) … Actor effects accounted for approximately 6% of the variance in relationship satisfaction and between 10% and 15% of the variance in life satisfaction. Partner effects (which were largest for Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Emotional Stability) accounted for between 1% and 3% of the variance in relationship satisfaction and between 1% and 2% of the variance in life satisfaction. Couple similarity consistently explained less than .5% of the variance in life and relationship satisfaction after controlling for actor and partner effects.

If you want a happy relationship, be a happy person and pick a happy partner; no need to worry about how well you match personality-wise.

In general, those who can send better signals should put more effort into signaling. In particular, those with a better shot at them should work harder to gain status markers. So women with better relative endowments should delay and reduce kid raising efforts; their fewer high status kids would make for more great-grand kids. And since farmer status inequalities were bigger than forager inequities, this effect was stronger for farmers.

Monday I described Bill & my suggestion that this effect might explain the demographic transition, if our subconscious minds neglect the possibility that whole societies could get and long stay rich. That is, we see that by ancient standards we live like kings, we might be fooled into thinking we have a chance at king-like status and relative reproduction success, if only we work extra hard to achieve status markers. But in fact, we can’t all reproduce like kings.

Tuesday Bryan objected:

Unless I’m deeply misunderstanding it, this “excellent” theory doesn’t even get off the ground. Like Feyrer and Sacerdote’s theory, Dickens-Hanson implies gender conflict: In the modern world, men should want more children than women, and this gap should get larger as people get richer. But in reality, men and women around the world see eye-to-eye on this question – see the World Values Survey, question D017. But doesn’t the Dickens-Hanson mechanisms work for men, too? Robin thinks it does, but admits that it doesn’t work as strongly:

I just don’t see that our theory implies gender conflict on family size. By “[the theory] doesn’t work as strongly [for men]”, I meant and said:

So men should work even harder to gain status markers. But even so, raising overt kids will less distract men from pursuing high status, and a man’s delay in starting kids will less reduce his fertility. Thus excess male status efforts probably do less to reduce overall fertility.

Since men are even more eager than women to gain status, and stay fertile longer, if men shared kid raising efforts equally they might well want to delay kids even longer than women want. But if women bear most of the kid-raising burden, that should make men more eager to have kids earlier. The net effect of these factors isn’t clear.  So I see no clear net prediction of our theory about how people should answer a survey question about “optimal family size.” (And I’m inclined to pay more attention to how many kids people actually have, relative to survey responses.)

Fake virgins. A growing number of Chinese women … are opting for a surgical procedure called “hymen restoration,” which returns the hymen to its condition before it was ruptured. … Many men, including white-collar professionals, say they want to marry a virgin. And increasingly liberated Chinese women have found a way to oblige them. …

Zhou, 44, said most of her patients are sexually active young women who are about to marry and have told their future husbands they are virgins. … For as little as … about $737, for a 20-to-30-minute procedure. … “It’s just a white lie,” Zhou said. And she blames men for having unrealistic expectations. … “It’s really worthless for couples to break up over this small issue,” said the woman, who asked not to be quoted by name. …

Some sociologists and others have criticized the virginity obsession as emblematic of a male-dominated society in which women are viewed as sex objects. … “Women demand men have houses and cars, why can’t men demand women be virgins?” asked one man. (more)

It seems to me many men really do have a strong preference for virginity, and are willing to pay a high price for it in a marriage bargain. This male preference for virgins seems as legitimate as the female preference for high status husbands. So it can do husbands a great harm to deceive them about virginity.

Imagine a woman married a man in part because of his great job and income, and as soon as she has his first kid he reveals that it was a fake; his parents had paid for a temporary high-status job and big house/car/etc. so she could give them a high quality grandkid. Now that the kid has arrived, husband goes back to being a janitor with a bike and one-room apartment. What if the man said, “It’s really worthless for couples to break up over this small issue.”

Added 10p: Wow, I go away for ten hours and 50 comments appear.  I didn’t claim male status is exactly like female virginity in all its effects, nor did I claim such preferences are independent of culture. The relevant issues seem to me to be the strength of preference, which it seems to be are often similar, and whether a preference is for some exceptional reason illegitimate. I accept most preferences as legitimate, and haven’t heard a good reason why male preference for virgins is illegitimate. Surely the fact that a preference is influenced by culture is not a reason by itself to consider that preference illegitimate.