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sixes_and_sevens comments on Politics Discussion Thread September 2012 - Less Wrong
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Comments (195)
Are you aware this reads like a piece of satire?
I can see how someone could read this and think "is the author a human being?" But I still think I'm right. People aren't used to applying dry topics like economics onto intimate activities like dating.
There have been a slew of pop-economics books over the past decade or so that apply economic concepts to just about anything but pecuniary subjects. Insofar as people without an academic background in the subject apply economic theory to anything, I'd say this is simply untrue.
Certainly, I think that people in my social group are more likely to have read Freakonomics than any more traditional economics book.
Only because humans are dumb when thinking about evolutionarily novel things like money in the context of evolutionarily ancient things like mating.
Most people who are concerned about gender egalitarianism probably feel, in fact, slightly relieved that this comment is quite, so to say, neutral - I know I did!
It treats hypothetical males as selfish animals who only care about dating a physically attractive fertile female and hypothetical females as selfish animals who only care about dating a socially attractive tribal chieftain! So basically it's neither misogynistic nor misandric, it's simply misanthropic :)
I say it reads like satire because it looks like a joke an economist might make when trying to underscore the limitations of simple supply/demand models, in a similar fashion to the efficient market hypothesis punchline of "if there was really $100 on the floor, someone would have picked it up already".
I say you're much less neurotic than me! Y'know, like that saying that Orwell couldn't blow his nose without moralizing on conditions in the handkerchief industry. I have yet to attain any of his virtues, but I already have some of his flaws. :)
I tried going further than that by making them exactly symmetrical: both sexes want a physically fit partner who wears nice clothes.
At any rate, my argument holds no matter what men/women want. As long as men and women can invest scarce resources into improving their dating value.