Dating markets and the dynamics of mate selection: sheng nu
I'm pretty fascinated with dating markets and the dynamics of mate selection. (One of my favorite activities, in fact, is looking up OkCupid profiles of people I know in order to test the efficacy of OkCupid's matching algorithm. In related news, I am creepy and need a life and should probably be satisfied by the data analysis contained in the OkCupid blog.) On one hand, dating markets are super romantic and lovey dovey and whatnot, but, on the other hand, they are matching markets like any other- in reality, dating markets aren't that different from labor markets (where employers are trying to find compatible workers and vice versa) except that, with labor markets, it's more clear who is the buyer and who is the seller. (There's got to be a joke in there somewhere.)
It's not surprising, then, that economists sometimes get involved with studying the inner workings of dating markets- just take a look at Marina Adshade's Dollars and Sex column, for example. But what happens when economists start to play cupid more directly?
-- Jodi 'with models ' Beggs
More: Steve Landsburg and Foreign Policy.
From the comments:
I get a chuckle when the 4'11" woman states she wants men 6'2" and taller. Then again, as a 5'8" guy, I am amused that it is socially acceptable for a women to request a tall mate, but I'm consider a cad if I want her buxom. Both are determined by DNA (and I can't change the one she cares about)
From Foreign Policy:
Wu Di, a contributor to China's Cosmopolitan and author of an alluring new book, I Know Why You're Left. The poised, professional crowd, outfitted in black blazers, leather boots, and trendy thick-framed glasses, was composed mostly of women in their mid-20s to mid-30s -- prime Cosmo readers and all there waiting patiently to hear Wu, who typically charges $160 an hour for "private romance counseling," explain their surprising plight: being single women in a country with a startling excess of men.
When at last she sauntered to the front of the room, microphone in hand, Wu, a pert, married 43-year-old who resembles a brunette Suze Orman (and whose chief advertised credential, it turns out, is an MBA from the University of Houston), surveyed her audience. Then she broke out into a practiced grin and, in the relentlessly chipper staccato common to Chinese public speakers, launched into her talk: a mix of sisterly homily, lovemaking tips, and economics lecture. It's unrealistic to expect that you will be madly in love with one person forever, she warned, or even that passion can be the right guide to marriage.
Leta Hong Fincher, a contributor to Ms. magazine and a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Tsinghua University, told me. Why else, she asks, would the government-backed All-China Women's Federation take pains to conduct an exhaustive, 30,000-household survey asking about attitudes toward sheng nu? "This derogatory term has been aggressively disseminated by the Chinese government," she points out. According to a state media report on the survey, "See What Category of 'Leftover' You Belong To," the All-China Women's Federation assigned young single women such hapless labels as "leftover fighters" (ages 25 to 27), "the ones who must triumph" (ages 28 to 30), and "master class of leftover women" (35 and over). The takeaway: Get worried, and get married. Or, as Fincher wrote for Ms.: "If you want to stand a snowball's chance in hell of ever getting married in this country, don't demand too much from your man."
The black version ( Ralph Richard Banks, Stanford professor of family law):
This crisis in the black "relationship market", as Mr Banks calls it, starts with a "man shortage". About one in ten black men in their early thirties are in prison. As a group, black men have also fallen behind in education and income, just as black women have surged ahead. Two black women graduate from college for every black man. As these women rise into the middle class, the men stay in the lower class, becoming less compatible.
Many black women respond by "marrying down, but not out," as Mr Banks puts it. But that makes bad marriages. Two out of every three black marriages fail, about twice the rate of white marriages.
The real problem is the behaviour of those few black men who are considered good catches. They often stay unmarried for the opposite reason: they have too many options. As one man told Mr Banks: "If you have four quality women you're dating and they're in a rotation, who's going to rush into a marriage?" Even black men who nominally commit to one woman are five times as likely as their white counterparts to have others on the side.
One way or another, many black women thus become, or stay, single (as two of Mr Banks's three sisters are). As one woman tells him: "We focus on our careers, our friends, go back to school, whatever. We fill our lives with other things."