Except many couples meet in school, where they'd be exposed to a disproportionate number of potential spouses within their own field of study, and maybe to a lesser extent others in related programs within the same college.

Which would also be skewed by things like length of study and personality types attracted to particular interests.

Eg, Doctors and lawyers often don't want to get married until after school, at which point they've primarily been around other doctors and lawyers for the previous 3-7 years.

We had one woman in my graduating comp-sci class. One. And she had been dating someone seriously for a few years.

We guys had better luck dating Early Childhood Education majors, which is supported by their chart.

Yes, I knew my wife before she went into teaching but it is a good match!

I think the joke is that Early Childhood Education studies are followed overwhelmingly by women.

I think it's a bit more than that.

There's the gender gap, which you mentioned, as well as the economic aspect, but I wouldn't discount the fact (or at least perception?) that people who choose to work with children are more likely to act in a caring and maternal way towards your typical aspie engineer (as opposed to the more common judgemental and standoffish approach).

At least that's my mum's theory.

I’ve read that one reason wealth inequality is worse today is because high-education-high-income individuals want to marry other HEHI individuals whereas in the past this wasn’t the case. If the claim about the past is true, it seems to undermine your point

Men generally do not care about the income of their wife, as that's not what they're innately attracted to. Hypergamy is characteristic of women and hence they want to marry up, and won't settle for someone who makes less than them. The latter is a reason for why there are so many educated but unmarried women today in their 30s and 40s.

> women are attracted to money and status! Not men!!!

Professionals I know in the 20-35 cohort only want to date other professionals. The ones that don’t want some weird stay at home trophy wife dynamic.

There’s nothing provably innate about some men preferring trophy wives. There is a lot of availability due to cultural baggage. The phenomenon that you’re talking about is culturally bound.

Anecdotally my wife makes ~150k more per year than me. She’s made more than me for like 80% of our relationship. I’ve stayed at home with our son.

We’re still top 1%. Neither of us care.

It’s not a weird dynamic. There is a threshold where if your partner isn’t making some meaningful amount of money relative to you, it’s better for them to just not work at all than spend 40 hours a week toiling away for a pittance of a paycheck. What is there to gain from having a wife work as a cashier when you make 10x as much as her?

You either want to be a power couple or just get the best partner you can and offer them a comfortable life. The relationships that are an exception to this are usually ones where both people started off equally and then one of them suddenly became massively successful but they still remain in love.

Trophy wife is not just about being stay at home. The term expresses lack of respect toward that wife, whose role is to look pretty and is not expected to contribute, to be knowledgeable nor have skills.

Second, men who earn a lot don't marry cashiers all that often. They want to marry within the same social class. They marry educated women whose earning potential is better then minimum wage.

Third, being stay at home partner comes with price and nowdays people really do it overwhelmingly because of children. The childless stay at home woman is mostly a rarity.

Partly because being dependent and fully paid by him comes with resentment and expectations on his side. The "I am working and you are just spending my money" feeling is one argument away. And partly because being bored, lonely and feeling useless most of time causes issues with her. Their interests and needs become different, so they diverge.

Unfortunately there is no guarantee that a woman with desirable genetic traits is also a high income earner, so in practice men must choose to concede some qualities if they are to have a good chance of finding a wife.

Usually, this means choosing beauty over earning potential, as beauty is much harder to find and then the value of money decreases as you earn more of it.

>beauty is much harder to find

This thread seems to use a lot of colloquial wisdom without citing where it came from. How are your arriving at this conclusion?

Seen from another culture: here in divorce assets are split, but not pensions, and there's no alimony. Stay-at-home divorced spouse could easily face financial hardships later in life.

Stay-at-home is not really a concept here beyond maybe a couple of years with a small child, otherwise it's just unemployment.

My limited observation is that women use HEHI as signal and as a filtering mechanism, otherwise non-HEHI men that could otherwise be candidates end up providing signal circumstantially through introductions, or a common environment that provides opportunities for serendipitous bonding to occur.

Men use it as a filter too, in my cohort (mid 30s, coastal US cities). A second six figure income in the partnership provides a lot of ease of mind, and is almost required if your goal is to live in certain neighborhoods.

I would say it is probably true that a smaller proportion of men use it as strong of a signal as women do, but that makes sense to me considering women have a decent risk of not being able to earn income due to childbirth and child rearing.

A wife who stays at home, manages the household and takes care of children is a "trophy wife" now? What has happened to society? Since when have traditionally feminine contributions been so devalued?

There's nothing wrong with earning money but there's nothing wrong with staying at home either. Some things money just can't buy.

These are not traditionally feminine attributes. Having a stay at home parent is a recent historical event starting post ww2 in the U.S.

What is the second claimed drawing from? It would seem like a stay at home parent was more common in the past, considering there were historically more single income families with children.

“The percentage of dual-income households with children under age 18 has been on the rise since the 1960s”

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2020/article/comparing-characte...

I don’t know whether it is innate, but it is cross-cultural: see Buss, D.M., 1989. Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures. Behavioral and brain sciences, 12(1), pp.1-14.

“Hypergamy” was not a term I was familiar with so I had to look it up. In doing so, there are some references that indicate that it is not actually innate, but a product of culturally reinforced gender roles [1].

For example, if a woman is in a culture that limits her ability to be successful financially, it would follow that she values the ability to make money in a mate to overcome those societal constraints. The cursory look into the research showed that as gender roles in a society became less rigid, the effect of hypergamy was reduced. If it were truly innate, I would expect there to be no reduction in hypergamy as societal norms change.

[1] Hadfield, Elaine (1995). Men's and Women's Preferences in Marital Partners in the United States, Russia, and Japan (PDF). Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology Vol. 26 No. 6, Western Washington University. pp. 728–750.

I'd add that when you're in your 30s or 40s, you're simply too late. The good men are already taken.

There may still be plenty of men in the same age group, single and good earners, but almost by definition they won't meet the highest of standards. Because if they did, they wouldn't be single.

This reminds me of the classical efficient market economists perspective that it’s a waste of time to pick up a $100 bill from the sidewalk. Because if it were a real $100 bill somebody else would have obviously picked it up already.

I don’t know that you can make the claim that the mating market is completely efficient.

The reason that joke is funny is that the economists are ignoring the fact that someone has to be the first person to come across that $100 bill. One is not likely be the first woman to 'come across' a single man in his 30s-40s, who has presumably been 'on the sidewalk' for 10-20+ years.

It's a play on the idea of market efficiency.

From the classical economist perspective, there's no point in trying to beat the market because if it were possible, somebody would have already discovered and exploited it, leaving you unable to do so similarly.

Just like the dating claim that if somebody was desirable, they would have already been taken.

My claim is that both perspectives are wrong because neither market is perfectly efficient. Ironically, taking the approach that they are efficient makes it harder to accomplish either end of beating the market or finding a mate.

I'd guess it depends on how narrow or wide you define the "desirable" group. Research from dating sites often conclude that women select for the top 20% of men whilst largely ignoring everybody else.

I imagine such a "top" man to be handsome, sociable, strong, economically successful or at least stable, funny, and whatever other quality women select for.

The chance for such men to go unnoticed and unclaimed until they are 30-40 y/o has to be close to zero. Almost all female attention is channeled to them, and they're unlikely to be passive themselves. The market should be efficient here. Do you know of any hot successful men that are single due to not being discovered?

If you widen the selection criteria to the best 50% of men, you're likely right that some of them in their 30s go "undiscovered". Yet it's questionable whether this is so in large numbers as time still matters:

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/a-profi...

In the age group of 30-49, 27% of men are single. Half of them want to be single and are not on the market, so that leaves 13.5% of remaining "supply".

So a single woman in this same age group looking for a man finds 86.5% of men unavailable or not interested. Did the market perfectly select the "best" 86.5% already? No, human affairs are complex, but we also should not look away from basic dynamics. Nature finds a way, whether we like it or not.

In my country (Netherlands) already from age 20, only 20% of men is single. It's unlikely that all remain with this same partner for life, but this is to point out that selection start early, and almost all "supply" is immediately taken. I don't know if the market is efficient, but it sure is fast. When trying to find your first partner in your 30s, you're a decade too late if you have high standards. In your 40s, most people have a family with kids that might be up to 10 years old, so "late" doesn't even begin to express it.

I think I'd question some of your analysis here.

>The chance for [handsome, sociable, strong, economically successful or at least stable, funny] men to go unnoticed and unclaimed until they are 30-40 y/o has to be close to zero.

No doubt it's a smaller pool, but close to zero? I would be skeptical about such an absolute claim unless there's actual data. The pew research article doesn't speak to this point specifically, and I'm not such how one would quantify it.

>So a single woman in this same age group looking for a man finds 86.5% of men unavailable or not interested

This is based on the assumption that the entire pool should be the denominator. I don't think it should, and the single men looking for a desirable mate are in the a similar situation, where over 60% of women are unavailable. If one was a highly desirable female, it would seem to they can still align with a highly desirable male because both pools are dwindling. It's not like every single female is competing with every other female. As the number of available mates goes down, so does the number of competitors, albeit at differing rates. I would expect those different rates to have an impact, but not so much that the effective ability to find a comparable mate to be driven to zero, at least not for someone in their 30s-40s.

To circle back to the economist train of thought, if alignment isn't happening it could be attributed to inefficiencies (e.g., there isn't a market that allows for relatively frictionless meeting between players) or there is a misalignment of expectations that prevents agreement between players (e.g., I can't get junk bond returns at AAA bond prices/risk).

I'm not going to be able to provide a scientific justification for the "close to zero" remark, I'm basing this on common sense. Handsome men stand out. They are desirable and attract attention wherever they go. As such, they can't be overlooked. If you then combine this favorable quality with great social skills, not only will they be discovered, it may be that man doing the discovery. If said man is also successful, not only will he be even more attractive, success is often visible, so the chance of being overlooked becomes practically impossible. But I'm sure it's not an absolute zero chance, I accept it to not be hard science.

You're absolutely right that using the entire pool is a simplification. In NYC, at age 30-40 there may be plenty of attractive mates left, as there's simply a lot of people in a small place and the career life style is the norm. Meanwhile, in the small rural town there may be no mate at all, or very few.

In the original example, highly educated women in their 30s-40s being single, I think it's a case of mismatch. Being both late and demanding (if we are to follow the stereotype) whilst supply is both low and low quality. Again, local exceptions can apply.

I do believe another complexity or nuance is the massive difference between being in your 30s or 40s. This decade is the time frame where almost everybody settles, many already in their mid twenties. Early 30s you may still stand a chance, in your 40s...really not the same thing. You're middle-aged and still have to start "life". Family planning may start to become an issue.

Life starts at 20, not 40.

>This decade is the time frame where almost everybody settles

I think this gets to the heart of it. Nobody wants to "settle", meaning there is a mismatch between expectations between two parties.

To extend your original phrasing (which I disagree with), a desirable man would not be single in his 30s or 40s. But by the same logic, neither would a desirable female. The latter point being underscored by the stereotypical premium put on youth and biological pressure due to age.

So that analogy (which I disagree with) leaves you with a less desirable single female expecting to land a highly desirable male. Of course, this will lead to frustration and they will be, as you say (which I disagree with), forced to settle. I would argue they will be forced to make sure their expectations match reality. If your hypothesis holds, they wouldn't be single if they were truly highly desirable. I don't agree with that but I don't see why that same logic doesn't apply to both sexes, outside of market inefficiencies (which technology has heavily eroded).

Is there a particular reason why your original comment focused only on men? If anything, the reduced pressure to settle down due to a lower threshold of biological constraints seems to provide a basis for it to be less applicable to men, not more.

I didn't focus specifically on these women to imply it only applies to women, I merely responded to somebody far up the thread that singled out that demographic.

I think it's important to be precise about the group. I'm assuming a subset of women that have delayed relationships or family planning for 1-2 decades due to their full dedication to their careers. Most educated women would not fall in this group. They would have found some balance between the two, and start earlier with the social aspect of life. So the group is highly specific, to a degree extreme.

I do not believe that men and women look for the exact same qualities in each other. The thing these women optimized for (professional status) is not necessarily high on the list of all men. And even if it was, (many/most) men would settle for "less" in the meanwhile, indicating that again time is the selector. These women have desirable qualities, but they don't matter if they're not on the market when it matters.

The opposite situation is not the same. Whether it is biological or cultural, men fully dedicated to their career do tend to find partners accepting this imbalance, thus they don't wait until 40 years old to start a relationship or family. It doesn't even have to be a harmful stereotype if its fully consensual.

So I agree that this dynamic is less applicable to men. And indeed, said women have to adjust expectations.

Again I could sum it up as this: start in your twenties if you're picky.

That clears up a lot. The original post was not nearly as specific regarding the subset group you’re singling out.

It may be that there is misalignment between what that subset is targeting and what their targets are targeting.

I don't think the situations are at all similar. If you come across a $100 bill, chances are you are in fact the first person to come across it. You've already beaten the odds.

If you come across a man in his 30s-40s who has always been single, chances are he is not a '$100 bill' man. It's possible that he is, but it's very unlikely. This is not the same as saying that there are no such thing as older '$100 bill' men, just like $100 bills do sometimes (but very rarely) end up on sidewalks.

I think you’re missing the entire point of the joke.

>If you come across a $100 bill, chances are you are in fact the first person to come across it.

The economist assumes you won’t be the first person because of market efficiency. Your assumption above disregards this. It seems like you are having a hard time reconciling that with the imagined scenario of seeing the bill, because the assumption is someone who noticed it previously would have picked it up. The fact that those two don’t reconcile is the whole point.

I get the point of the joke.

The equivalent would be if someone were saying "Oh I met this handsome, rich, kind, unmarried 45-year-old man last night, but there must be something wrong with him, or else someone would have married him already." But I'm not saying that and I don't think the originator of this sub-thread is either. We're saying "Only a small portion of the available older men will actually be attractive mates (on whatever dimensions) because those who are attractive will have mostly been taken already."

It's like an economist saying "It's not a good use of your time to go outside scouring the sidewalks for $100 bills." That's not funny, it's just accurate.

>The equivalent would be if someone were saying "Oh I met this handsome, rich, kind, unmarried 45-year-old man last night, but there must be something wrong with him, or else someone would have married him already."

We may be reading it differently but to my eyes, GP said essentially the same thing with

"by definition they won't meet the highest of standards. Because if they did, they wouldn't be single."

In other words, that rich, kind, high standard unmarried 45 year old must have something wrong with him or he wouldn't be single. I didn't take them to mean "there's a smaller pool to select from" because that's trivially apparent as more people get married, but it also cuts down on the competition as well.

I don't think anyone would argue that the longer a buffet table is open, the less chance there is to get the best choices. But the economist was saying "That cake still on the buffet line can't be good because if it were, it wouldn't be there." That's much more aligned with the GP's statement.

I suppose the dating market, much like the hiring market, is distorted by the intense aversion to false positives.

So your definition for good men are only people who have never had a break up in their 30s/40s because there are plenty of people who have?

No, not at all. I think from this context you'd understand that "good" means most attractive or most desired within the scope of selecting a partner. It doesn't mean you're a good or bad person in general.

And of course, some attractive ones are returned to the pool. But most are not, so the bigger issue of low supply remains.

What are you basing this on? Seems like a large claim to make about what people are innately attracted to.

Based on redpills, obviously.

I’ve only ever seen the word “hypergamy” used by red pill maniacs. If that’s the case, his scientific basis is bitterness and pseudoscience.

> Men generally do not care about the income of their wife,

Right up until it becomes greater than theirs.

It wasn’t that long ago (at least over here in Europe) that very few women[1] made it to anything High Income, so such couplings were rarer.

[1] Relatively speaking

Social class seems to have always played an important role in marriage (e.g. Jane Austen as a primer on 19th-century upperclass British society), so I'm not sure it's fair to say that this is change from the past. But I think it's fair to say that it is a factor in concentrating wealth.

The change is the soaring achievement levels of some woman where they achieve themselves right out of marriage-ability.

Can you elaborate on why high achieving women are less likely to get married? I think the research shows the opposite and the marriages tend to last longer

At the individual level, yes, there will probably always be a man outcompeting any woman at the top of a competitive field. But on a population level, the instability [0] of matches where the woman out-earns the man means that the pattern of women outnumbering men in ever-more prestigious fields is going to leave some very successful women without good matches. And foregoing that weaker match has increasingly little apparent downside when you're finding some career satisfaction and materially very comfortable.

I think you're referring to the fact that successful marriages are largely becoming a luxury good, but these can both be true for a couple of reasons. First, using education as a proxy for attainment (please give me something better, because I haven't found it) I struggle to find statistics going past four year degrees to really talk about the top or competitive fields, and that isn't sufficient. Second, it seems reasonable to me that the women (and men) excelling professionally would have, on average, better chances of making a marriage work; it may be that a strong correlation between women's propensity for success in career and success in marriage is obscuring a negative effect of outlier-achievement on rates of getting and staying married that is also coming into play.

Besides all this, it's consistent with what I encounter in my daily life.

[0] https://www.nber.org/papers/w19023

>women outnumbering men in ever-more prestigious fields is going to leave some very successful women without good matches.

I agree with your post but the quote above speaks to my original point further up the thread. The fact that this assumes that the only suitable mate is one of the same career status is part of what drivers income inequality.

Other than that, the only other proxy for attainment is income but it’s still the same story

>The fact that this assumes that the only suitable mate is one of the same career status is part of what drivers income inequality.

Absolutely. The proliferation of two-income families is a huge and well-documented driver of inequality. But the fact is that human woman tend not to marry below themselves in terms of some combination of status markers that they judge as important. And human men who don't feel like their contributions are important to the family (primary earner, mostly) tend to make their relationships less stable.

>the fact is that human woman tend not to marry below themselves in terms of some combination of status markers

I think this point to what people have an issue with. In many western cultures people are told marriage/mating is based on love, yet more than a trivial amount of what people see is largely based on status. They may not be mutually exclusive, but not weighted in the proportion that is commonly spoken about

Once again, I am in almost complete agreement; I am the last person to defend popular US American messaging about love and match-making. It is mostly fanciful lies, and telling young people how you wish things were does not prepare them for life.

IIRC it was the book The Meritocracy Trap that detailed the change from past generations, but I don’t know the numbers or underlying sources off the top of my head

Thanks for bringing up the source; if you do end up finding the data I'd love to see it. It's also fascinating to think about the relationship between social changes like this one and some of the economic/political drivers of inequality (less progressive taxation/inegalitarian investments in education/globalization). I suspect that the rise of tertiary education over the past 40-50 years which has further stratified educational attainment along class lines may be a relevant factor.

>I suspect that the rise of tertiary education over the past 40-50 years which has further stratified educational attainment along class lines may be a relevant factor.

This was a central point to the aforementioned book. The gist being elites invest in education, skill investment, and long hours that leads to more money that they can use to invest in more education and skill development in their children to repeat the cycle. The irony being that, while education and skill development work to gain material success, the long hours required to stay at the top of the competitive heap also makes the meritocratic winners miserable.

I dunno, I’m pretty sure it’s awesome being a winner!

I guess it depends on how you define winner. If you measure winning primarily by social status or money, sure. But one of the main points of the book is to illustrating the costs of all that "winning".

There was one quote from the book of a high-achieving mother who, due to long hours, only got to spend 20 minutes a day with her child but "wouldn't give up those 20 minutes for the world."

If you're someone who values close human relationships, I don't know if I'd call that "winning".

I think this is a valid point in the United States (to a certain extent, of course: I don't think "working too hard and not seeing your kids enough" is really comparable to "living paycheck to paycheck", although I understand that they're directionally the same). Does the author address other countries, though? The logic of meritocracy has been used to justify huge increases in inequality in countries where people work significantly less hard (e.g. France, India, Sweden).

I don’t remember any other countries being mentioned

Why? In the past (pre 1960s/70s/80s) spouses largely didn't meet in college/university level education or at the workplace, or if they did, it wasn't as peers.

But my point isn't so much that people meet in college, so much as there isn't really a good way to adjust statistical measurements to account for the popularity of a particular field/job, as was suggested up thread.

There are way too many related, interdependent, conflicting variables, with common field of study being a major one, even for the smaller disciplines.

Out of curiosity, makes you think they didn’t? I mean, it was prevalent enough to coin a derogatory term for women who attended college for the explicit intent to be a wife [1]. I not sure I agree there isn’t a way to adjust for other variables, but I will concede it doesn’t seem like the data went that far.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRS_Degree

Do you have a link to this article/study? I'd like to explore this concept more. I don't know if it's true but it certainly seems within the realm of possibility

I brought it up in another comment, but I believe it came from the book The Meritocracy Trap. Although, since I don't know the exact quote or underlying sources from memory, I could be mis-remembering

> This study captures P(running into a profession) x P(preference for that profession). I would love to them model P(running into a profession), so that we could get the much juicer preferences of each group for various professions.

The page links to a different visualization of the same data, [0] which attempts to control for the prevalence of a job within the population.

Maybe it doesn't go far enough for you but that's a pretty big first step in that model.

[0] https://flowingdata.com/2017/08/28/occupation-matchmaker/

> so that we could get the much juicer preferences of each group for various professions.

You'd probably just get a bunch of data that tells you the more female a profession is the more it wants to marry up and the more male a profession is the more it wants to marry toward a profession with a lot of young women.

> Us programmers stick together. Quite a high rate of marrying within the community.

nobody else would take our schtick ...

This is us only though. In my country, most programmers end up with psychologists, but because there are so many women psychologists and not a lot of female programmers.

Which country?

Argentina

> it appears as though software analysts don't like intermarrying

What happened to 'software analysts'? Is that even a career today? Sounds like something straight out of the 80s. Is it a 'product owner'?

But the real explanation is that realistically 90% of people meet their spouses in university.

> But the real explanation is that realistically 90% of people meet their spouses in university.

I believe in the last census it was found that something like 48% of American adults had an associates degree or higher educational attainment. It seems that that fact, on its face, makes your assertion nearly impossible.

> But the real explanation is that realistically 90% of people meet their spouses in university

This is very exaggerated. It seems like people who find their partner in university are in the minority these days.

Is that the case? I guess my university experience is 10 years out of date but that's how it was back then.

School demographics matter a lot. The Harvard crowd isn't finding their future wife at school.

Huh that surprises me. I would have thought that's exactly the kind of middle-class crowd that'd want to marry-in?

Once you’re in that crowd you continue to run with that crowd- there is no hurry to get hitched at that age, the opportunities to find a match after you’re established professionally will still be there.

Harvard graduates are going to have multiple partners before settling up and marrying by their mid-thirties

On the topic of analysts, I've been wondering for a long time about "systems analyst" which used to be the cool job in computing in the 1980s but then essentially vanished. I was never quite sure what systems analysts did.

Getting back to the data visualization, a lot of it seems to be that male-dominated jobs pair with female-dominated jobs, which isn't particularly surprising.

Many of those “analyst” positions are now just labeled “architect” or “solutions engineer” instead.

From my viewpoint, the role got split. The technical responsibilities got pushed to an engineer's job with the architect role, the business responsibilities got pushed to the product manager role.

You have to be a 'Computer Systems Analyst' to be eligible for TN status.

According to FB only 28% of married couples meet in college.

So that's still probably a vast majority of people with the predicate of people who went a university at all?

The data shows physicians predominantly marry other physicians and ag workers tend to marry other ag workers. Not that physicians and agricultural workers inter-marry

Even in rural areas, I doubt 90% ag workers is to be found in the United States. It takes shockingly few people to run a modern farm and the majority are owner-operated with zero employees. These areas will still have substantial rates of doctors, teachers, truckers, and service workers, among others.