Oct. 12, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
55:35
3099 How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game
Using a combination of demographics, statistics, game theory, and number-crunching, Jon Birger (Author of Date-onomics) makes the case that the "man deficit" is real for every single, college-educated, heterosexual, women who is looking-for-a-partner.Get "Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game" at: http://www.fdrurl.com/dateonomicsJon Birger is a contributor to Fortune magazine. A former senior writer at Fortune and Money, he’s an award-winning freelance journalist who has also written for Time, Barron’s, and Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, CNBC, National Public Radio, and Fox News. Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.fdrurl.com/donate
He's a contributor to Fortune magazine, a former senior writer at Fortune& Money.
He's an award-winning freelance journalist written for Time, Barron's and Bloomberg Businessweek.
He has appeared on a wide variety of television stations.
He's currently slumming it with us, which we hugely appreciate.
And he's written a book that I really recommend you grab.
We'll put a link to it below.
It's called Datanomics, How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game.
Thanks a lot, John, for taking the time today.
You're welcome.
So, let's just go over the thesis briefly.
I've got some real questions to drill down more into the data, but why is it so tough for women to settle down, and why is there so little incentive for men to do so these days?
Well, my book focuses on educated people, on college grads.
And women have been attending college at a much higher rate than men going back to the 1990s and at a somewhat higher rate than men going back to the 80s.
So as a result, last year you had 35% more women than men who graduated from college.
Translates into four And this, you argue, It fundamentally changes behavior in a supply and demand fashion.
And you had a fascinating example of a topic, I think, that we've woefully underexplored, at least on this show, which is the topic of fish sex.
And I think you've got some very good examples.
I wonder if you could break those out for our listeners.
It's not just men who can become cats.
It seems to be fairly common throughout the animal kingdom when there's an oversupply of women.
What happens to male monogamous behavior?
Yeah, so it doesn't just make it statistically harder for women to find a match.
As you said, it changes behavior too.
And a lot of the social science on human behavior as it relates to sex ratios grows out of zoology or animal behavior.
And the study you referenced looked at a species of fish that is nominally monogamous, or at least monogamous during mating season.
The researchers played around with the sex ratio in a controlled population.
So when it was 50-50, or 5 males for every 5 females, the males deserted their female mates at about a 20% rate.
When researchers took the sex ratio from 5 to 5 to Six males for every four females.
The male desertion rate was cut in half, I think from 20% to about 11%.
So basically the males became more protective and more invested in their mates and in their offspring as females became less numerous.
What was really interesting is what happened when they took it in the other direction, when they Changed the sex ratio so it was six females for every four males.
What happened was the male desertion rate went from about 20% to 52%.
So the prevailing mating culture went from what we humans might call monogamy to polygamy.
The mating incentives for the male fish changed because their odds of having maximum numbers of offspring were better mating with multiple females, even if that meant that their first brood, so to speak, was left vulnerable to predation.
They were still likely to have more offspring overall.
If they mated with multiple females, whereas their best bet when the males were in oversupply was to stick with one mate and protect her.
Right.
So if I understand that correctly, monogamy and chivalry are market adaptations to a scarcity of females.
So you have to bring more to the table.
And sort of the spray and pray, the pump and dump, the idea of one night stands or hooking up is an evolutionary programmed response.
Again, free will and all that.
But it's an evolutionary programmed response to an excess supply of eggs, so to speak.
I mean, both extremes are evolutionary adaptations.
I'm not saying one is the norm and the other one is a reaction to supply and demand.
I think there's a continuum there.
But as we write in the book, we're not fish.
We're not rodents.
People have a moral compass.
And I do believe that As a financial writer, somebody who typically covers financial markets with a long history of inefficient behavior changing once you shine a light on it.
And I kind of feel like that applies here as well.
Right.
So the argument, I guess, is that once people understand the degree to which sex ratios determine courtship or sexual or mating rituals, then they can adjust their behavior to adapt to it.
I think you mentioned in the book a couple of examples, like the January effect and the analysis, the Moneyball analysis of baseball statistics.
Yes, exactly.
Are your listeners going to be interested in the January Effect?
Oh yeah!
We do shows with economists quite a bit, so we're a pretty financially and mathematically literate audience.
Alright, but you'll stop me if I bore you.
So the January Effect involves stock investing.
Many years ago, there was a trading pattern that emerged in which stocks would typically trade down price-wise in December and then rebound in January.
And the reason this was happening is that investors were selling stocks they had lost money on in December in order to lock in tax losses.
And then they would buy back the stocks in January once the tax considerations were locked in.
So for a while, people who knew what was going on, a small crowd of investors who knew what was happening, realized it was a buying opportunity here, that they could buy stocks on December 20th and then sell them on January 5th.
You know, make a quick profit by doing this.
But what happened is a lot of the people who made money off this trade, they didn't keep the secret to themselves.
They wrote journal articles about it.
They gave interviews to The Wall Street Journal and the like.
And unsurprisingly, lots of people then started to try to buy stocks in December.
And when they did that, those stocks were longer pressed in price.
So the whole January effect went away because of the publicity that it generated.
And I kind of feel like something similar could happen here, that all the women who are now moving to New York City, because they think there are lots of guys in there, well, maybe they will be more inclined to consider Denver or Seattle because, at least for the marriage-minded women, those might be better places to locate.
Yeah, and I hear what you're saying, John, about ethics and sexuality, but I think one of the great challenges is that ethical imperatives really have a tough time surmounting biological drives because all ethical imperatives that went counter to optimum reproduction strategy tended to get weeded out of the gene pool.
So you really are, I think, running right up against the biggest problem.
I mean, there are lots of types of human behavior that's instinctive, but we've learned to control.
The human brain is basically hardwired to fear and run from the unknown.
And that's because we evolved at a time when avoiding predators or avoiding bad weather was kind of the foremost concern of prehistoric man.
But nowadays, every time we hear thunder, we don't cower.
Every time we see somebody who is not a member of our tribe, so to speak, we don't try to kill them.
So there are ways that human behavior has adapted beyond what our intrinsic nature might push us towards.
And one of the things, I think it's an excellent point, one of the things that I thought was really refreshing about your book was the degree to which it took some of the burden of shame and failure off of people in particular, successful, attractive, educated and intelligent women that, you know, you're not bad at gambling if you keep losing when the house is going to inevitably win.
And helping people to understand the numbers game that they're up against takes, I think, this sense, and some of the women in your book describe it this way, like a burden, a weight lifted from my shoulders because it's not just me, there's not something I'm fundamentally doing wrong, it's just that, you know, if you pan for gold on a beach, you're just not going to have much luck, but it's not because you're bad at panning, it's you're on the wrong place.
So the whole way I became interested in this topic was just because I knew all these things Single women in their 30s and 40s who literally had everything going for them from being good people and fun, good company, very attractive, yet so many of them were unhappily single and they had these dating histories, these dating stories that just made so little sense to me.
Either they had guys who mistreated them or cheated on them or they claimed to never get asked out on dates at all.
And, you know, all the guys I knew, particularly at my last two employers, Fortune and Money Magazine, you know, all the guys were basically dorks like me, and we were all married.
But the women, you know, they had a lot more going for them, and they were single, and I couldn't...
And this kind of caused me to explore the topic of why there seemed to be this imbalance or this mismatch between datability and...
I do think that as I explored the data and began talking to friends about how lopsided the dating market was, it was comforting to know that it wasn't their fault.
So many of the dating books out there basically tell women that they've been going about it all wrong, that they've You know, they've been returning his text message an hour too early or an hour too late, or they've been, you know, calling him at the wrong hour.
I mean, all these sorts of silly things that if you really think about it intellectually, you know, it's pretty clear that this doesn't actually...
These kinds of things aren't important.
What kind of restaurant you go to on the first date really isn't going to stop you from...
Connecting with somebody who's truly your perfect match.
But so much of the advice out there focuses on these generally inconsequential things that supposedly are getting in the way of women finding Mr.
Right.
Oh, yeah.
No, it is this detailed tweaking while missing out the big picture.
If no one's hiring, it doesn't matter what the font on your resume is.
It's not going to work.
I mean, if you think about it...
If you or I tried to apply this kind of logic to anything else, we would be laughed at.
If I needed a surgeon and I knew a really great doctor and I called him up or called her up and she returned my call in five minutes, am I going to not have her do my knee surgery because she was too enthusiastic?
Or if you're my best friend and I text you about you want to go out for a beer, And you text back right away.
Like, you know, am I going to say, oh, you know, Stefan is too enthusiastic.
I got to get somebody else to drink with who will, like, text me back in two hours, not two minutes.
I mean, it just doesn't make any sense.
Right.
Especially if it's 7am and I say, well, I've already started, that may not be the best social engagement to think of.
Now, one thing I thought that was, I'll be jumping around a little bit in the book, but of course I want people to buy it, not just have us describe it.
But in the book, I thought something that you pointed out was quite fascinating was the degree to which assertiveness or brinksmanship on the part of women tended to precipitate marriage, you know, the ultimatum.
And I thought the degree to which women's confidence, if they lack the numbers, like if they lack the data as to the scarcity, you know, as you point out in the book, 60-40, a 60-40 ratio, which is not uncommon in some US colleges, 60-40 women to men.
And of course, some of those men are going to be gay, some of them are going to be in relationships, some of them are going to be asexual and so on.
And I thought the degree to which women's confidence gets eroded by these constant rejections or these slippery guys that they can't seem to hang on to because they're always out there scouting for going up one-tenth on the point of attractiveness or something, the degree to which their confidence gets eroded to the point where they feel unable to make the kind of ultimatums that do seem to precipitate marriage, it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, that's a very lopsided gender ratio.
And It's clear it gives men the upper hand and women who perhaps came from a high school environment or some other environment where it was 50-50 and they're very attractive and they're used to having guys asking them out or flirting with them constantly, suddenly they get to A college like Skidmore or a city like Miami and it's different and they can't figure out why and they start blaming themselves.
But to your point, there does seem to be an advantage to the woman who's aggressive.
And I think part of the reason why women resist this is because there's this notion out there, and maybe you can tell me whether you agree with my take or not, But I think there's a false notion out there that men genuinely enjoy the chase.
I don't think men do enjoy the chase.
I just think that...
If men enjoyed the chase, there'd be no delivery for food, right?
When we go out and hunt deer.
It's like, I like phoning for a pizza, having the pizza come to my house.
I mean, the idea that I want to go chase down a rabbit and take it apart with my bare hands.
No, no.
Sorry, go on.
Right.
I mean, when I was single, I'll be honest, I liked women who liked me.
And I'm sure, I'm not claiming to be the benchmark for all men, but I think men appreciate women who express interest.
And I remember having a, this is in the book, I had a conversation with my rabbi about all these topics, and he When he marries young couples, he typically does a month or two of premarital counseling with them, and he had ten soon-to-be-married couples in counseling,
and he told me of those ten, I think seven or eight of them shared a similar story, and that was that the guys all had multiple choices, but the women whom they married were the ones who pursued them most aggressively.
Yeah, I mean, if you want to close a sale, you don't wait for the customers to call you.
You corner them and supply them with value until they give up, so to speak.
No, and that was certainly the case with my marriage.
And my wife, when we first met, was, you know, I'm interested, but I'm not interested in a player.
I want to settle down and have kids, and that's going to be the parameters if we're going to go forward.
And I'm like, yeah, okay, so she's interested.
It's not complicated.
No, I think the simpler, the better.
The idea that, you know, they...
I get annoyed just when I get a piece of electronics in packaging that's hard to open, let alone chasing some woman who's giving me mixed signals.
That's just...
I completely agree.
And then you mentioned ultimatums before.
To me, an ultimatum for a woman is kind of an antidote to something else.
There's this truism in business and politics and I think many other walks of life or many other areas that...
It's never smart to make a decision any sooner than you have to.
And I think even when I was younger, my dad used to give me that advice.
And it's good advice generally.
But when you think about that kind of advice as it applies to dating and as it applies to men, the takeaway for a college-educated man might be, if I shouldn't make a decision any sooner than I have to, maybe I should hold off on making a lifelong commitment to my girlfriend While I continue to survey the marketplace.
And you could argue that's a rational response to an abundant marketplace or an abundant supply of women.
So to me, a woman who makes a marriage ultimatum is pushing back against that.
What she's doing is creating artificial scarcity in an otherwise abundant marketplace, basically making the man Right.
No, and I think that is a wise thing because, you know, the general historical prejudice or stereotype is that women are after commitment and men are after sex.
And of course, if what you want is sex, then you can go into these places with these disparate gender ratios and be the pudgy lothario as much as you want to be.
But of course, if you're interested in settling down and having a family, the decision should come sooner rather than later because people close in age tend to do better in marriage.
And so you don't want to be trading in for the younger model all the time.
That's going to provide some statistical instability to your marriage foundation.
And you want to try and find someone who you're going to be compatible with and settle down with.
And again, sooner rather than later.
But I think it creates a scarcity that most people aren't as aware of as they should be.
And as you point out in the book, there was one just these heartbreaking little vignettes.
This woman who said, I think she was in her early 40s, and she said, Oh, you know, I would have accepted the guy, probably, who proposed to me 15 years ago if I'd have known how stacked the deck was against me moving forward.
And so I think that scarcity exists.
Yeah, I mean, that story really resonated with me, too, in part because she was acknowledging in some ways that had she married that guy, she doesn't think the marriage would have worked out.
But she actually said to me, well, at least I would have been married.
Right.
Now, let's delve into some of the more exciting areas of sexual politics at the moment.
You touched on this in the book.
I'm just wondering if you've had more thoughts on it since, John, that when we look at some of the sexual or romantic tensions that seem to be rife in U.S. campuses these days, in particular, I'm thinking of UVA and the, I think, recently discredited rape story, with regards to the frat and the woman and so on.
And you point out in the book that college women are twice as likely as college men to experience psychological distress after hookups.
And biologically, that to me evolutionarily makes perfect sense because of the costs for women for sexuality in history were infinitely higher almost than that of the men.
But I wonder the degree to which the growing cattishness of gender disparate colleges is creating an environment where female resentment is going to grow and may spill over into some of these accusations.
questions.
You see, I have a little different take.
I think this increase in campus rape is real.
This is an actual increase in campus assault, not an increase in accusations.
And I'm making this argument not just, you know, just based on my own gut feeling.
It's based on a lot of research that's been done on correlations between sex ratios and rates of sexual assault.
So there's a professor at, I think she was at Columbia, Lena Edland, who looked at China.
And as you may know, the I'm sure most of your listeners know that China currently has a big gender ratio on balance in the other direction, that there's about 20 to 25 percent more marriage-age men than marriage-age women.
And what Edlin found in her study was that as a byproduct of the old one-child policy that China used to have and more Chinese families Engaging in sex selection, essentially, and preferring boys.
But what Edlin found in her study was that as the young population skewed male, property crime rates went up, which makes some sense.
You'd think that like more young men, there could be more robberies and more violent crime in general.
But the one crime category that went down was rape.
And the thinking on all this is that when women are scarce, men value them more and protect them more.
However, if you look at college campuses today where women are overly plentiful or where men are scarce, the reverse happens.
Men devalue women.
And are less likely to see sexual assault as a serious act or that sexual assault becomes more commonplace because men are less inclined to protect women and they devalue women.
Oh, and this, you know, of course, you know, economics is all about the unseen costs, right?
The unseen costs.
And this is one of the things that just drove me batty in reading your book, like, because the degree to which female, the female pursuit of empowerment and equality, and to some degree, over equality in terms of college attendance...
You know, feminists, of course, and rightly so, for a long time, have railed against women being treated as sex objects, and so they wanted to empower women to get better education, and so on, so more women went to college.
But if the thesis, which you, I think, amply establish in the book is valid, that very success leads to an increasing treatment of women as sex objects, because there's so many of them relative to the men that they're less valued.
See, I don't think feminism has anything to do, or much to do, with women attending college at higher rates.
Even in China, which clearly does not have the same kind of feminist movement that we have in the United States, there are 10% more Chinese women in college than men.
And that's amazing when you think about the fact that there are about 25% more college-age men than women overall.
So I don't think feminism or politics really has anything to do with why women are attending college in greater numbers than men.
Then, oh yes, and that was something, because I wanted to go on a good old libertarian rant about Title IX, but unfortunately you blocked me in the book for reasons.
I'm sorry.
I know.
You've got to put a warning on the book.
For libertarians, I'm going to block your outrage at bad government policies.
I mean, we can talk about Title IX in a different context, but I assume this is something you may disagree with me on.
The One of my pet peeves, and you may disagree, is that private colleges here in the U.S. are exempt from Title IX when it comes to admissions.
So what some private colleges, like my own alma mater, Brown University, and many others are doing, is they're accepting men at higher rates than women.
So the acceptance rate from men at Brown is 11%.
For women, it's 7%.
At Vassar College, it's a 34% acceptance rate for men, and I think it's 18% for women.
So in order to keep their gender ratios more balanced, these colleges, some of these elite private colleges, are doing kind of quiet, affirmative action for men.
And what's really interesting is that the public universities that are bound by Title IX when it comes to admissions All except women at a higher rate than men because women do better in high school.
They get higher grades.
They're closing the gap on test scores.
70% of valedictorians are girls in high school.
So the schools are required to have a level playing field when it comes to admissions like Cal Berkeley or University of Michigan or University of Virginia.
The top public schools accept women at a higher rate.
Too many of the private schools are essentially discriminating against women because they are exempt from Title IX. And so to crack back to the mystery of China and how many women are going to higher education there, if I remember rightly, the four-letter word, the pill, was one of the things that giving women control over their reproduction allows them, of course, to have children later or choose when or where to have children later.
And this gives them more opportunities to complete higher education, to not feel that they've got to go to school for their MRS, as the cliche goes.
Is that a fair assessment of what you think one of the primary causes is?
Well, I think the pill explains how we got to 50-50.
I think that, you know, so if we'd had this conversation 50 years ago, the numbers would have been the opposite.
It would have been many more men than women attending college.
And I think the pill explains how we got to 50-50, because just in economic terms, you know, The biggest driver of female gains in college enrollment is the expectation of workforce participation.
In other words, if you're going to get married at age 21 or 22 and have kids like a year later, the economic value of a college degree isn't terribly high.
But if you can delay marriage and delay childbirth, And spend 5-10 years in the workforce, the economic payoff from college becomes much higher.
So I think the till kind of explains how we got to 50-50.
What it doesn't do is explain how we got to a world in which there's 35% more women than men graduating from college and the U.S. Department of Education thinks it'll be closer to 50% in 10 years.
So, my take on that question of how we got to lopsided numbers in the other direction is not related to the pill.
There's a lot of neuroscience on child development and child brain development and the consensus seems to be that girl brains mature at a faster rate than boy brains and that the maturity gap actually widens into the teen years.
So that girls are intellectually more mature, socially more mature than boys.
And this explains why when it comes to schoolwork, girls fare better.
It's not that girls are smarter.
When it comes to raw intelligence, boys and girls test about the same.
But girls are essentially a year ahead of boys, which is why I argue in the book that we should all be thinking about redshirting our boys in order to narrow the college gender gap.
And that's putting them to school a year later, right?
Yeah, I'm sorry.
My belief is that boys should start first grade at age 7 and girls should start at age 6.
And if you would like me to rant a little bit about Title IX, here's the opportunity.
Okay, hang on.
Let me just get ready.
Okay, I'm ready.
This is one area where Title IX to me is a huge obstacle.
Because even though the science says that the readiness to learn for girls at age 6 is comparable to boys at age 7, a school district could never have a policy of starting boys later than girls because that would be an obvious violation of Title IX. And Title IX being that you can't gender discriminate in education.
And this goes, I think, as well to...
Yeah, and this goes as something that I was ready to rant on, but then you defused, unfortunately, was the degree to which...
Well, it's okay.
I get used to it.
It's just still tough every time.
But...
You talk about in the book that one of the reasons why college presidents don't want to try and get more men into the school is because funding for extracurricular, particularly sports activities, is dependent upon gender ratios.
If they cut back on the number of women relative to men, they may have to cut female sports, which is getting kind of an indirect subsidy based upon the gender inequality in the ratios.
And that could be, you know, problematic in terms of public perception.
Yeah, I think that's part of it.
I think the other part of it is the way you get more boys is really expensive.
But boys are more into...
So the schools that have more balanced gender ratios or actually have more men than women, they tend to be schools that have big engineering programs, big computer science programs, physics, anything STEM-related.
Any schools like Johns Hopkins or Caltech or Tufts, schools that are big on the sciences, are going to have more balanced gender ratios, if not more men than women.
But, obviously, building a computer lab is not an inexpensive thing.
So I think that's one of the obstacles to attracting men.
It's just the fact that it's much less expensive to hire a philosophy professor than to build a computer lab.
Right, right.
Wanted to touch on...
There's a great quote in the book, which is the Chinese woman who says, I would rather cry in a BMW than smile on the back of my boyfriend's bicycle.
But having more resources is better than having true love.
Which, you know, that's her eggs talking, not her heart.
But, you know, eggs finally usually have a say in what happens.
But I was fascinated the degree to which male...
Economic productivity is driven by a man's desire to gather together shiny baubles to attract a mate.
You said 20% of China's GDP growth from 2000 to 2005 could be attributable to the oversupply of men getting on the hamster wheel of wanting to attract women.
And the woman who said, you've got to have your own apartment built later than 2000, you've got to have a car and no minivan won't do.
It's like a laundry list, like the guy's got to come with a dowry now.
It makes me wonder how much of the Shanghai real estate boom is related to the gender imbalance.
Because if you're a middle class guy and you can't get a date or you can't find a wife unless you own your own apartment and own a half decent car, think about the economic stimulus that provides.
The study that you cite was a One done by, I think, a Columbia University economist and another academic as well.
And they concluded that 20% of China's GDP growth has been a byproduct of not only young men having to work harder in order to impress or attract a potential wife,
but their parents as well, because the The parents are now in some ways subsidizing a type of dowry, a reverse dowry, by helping their sons buy apartments or buy nice cars so they can find a wife.
And there was a fascinating story that I read actually pretty recently.
It was a Bloomberg News story.
And it was talking about this stuff.
And it quoted a soon-to-be father, a young married man.
And his quote was, I hope I have a girl.
It's too expensive to have a boy.
And if you think about Chinese culture and how boy-centric it's been for millennia, the fact that a young Chinese father would actually be hoping for a girl, it just shows what you're talking about.
It shows the economic impact of this gender imbalance on Chinese society.
I've reiterated this countless times on my show that the market is to human society like physics is to the natural world.
You ignore it at significant peril.
Now, I wanted to get to...
First, this paradox that I really want women to understand, and of course men as well, which is that the more you stuff yourself full of human capital, whether it's education, looks, accomplishments, wealth, whatever you do to stuff yourself up with human capital, and particularly more so for women because of the tendency of women to want to marry up in terms of hypergamy, the higher quality you make yourself, the smaller your dating pool becomes in any situation.
Because you want to marry up and you talk about this mixed collar marriages, the idea that in some cultures, particularly in the black culture in America, it's more acceptable to marry down because it's like two to one or higher that black women having college degrees versus black men.
But certainly in a lot of cultures, particularly the European cultures, this idea of marrying up.
So it's great to stuff yourself full of human capital, but it does mean that your dating pool gets significantly diminished and the dating pool that is left for you to attract as a high-value woman, so to speak, is full of guys who, in a sense, have even higher value than you do because of the gender imbalance.
No, you're onto something, although I will say it's not just the women who are reluctant to marry down, it's men too.
The catch is that when college-educated men insist on only dating and marrying college-educated women, They pay no penalty for this because the supply of college grad women is so vast.
So their own kind of classist tendencies don't penalize them, which is unfair in some ways, but that's the reality.
A woman, though, who refuses to consider dating or marrying a working-class guy is doing two things against her interests.
One, she's narrowing her dating pool statistically, and two, she's giving way too much leverage to the To the college-educated guys who, as you just said, have more options than she does.
Yeah, so that's an important thing to remember.
This idea that something is always better around the band, while the final band is just being dead, and there's not much after that.
In terms of mixed-color marriages, this is...
A little bit of a suggestion in the book, but it's also a prediction.
I just believe that if we talk 10 years from now, it'll be much more common to see pairings and marriages of educated career women married to working class guys.
It seems inevitable because in the working class dating pool, you have more men than women.
In the white-collar dating pool, you have more women than men.
It just seems inevitable to me that you're going to see more of these so-called mixed-collar marriages.
You referenced the African-American community.
I don't know.
Have you ever seen a Tyler Perry movie?
There's always...
He's a black filmmaker.
Yeah, and I haven't, but I've certainly heard of...
I've seen a couple of trailers.
You can take my word for it.
So there's always...
All of his movies seem to have a couple, like a high-powered African-American career woman married to a mechanic with a heart of gold.
And I joke that in a white movie...
If Julia Roberts' CEO character was married to a fireman, you'd need like a 10-minute on-screen explanation for why she was married to the fireman.
But in the Tyler Perry movies, it's accepted.
People are comfortable with that.
Well, I mean, I agree with you, but I mean, the degree to which, and this is all very theoretical, of course, but the degree to which you could look at college students A college degree as some big, giant, expensive roundabout IQ test, and that IQ compatibility is kind of important for basically what a marriage is, which is a 50-year conversation, then I think marrying down is not so much, oh, you know, he works with his hands and that's bad.
It's that I think that you could look at the bell curve of working class versus college-educated people, probably see half a standard deviation or even a standard deviation between IQs, and that may not add to compatibility.
That may be very practical reasons for that.
I'm going to disagree with you there.
Part of this is a bit personal for me.
My wife and I have a friend from college, a woman, Ivy League educated school teacher.
She's married to a working class guy.
They've been happily married for 20 years.
They've raised a phenomenal kid together.
To me at least, and you can disagree, but to me at least, the whole notion that she married down or settled or compromised or lowered her standards I have a visceral reaction to it, and I find that whole suggestion offensive.
Now, granted, I take this personally because these people are friends of mine, but I reject the idea that somebody with a college degree is inherently more marriageable than somebody without a college degree.
Well, to push back on that a little bit, as you know, of course, a singular exception doesn't disprove a general trend.
You know, it's the tall Chinese basketball player syndrome.
And to me, it's not a question of marriageable or not marriageable.
I mean, working class people are perfectly marriageable.
It just depends on whether there's a certain amount of compatibility or not.
And I think you could reasonably say that if you were going to look at the bell curve of IQ of people in college, that it would generally be higher.
And again, there's lots of overlap and lots of, you know, exceptions, but...
I know plenty of working-class guys who make a really good living, like my plumber.
I feel like half of my income over the past year has gone to him.
There are plenty of working-class guys who don't have a college degree and are good businessmen and are smart people, and I just can't accept the idea that marrying one of them is marrying down or lowering standards.
We may just have to agree to disagree on this.
Part of it is that if you think about the needs of this new generation of career women, having a husband with a 9-to-5 job who can help a little bit more with homework and can go to Little League games or dance recitals when she's staying at the office until 7 every night That's actually a pretty good match.
A higher level of compatibility versus two type A career people married to each other who really don't have time for any of those things.
Yes, I think that's certainly valid.
My point is that it's not that women should not look at working class men.
And you're right, if the woman is the high powered, I think you mentioned it's like a third of women close to are the primary owners.
Yeah, if the woman's high powered, that's what she's doing, then I mean, I'm a stay at home dad, I'm not going to diss the profession as a whole.
But it may not be a solution in general, but it certainly can be a solution in a wide variety of very specific instances.
That would be sort of my, yeah, tons of exceptions.
But I reserve judgment about it.
I hesitate to say it's the solution for everyone.
Well, can I offer up one more thought on this?
Yeah.
So, my own feeling is that online dating has actually made this all worse.
Because, I don't know, I mean, one of the...
Things about online dating is it's increasingly like picking options on a new car.
So you check boxes for what you want.
With a car, it's the power steering and the heated seats and things like that.
With dating, it's race, religion, height, weight, dog person, cat person, etc.
But the one box that the children of the suburbs Never think twice about checking is college education because, you know, my parents went to college, I went to college, I want somebody who's college educated.
And my feeling is that 20 years ago, if, you know, I were single and I met a woman at a church or a beach or a restaurant and she was a college dropout and I have a college degree The fact that she had dropped out of college wouldn't really make a huge difference as long as we clicked in some way.
But what happens nowadays is college educated people never even see the dating profiles of non-college educated people because of the way online dating works.
Right.
And so that brings us to a point that I thought was very interesting.
Because you've talked in two communities, right?
The Orthodox Jewish community and in the Mormon community.
That the values that these communities espouse, as we talked about at the very beginning of this conversation, John, the values that these communities espouse also seem to be running up to significant break walls, so to speak, in terms of gender disparity.
I wonder if you could briefly help people to understand just how even, you know, no sex before marriage, highly committed, high value on marriage and children, how that's running up against the gender disparities in those communities.
Yeah, so I have a chapter in the book that explores gender Two marriage crises, one among ultra-Orthodox Jews and one among Mormons in Utah.
And in both of those communities, there's an increasing number of single, very marriageable women, and nobody can figure out why there's so many women and why some of the men who would be considered good catches, why they're suddenly in no rush to get married themselves.
In both communities, they kind of view this as a social failing, that maybe they're not doing a good job instilling proper values in young people these days, or maybe the boys are too picky or the girls are all holding out for the Mormon George Clooney or the Jewish George Clooney or something like that.
But in fact, this is all about demographics.
In the Mormon community, For reasons we can get into, men have been leaving the LDS Church, which is the Mormon Church, at a much higher rate than women.
So among marriage-age people in Utah, there's about three young women for every two young LDS men.
In the Ultra-Orthodox community, the cause is different.
As you may know, Ultra-Orthodox Jews have a very, very high birth rate.
It's pretty common for ultra-Orthodox Jewish families to have four, five, six kids.
And that would have no impact on marriage if 20-year-olds were marrying other 20-year-olds.
But what happens in at least part of the Orthodox world is that the girls get married at 18, but the boys go to yeshiva, which is kind of a Jewish tradition.
Theological school for three or four or five years, and they don't get married until they finish Jewish seminary.
So the boys are getting married at 22 or 23, and the girls are getting married at 18.
So this is one segment of ultra-Orthodox Judaism in which there's been an increasing amount of pressure on young men to complete Four, five, six years of Torah study and Talmud study before they get married.
It's not throughout the Orthodox world.
As I said, among Hasidic Jews, it's equally structured and that they use matchmakers in the same way to pair their young men and women for marriage.
But among Hasidic Jews, men marry women their own age.
Among what's known as the yeshivish or Theuanian, ultra-Orthodox Jews, there's this age gap in marriage.
And if you think about what happens with a community with a very high birth rate, there are always going to be more 17-year-olds and 18-year-olds, more 18-year-olds and 19-year-olds, more 19-year-olds and 20-year-olds, and so on and so on, because every one-year age group has 4% or 5% more members than the one that preceded it.
So, but by...
By having a system or having a tradition in which 22 or 23-year-old young men are marrying 18-year-old young women, there are always going to be too many 18-year-old women for too few 22 or 23-year-old men.
I hope that made sense.
Yeah, I'm with you.
Okay.
So what's happened, just back to your original question, In both of these communities, which, as you know, are very traditional in terms of social mores and sexual mores, that there's this chlamydia rates in Utah have skyrocketed.
There's intense pressure on 16-, 17-, 18-year-old young women in the ultra-Orthodox community to appear as marriageable as possible.
And in fact, you have 17-year-old girls who are expected to prepare resumes, which are kind of like...
Descriptions of themselves.
Frequently including glossy photos.
Hang on.
You mentioned the resumes in the book, but I thought that was sort of a satirical term.
But is it actually like, here's the portfolio of my daughter?
No, they're actually called resumes.
Really?
The sickest thing about it is that the girls are expected to disclose to their male suitors Not only their own dress size, but the dress size of their mothers.
So these young men can kind of project, well, after she has five kids or six kids, what is she going to look like?
Wow.
And I think you pointed out that in the Orthodox Jewish community, there are, I think, 50% higher rates of anorexia than there is in the general population because there is this belief of thinness needing to be the competitive advantage in this market.
No, you have 17-year-old girls being told if they're bigger than a size 6, they won't get married.
I mean, to me, it's a sickness.
And I'm Jewish.
I'm not Orthodox.
I am Jewish.
And to me, it would be an act of compassion, an act of kindness, if the rabbis in the Orthodox world would get together and agree not to marry any women below the age of 21, because it's putting...
unhealthy pressure on sixteen, seventeen-year-old orthodox girls to appear marriageable and I don't think a sixteen or seventeen-year-old girl should be worried about her dress size.
Well, and there's this statement that, again, the book is very well written and researched, but there's this jaw-dropping stuff in there for me where the girls have to come with a kind of weird dowry because, of course, a lot of the boys in these communities are going after, as you say, to study the Talmud and to research for years.
And so the girl's parents...
Was it a rabbi or a matchmaker who was saying, oh yes, the top-level boys cost $100,000 a year.
We have boys for $70,000 a year, maybe even $50,000 a year if you want to go cheap.
I mean, I know it's not human trafficking, but it really seems very strange.
It shows...
I mean, basically...
I don't think they use the word dowry, but effectively that's what it is.
These are essentially...
Financial promises that the bride's family makes to support the young couple for the three or four or five years that he's off at Jewish seminary studying Torah and Talmud.
So the parents of the girls are under such stress, and the boys have such It's essentially a reverse dowry.
And I mean, that is really quite astounding.
But of course, because there's a desire to marry within the community, there is, of course, a smaller pool.
You can't balance it out, so to speak, by importation from outside the community nearly as easily as you say.
I think only 2% of Orthodox Jews marry outside the faith.
So that receives kind of a tariff wall, so to speak.
But as I mentioned before, there is this segment of the Orthodox world, Hasidic Jews, where Basically, everybody gets married at 18, and then the guy goes off and gets a job.
He's not spending five years in Jewish seminary.
And if you ask a Hasidic Jew about what the other Orthodox Jews call the Shaduk crisis, they have no idea what you're talking about.
I mean, they've heard the term, but the whole notion of there being a marriage crisis and too many unmarried women It's completely unfamiliar to them because there isn't this demographic quirk of more 18 year olds.
It doesn't matter in the aesthetic world that there are more 18 year olds than 23 year olds because 18 year olds are only marrying other 18 year olds.
Right, right.
I was originally in this conversation, I was going to touch upon your solutions, but I kind of decided against that.
It's your interview, so let me know.
But I want the carrot for people to pick up your book to be the excellent chapter or two on solutions and things that you can do to counteract these numbers, which are very hard to overcome.
And so I've decided to veer off from solutions in hopes of enticing people to pick up, you know, a short, highly entertaining, well-written, very readable and potentially life-changing book that you've written.
So I'm going to try and veer off from solutions and hope that people will then click below this conversation and actually pick up the book.
But as far as I understand it, of course, you're all over the media promoting it.
And I think that's a great thing.
Would you be tempted to go back into this world again?
I know it's a bit of a departure from the stuff you've done before, but how do you find yourself in this milieu?
Is it enjoyable?
How is it relative to what you expected?
Well, it's certainly a change.
I normally cover much duller things like energy and the stock market, things like that.
I will say that when I've People ask me what my next book is about, and I don't have a great answer to that yet, but I have had a couple people tell me I should do a book about the economics of divorce.
I'm not sure that that's maybe too depressing.
I think I need a happier book for my next book.
Well, you know, it's not depressing if you help people avoid the catastrophe of divorce.
I had a guy on here who did a documentary called Divorce Corps.
You know, I guess it's depressing to do an anti-smoking book, but just think of all the healthy lungs that come out of it.
So that would be my suggestion around that.
All right.
Well, thanks a lot, John.
A really enjoyable chat, and I appreciate the book very much.
Again, just to remind people, Datonomics, O-N-O-M-I-C-S, Datonomics, How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game will put the link below.
Go pick it up.
Go hand it out, particularly to women who are staring at a TV wondering why there's dust gathering on the cell phone.
It really will help them to become more proactive in finding ways to solve the inevitable results of these lopsided gender ratios where they happen to be.
There are solutions out there.
John explains them very well.
And I, for what it's worth, I highly recommend it.
