Insights From Dollars and Sex: How Economics Influences Sex and Love Pt.1 (#5)

This will probably be my most viewed blog post. Who doesn’t want to read something about the relationship between getting some & money?

This is a decent book if you actually think about love & sex (lol) and are into economics especially behavioral economics — which is the sub-branch of economics that applies psychology to economics to better understand decision-making made by humans.

https://amzn.to/2J2FGKY (Amazon affiliate link)

Don’t take all the stats in this book as life or death — it seems that in a lot of situations love/sex is about finding the “right” person at the right time.

Love In Cyberspace

• The quality of a relationship, however is more about experiential qualities than it is about empirical qualities, and those are much harder to quantify and to search for online.
• When we limit our searches (e.g. income, ethnicity) in digital dating, we create artificially thin dating markets — markets where there are few buyers and sellers — and it is difficult to settle on a price at which everyone is willing to trade.
• Men and women do not necessarily marry the type of person their initial preferences dictate: they marry the person who is both available and willing to be married to them.
• People who are less physically attractive are more prone to lying than others in online dating.

How Race Plays Into Online Dating

• White women are married to black men more frequently than black women are married to white men not because white men are not attracted to black women, but because black women prefer to date men of the same race.
• There was a study measuring ethnic preference against another male characteristic that women seem to care about : a man’s income.

For white women:

• The experiment predicts that a black man would have to earn $154,000 more than the white man in order for a white woman to prefer to contact him instead of the otherwise identical white man
• Hispanic man would have to earn $77,000 more than the white man
• Asian man would have to earn $247,000 more in additional annual income to make her want to contact him.

How Much More Money A Man Of Each Race Would Have To Earn To Be Preferred To Be Contacted By White Woman vs Her Contacting A White Man

For black women:

• A white man would have to earn $220,000 more than a black man in order for the black woman to prefer to contact him than a black man
• Hispanic man would have to earn $184,000 more

How Much More Money A Man Of Each Race Would Have To Earn To Be Preferred To Be Contacted By Black Woman vs Her Contacting A Black Man

Asian women:

• A white man would have to earn $24,000 less than an otherwise identical Asian man, and an Asian woman would still prefer to contact him.

Money & Looks Stats

• 1st man is in the top 10% of all men in terms of appearance and earns $62,500 a year.
• 2nd man is in the bottom 10% of all men in terms of appearance and earns $X per year.
• Seriously unattractive guy would have to earn about $186,000 more than the really hot guy in order for a woman to prefer him.
• When compared with income, looks are very important to women.
• How much does a man need to be compensated in order to encourage him to date a woman in the bottom of the distribution in terms of appearance? — NOTHING
• Men prefer to marry younger women, but some men will forgo the opportunity to find a younger wife if he can find an older woman who is willing to provide him with financial stability.
• In India the preferences for people to marry within their own caste is so strong that both men and women are willing to marry someone with fewer years of education in order to make a within-caste marriage possible.
• Most of us (including men) are depreciating assets on the dating market as we age
• When given a choice, women prefer a handsome man who has lower income over a handsome man who has a higher income.
• If a woman can have a handsome man, she would prefer one whom she doesn’t have to share with other women, which would be more likely if he also had a high income.
• Women prefer a man who has a medium income level over a man who has a high income level if he is physically attractive (more than a 7 out of 10).
• If he is less attractive (4–6) women prefer a man who has a high income level over one who has a medium income level.
• If you meet someone thru an online dating site/app, that person is more likely to meet up with you in person if they have paid for the site/app.

Marriage & Income

• A high-wage-earning man is now far more likely to marry a woman who also earns a high income, not just because more women are earning higher incomes (they are, of course) but also because he can now search for a partner on a much larger dating market.
• From an economic perspective the purpose of marriage boils down to 2 things — efficient production of household goods and services, and insurance in bad times.
• “Male breadwinner model” occurred around the same time as the Industrial Revolution.
• Physical labor was arduous, giving men the comparative advantage in market labor and women the comparative advantage in the care of the home and married women with children began to move into the workforce, only after jobs become available that rewarded brains over brawn.
• Single men show a much higher preference for status-type goods when they are exposed to a provocatively dressed women than when exposed to a conservatively dressed women.

Parents Affecting Marriage Prospects

• 60% of men are married to women whose parents have wealth in the top bracket, and only 7% are married to women whose parental wealth is less than $1,000
• Parental wealth plays a role in marriage market outcome
• Premarital sex is strongly tied to family income; girls who live in the poorest households are 50% more likely to be sexually active than are girls in the richest households
• Women who expect to eventually be married tend to underinvest in their careers.

How Cities Affect Love & Sex

• Singles looking for love flood into large cities for 2 reasons: the search costs are lower in densely populated areas
• Reasons there are so many single educated women on urban marriage markets is educated women greatly outnumber educated men because more women than men go to college and because educated women prefer to marry men who are better educated than themselves while educated men do not.
• Educated female workers have an additional incentive to be in cities; they are significantly more likely to find an educated husband there. Less-educated women also have an incentive to move into cities for the same reason — they may not benefit from higher wages in the city, but they are much more likely to find themselves a well-educated husband than they would had they stayed in the country.
• The higher the income earned by men (ages 25 to 44) in a particular city, the more women there are living in that city relative to the number of men.

Education Levels

• There are fewer potential partners for women at every educational level.
• The reason men outnumber women in high-power jobs is that women decide to enter the marriage market when they are younger rather than risk being unsuccessful in that market later in life.
• Educated men prefer younger but less-educated women over older but better-educated women.
• The share of women currently married to men with less education (28%) is greater than the share who is married to men with more education (19%).
• People who are better educated are more likely to live and work away from their own community
• Finding a husband who is as — or more — educated has become more difficult as all women now compete for relatively few educated men.
• assortative mating ⇒ when men and women end up in relationships with others who are similar to themselves
• People usually end up with a partner similar to themselves in terms of education, income, and even physical attributes such as height, weight, and beauty.

Income Inequality & Sex

• Low-skilled workers are not penalized for workforce interruptions
• High-skilled workers who see their pay increase as they gain years of experience, both lose their current income and see a decrease in future income when they take time out of the workforce to care for their children.
• The gap between the wages paid to skilled and unskilled workers has increased substantially over time.
• The gap between rich and poor has led to high rates of unintended pregnancies among poorer women. Women behave as if they have estimated the low probability of finding a husband who can afford a wife and family, or the probability that they will be able to go to college and have a rewarding career, and they have found that the benefits of casual, risky sex exceed the expected costs
• Countries with greater gender equality are also those with more promiscuity
• Wealthiest nations are the most promiscuous as it’s a luxury that is affordable to more people in richer nations.

Sex & Happiness

• Sex particularly makes women happier than any other activity.
• More educated people are made happier by sex than less-educated people.
• More sex makes people happier, having more sexual partners does not. The happiest people are those with just one sexual partner and in fact, the more sexual partners they have had in the last 12 months, the less happiness people reported.
• People who have multiple one night-stands have sex less frequently on average, than those in committed relationships.

Sex & Tuition

• When tuition fees are high, youth tend to engage in riskier sexual behavior.
• Parents who worry that promiscuity will impose a high cost in the long run on their college-age children would be well advised to look for schools in which male students outnumber female students.
• Single women are more sexually active when men are relatively scarce than they are when men are relatively abundant.
• When women are abundant, there is far less traditional dating and far more “hooking up”
• Half of the student population who are binge drinkers are far more likely to have risky sex than the non-binge drinking half.
• Paying your way through school in the sex trades is probably more common than you think.
• Because of the risk to lifetime income and marriage prospects, it explains why sex work pays so much more than other unskilled jobs that students might consider
• People respond to increases in alcohol prices by reducing both their consumption of alcohol and their risky behavior
• Men who are sexually stimulated by pictures of scantily clad women (the type that surround us everyday) are not only impatient to consume but more willing to accept unfair offers.

Fitness As Related To Sex & Love

• Single women who are obese earn higher wages than similar women with a lower BMI
• Married men and single women both have a wage rate that is positively related to their BMI — the heavier they are, the higher the wage they are paid.
• Single men and married women, their wage rate and BMI are negatively related; the heavier those men and women are, the lower the wage they are paid.
• Encourage them to invest more into their careers in order to compensate their wives for their lack of physical fitness
• An average man can compensate his wife for an additional 22 lbs of body weight by earning 1% more than the average wage.
• Overweight women are less likely to marry, but when they do marry, they are much more likely to be married to low-income-earning men. For every unit a married women’s BMI increases, the lower is the earned income of the man whom she is married.

Race & Relationships

• 96% of married black women are with black men — then high rates of incarceration are disadvantaging black women on the marriage market.
• For every additional year of education a man or woman has, the probability that he/she is married to a person who is the same race decreases by 1.2%.
• In racial communities with very high average levels of education relative to the rest of population, people actually have a greater tendency to marry their own ethnicity.
• Educated black men’s relative scarcity also gives them market power on the casual dating and sex market.
• Why we’ve had to wait for male birth control — The cost of an unplanned pregnancy for a man is much lower than it is for a woman.

LGBTQ STATS

• Promiscuity among heterosexuals is increasing while gay men are experiencing a decrease in promiscuity
• Increase in tolerance (20 percentage points) is also associated with a decrease in HIV of 1/100,000 of the population
• Destigmatization of premarital sex has increased promiscuity among heterosexuals
• Lesbians are paid wages that are about 6–13% higher than the wages paid to heterosexual women.
• Lesbians, are, on average, better educated, more likely to be white, lively predominantly in cities, having fewer children, and significantly more likely to be professionals than are other women.
• Increased tolerance makes it possible to have committed relationships without incurring the costs that intolerance imposes.
• Economic growth is openness to new ideas, trust, and a willingness to accept risk.

Random Economics Concepts Covered In Book:

• Markets that are thin have few participants, making it difficult for buyers and sellers to settle on a price at which they both want to trade. Markets that are thick, however, have many participants, meaning that it is possible to settle on a price at which both buyer and seller are willing to trade.
• Comparative advantage — the task at which each is relatively efficient.
• Opportunity cost ⇒ potential benefit that is lost when we choose an alternative option.
• Economic trade theory argues that the most productive matches are those in which individuals are different enough from each other so as to exploit the gains from trade.

Pt. 2 ( https://medium.com/@kobekoto/insights-from-dollars-sex-pt-2-6-7dfbcb326288) of my insights from Dollars & Sex cover more details about marriage, divorce, and infidelity.

Link to buy the book is here: https://amzn.to/2J2FGKY (amazon affiliate link)