By worse off I'm saying a small improvement in your new mating dance versus the old one won't overcome a large decrease in the value of that mating dance.
It doesn't have to equal a small improvement. It can also produce a larger improvement. The empiric fact that I know multiple guys for whom online dating produced a lot of value suggests that's true.
. For instance lives of citizens are generally valued at $10 million (and foreigners near zero) for many policy decisions.
That's true for some policy decisions made by bureaucrats. On the other hand it's not true for a lot of decisions made by democratic parliaments.
There's an old joke. A man asks if a woman will sleep with him for $10 million. She agrees. He then asks if she'll sleep with him for $10. She scoffs ""What do you think I am!?". He replies "we'vs already established what you are; now we're just haggling over the price."
The fact that you can theoretically buy a woman for a price in no way implies that that's the dynamic of the average dating interaction.
You make mistakes when you model decision making that doesn't use price as a criteria with a straight market dynamic.
In regards to price and modeling:
I agree that certain types of items are not readily traded for other things. It's hard to buy time with money for instance. But if things have value then things have a price. That price can be measured in dollars normally, but it can also be measured in time or enjoyment or any of a number of other metrics. I believe I'm simply using a more general definition of price and you're using a stricter definition so the argument is mostly semantics.
Plenty of supply and demand models don't use money as a criteria. Switching fr...
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