7 ms·

The Eligible Bachelor Paradox

94 points by jwt 18y ago

acgourley 18y ago
I'm a bit bothered than there is no objective evidence - just a claim that "everybody knows" followed by a loose application of game theory. But, if he is right, then as a man you should be holding out.
- drinian 18y ago
  Especially since he explicitly eschews "reductive" biological evidence.
- three14 18y ago
  That doesn't follow - presumably the desirable men are also getting what they want, less desirable but more devoted women. After all, the idea of the linked article is that a woman who does marry a desirable man would be likely to get a less desirable mate if she were to compete directly with other women.
  - acgourley 18y ago
    I don't know if you can assume early bidders are more devoted.
    - three14 18y ago
      I'm assuming that early bidding isn't what's working for the less desirable women. It's a self evaluation that they can't compete directly, so they don't. Instead, they concentrate their resources on one mostly-desirable man. Bidding early is one part of the equation, but bidding more is another, probably more important part. If the article is supposed to reflect real life, the timing isn't likely to yield a real advantage, since society discourages women from getting married until relatively late anyway.
carterschonwald 18y ago
The author is actually indireclty referring to the stable marriage problem ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem , don't bother reading the paper the slate writer links to, it has no substantive content), in which you have two sets of agents which we label the "men" and the "women". Each agent has a preference ordering of the members of the other gender. It is really easy to prove that you can then find an equilibrium arrangement by iterating the following procedure i = 1..n: have each man propose to the i'th woman on his list (if he's not currently matched, otherwise he does nothing). the woman accepts if she's not matched yet or if the man ranks higher on her list than the previous guy she accepted. if you think for a moment you can see (and prove) that this equilibria favors the men. Also curiously enough, this exact algorithm is used to match med students with residency programs
- rms 18y ago
  Steven Rudich has a good lecture on this: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15251/discretemath/Lectures/dating.ppt http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15251/di... http://www.discretemath.com http://www.discretemath.com
  - dominik 18y ago
    Good slides; He mentions that the "largest, most successful dating service in the world" uses a computer to run the Traditional Marriage Algorithm. But which dating service is the "largest, most successful dating service in the world"?
    - rms 18y ago
      the medical residency program
wallflower 18y ago
> Where have all the most appealing men gone? Married young, most of them—and sometimes to women whose most salient characteristic was not their beauty, or passion, or intellect, but their decisiveness. I think this one quote from the article is important. > What they understood is this: as your priorities change from romance to family, the so-called “deal breakers” change. Some guys aren’t worldly, but they’d make great dads. 2nd quote from linked article in original piece - an interesting Lori Gottlieb article entitled "Marry Him!" which I'm considering forwarding to a few of my 30-ish single and still serial-dating female friends (considering the negative repercussions). http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/single-marry http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/single-marry
- cturner 18y ago
  Good read. "What I long for in a marriage is that sense of having a partner in crime." I smiled as I read this because that's my exact choice of words when describing what I'm interested in.
  - Spyckie 18y ago
    hmm is it romantic or pragmatic if you think of your spouse as a good friend/cofounder you can split work with and help each other out? I'm beginning to see no point in love - only solid, mutually beneficial friendships.
    - tdavis 18y ago
      I think Alexander Smith put the "point of love" quite well: "Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition." You can love a friend in that sense to a point, and that may be enough for many people. Obviously romantic love is an entirely different story: irrational and perhaps less efficient than a work partner, but the sort of thing that contrasts and enhances the purely logical.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 18y ago
      I'm beginning to see no point in love - only solid, mutually beneficial friendships Love takes that and raises it to the googol'th power. I mentioned earlier in this thread that I am getting divorced. My wife and I sometimes talk about the times when we were head over heels crazy about each other, but what we have now and are trying to maintain is perfectly described as "a solid, mutually beneficial friendship." The difference is beyond night and day!
critic 18y ago
There's a simpler explanation than appealing to math the author admits not understanding: male attractiveness ages better. A 40 year old man can be attractive to 20 year old women, but a 40 year old woman is rarely attractive to 20 year old men. In other words, women past their prime who restrict themselves to mates their own age will may be in relatively low demand.
- tlb 18y ago
  The opposite is true. Because women in their narrow age range of attractiveness get paired with men in a much broader age range of attractiveness, that would create a shortage of women. Say, if women 25-35 date men 30-45, there are 50% more men in that group. or combining folk wisdom and math: d(half your age + 7) / d (age) < 1 However, the fact that men propose and women decide creates an inversion. Early marriages take decisive women and attractive men off the market, leaving beautiful women and schlubs. Hooray for graph theory!
  - miloshh 18y ago
    Actually, I think critic above had it right. Sure, women are considered more attractive when 20-30, and get a lot of attantion from men in that age, much more than men do at any point in their life. After women get past 30, things simply get back to "normal", but to them this seems as a shortage. In fact, single women above 30 seem to be the only group that ever refers to a "shortage of suitable males" - in my experience, younger women and men are generally surprised as to why such thing should ever exist. Furthermore, the theory that men are trying hard to marry, and the most attractive ones "succeed" to marry at a younger age, just does not seem to be realistic, especially not in modern society. There are good reasons for men not to marry early.
    - dannyj 18y ago
      But it seems that men in their early 20s are trying harder to get laid. Thus the agressivness of the "weak"bidders..
- vaksel 18y ago
lacker 18y ago
A better explanation is that older men date younger women more often than older women date younger men. So there are extra old women and young men. No need for combinatorial game theory, just supply and demand.
spot 18y ago
the Gale-Shapley algorithm requires an authority (like the medical school establishment) to make it work. in real life, if you want to get married, you face a much more amorphous situation: a series of prospects, and with each a decision, "are they good enough"? i can't find it anymore, but iirc the answer was, to estimate the length of the game (say 20 years on the marriage market) and then just date for the first 1/e fraction of this time. and then say "yes" to the next person as good or better than the best you could have had during your trial/dating period. can anyone name the theorem or is this apocryphal?
- carterschonwald 18y ago
  thats only a nice algorithm if you can go through the process several times, because i think that its a bound in expectation rather than point wise.
- wallflower 18y ago
  37% rule > Estimate how many people you’re likely to date in your life, dump the first 37% but keep a photo of your favourite on your bedside table. Then, marry the first one after that who beats your sweetheart! Of course, every rule has exceptions and sometimes you get an offer that’s too good to refuse, 37% or not. Sometimes, mathematics doesn’t have all the answers! > Using this process, we find that we can be successful in selecting the best from a group of N by letting approximately 37% of the available positions go by, then selecting the first choice better than any seen before about 37% of the time. And this is true no matter how large N is! This is a strikingly high probability. http://www.illuminatingscience.org/moving-house-part-i/ http://www.illuminatingscience.org/moving-house-part-i/ http://courses.ncssm.edu/math/Talks/PDFS/spouse.pdf http://courses.ncssm.edu/math/Talks/PDFS/spouse.pdf
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
vaksel 18y ago
I think additional part of the problem is that men are starting to realize that they really don't have anything to gain by being married. And they are so afraid of having to go through a divorce that can wipe them out, that they don't feel like trying. I mean a 50% divorce rate in this country, is pretty much a coin toss on whether or not you lose everything. Seriously the only thing to gain by being married is saving a few bucks on taxes. And you lose pretty much everything else. Every single married guy I know is MISERABLE. The sex pretty much stops within the first couple of years. And the woman gains mega weight, because now that they "got" you, they don't need to keep in shape. And then the whole bitchy wife comes out treating the guy as a second class citizen. Marrying an American woman is pretty much the worst decision you can make. If you really want to get married, go find a nice European girl to marry, unlike American women, at least they know that marriage is not a one way street.
- time_management 18y ago
  And they are so afraid of having to go through a divorce that can wipe them out, that they don't feel like trying. Yep. It's an utterly broken system where the wife can decide she's not into her husband any more and walk away with half of his shit. Every single married guy I know is MISERABLE. The sex pretty much stops within the first couple of years. And the woman gains mega weight, because now that they "got" you, they don't need to keep in shape. I think this is far from universal. You seem to know some really unhappy married people. It seems like this is more often the case among less educated couples who marry too young. Marrying an American woman is pretty much the worst decision you can make. If you really want to get married, go find a nice European girl to marry, unlike American women, at least they know that marriage is not a one way street. Why European? My observation is that E. European, Asian, Latin American, and African women are around the same level of quality: very high, because the educated women from those areas are cultured and would be at the pinnacle of refinement by the US standard. Next is W. Europe, Canada, and the Pacific Northwest. Urban sophisticate and minority American women are probably at the same level as Pacific NW ladies: not bad, and not nearly as bad as the reputation of American women would suggest. However, the suburban-bred office cows, raised on Sex and the City and burned out on college casual sex, are at the cellulite-ridden, lumpy, bottom. They're the ones who give American women a bad name. In truth, you can find quality women anywhere, even in the US... it's just much harder in some places. There seems to be a criticality situation regarding the number of decent women in a given nationality. What might be at root a 2% shortage (in quality American women vs. men) blows up, on account of some sort of a positive feedback loop. The advantage conferred by the shortage causes (some) women to become spoiled, which further erodes the quality of the women, leading to more shortage, and so on.
tyn 18y ago
Why is it not the case that attractive men postpone their decision too, just as attractive women do?
- jcl 18y ago
  In isolated cases perhaps attractive men also postpone their decision, but I believe that the idealization given in the article is pretty close to reality: women decide and men settle for what they can get. I recall reading about some research showing that overweight women actually have sex more often than their peers, which seems to support this theory. (http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2008/10/31/Overweight_women_have_more_sex/UPI-68841225431194/ http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2008/10/31/Overweight_women_h...)
miked 18y ago
It's been a while since I read his explanation, but an economist -- I believe it was Tim Harford in _The Undercover Economist_, but it may have been Tyler Cowan -- has already solved this, and with a very different answer. Several factors are operating. First, due to a higher death rate among males, the number of women begins to exceed the number of men (of a given age) starting at age 23. Next, there are about 10 times as many men in prison as women. Also, there seem to be rather more gay men than lesbian women. There are far more women in large US cities, where articles like this are written, than men (who are disproportionately rural). then, women like to "marry up", whereas men are willing to marry down. Now comes the key point. Even a rather small discrepancy between supply and demand in an auction market can quickly drive prices thru the roof, or the floor. Great example: recent oil prices. Back when the economy was going well prices could shoot up rapidly as oil fields became exhausted and development of new ones was blocked. When the economy talked and demand dropped just a few percent, prices collapsed from $147 to $39, or some such. I read his account too quickly to fully follow it, and I'm sorry I can't remember it, but small-supply-imbalances-can-produce-huge-price-swings was the gist of it. Sorry, I don't have the book available to check it. >> This is how you come to the Eligible-Bachelor Paradox, which is no longer so paradoxical. The pool of appealing men shrinks as many are married off and taken out of the game, leaving a disproportionate number of men who are notably imperfect (perhaps they are short, socially awkward, underemployed).
- huherto 18y ago
  "Several factors are operating...". Also lot of men are ineligible. (Drink too much, Do not have a stable job, very unfaithful)
- ardit33 18y ago
  I think the author has never been Silicon Valley. It is a huge sausage fest in here, everywhere. San Jose is called Man Jose for a good reason. Smart and educated girls, that are also cute are rarely single. I have so many great male friends that are single, and yet I don't know a good looking/smart girl that is single. This is my major disappointment with the SF Bay Area.
  - 18y ago

94 points by jwt 18y ago

I'm a bit bothered than there is no objective evidence - just a claim that "everybody knows" followed by a loose application of game theory. But, if he is right, then as a man you should be holding out.

drinian 18y ago
Especially since he explicitly eschews "reductive" biological evidence.
three14 18y ago
That doesn't follow - presumably the desirable men are also getting what they want, less desirable but more devoted women. After all, the idea of the linked article is that a woman who does marry a desirable man would be likely to get a less desirable mate if she were to compete directly with other women.
- acgourley 18y ago
  I don't know if you can assume early bidders are more devoted.
  - three14 18y ago
    I'm assuming that early bidding isn't what's working for the less desirable women. It's a self evaluation that they can't compete directly, so they don't. Instead, they concentrate their resources on one mostly-desirable man. Bidding early is one part of the equation, but bidding more is another, probably more important part. If the article is supposed to reflect real life, the timing isn't likely to yield a real advantage, since society discourages women from getting married until relatively late anyway.

carterschonwald 18y ago

The author is actually indireclty referring to the stable marriage problem ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem , don't bother reading the paper the slate writer links to, it has no substantive content), in which you have two sets of agents which we label the "men" and the "women". Each agent has a preference ordering of the members of the other gender. It is really easy to prove that you can then find an equilibrium arrangement by iterating the following procedure i = 1..n: have each man propose to the i'th woman on his list (if he's not currently matched, otherwise he does nothing). the woman accepts if she's not matched yet or if the man ranks higher on her list than the previous guy she accepted. if you think for a moment you can see (and prove) that this equilibria favors the men. Also curiously enough, this exact algorithm is used to match med students with residency programs

rms 18y ago
Steven Rudich has a good lecture on this: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15251/discretemath/Lectures/dating.ppt http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15251/di... http://www.discretemath.com http://www.discretemath.com
- dominik 18y ago
  Good slides; He mentions that the "largest, most successful dating service in the world" uses a computer to run the Traditional Marriage Algorithm. But which dating service is the "largest, most successful dating service in the world"?
  - rms 18y ago
    the medical residency program

wallflower 18y ago

> Where have all the most appealing men gone? Married young, most of them—and sometimes to women whose most salient characteristic was not their beauty, or passion, or intellect, but their decisiveness. I think this one quote from the article is important. > What they understood is this: as your priorities change from romance to family, the so-called “deal breakers” change. Some guys aren’t worldly, but they’d make great dads. 2nd quote from linked article in original piece - an interesting Lori Gottlieb article entitled "Marry Him!" which I'm considering forwarding to a few of my 30-ish single and still serial-dating female friends (considering the negative repercussions). http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/single-marry http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/single-marry

cturner 18y ago
Good read. "What I long for in a marriage is that sense of having a partner in crime." I smiled as I read this because that's my exact choice of words when describing what I'm interested in.
- Spyckie 18y ago
  hmm is it romantic or pragmatic if you think of your spouse as a good friend/cofounder you can split work with and help each other out? I'm beginning to see no point in love - only solid, mutually beneficial friendships.
  - tdavis 18y ago
    I think Alexander Smith put the "point of love" quite well: "Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition." You can love a friend in that sense to a point, and that may be enough for many people. Obviously romantic love is an entirely different story: irrational and perhaps less efficient than a work partner, but the sort of thing that contrasts and enhances the purely logical.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 18y ago
    I'm beginning to see no point in love - only solid, mutually beneficial friendships Love takes that and raises it to the googol'th power. I mentioned earlier in this thread that I am getting divorced. My wife and I sometimes talk about the times when we were head over heels crazy about each other, but what we have now and are trying to maintain is perfectly described as "a solid, mutually beneficial friendship." The difference is beyond night and day!

critic 18y ago

There's a simpler explanation than appealing to math the author admits not understanding: male attractiveness ages better. A 40 year old man can be attractive to 20 year old women, but a 40 year old woman is rarely attractive to 20 year old men. In other words, women past their prime who restrict themselves to mates their own age will may be in relatively low demand.

tlb 18y ago
The opposite is true. Because women in their narrow age range of attractiveness get paired with men in a much broader age range of attractiveness, that would create a shortage of women. Say, if women 25-35 date men 30-45, there are 50% more men in that group. or combining folk wisdom and math: d(half your age + 7) / d (age) < 1 However, the fact that men propose and women decide creates an inversion. Early marriages take decisive women and attractive men off the market, leaving beautiful women and schlubs. Hooray for graph theory!
- miloshh 18y ago
  Actually, I think critic above had it right. Sure, women are considered more attractive when 20-30, and get a lot of attantion from men in that age, much more than men do at any point in their life. After women get past 30, things simply get back to "normal", but to them this seems as a shortage. In fact, single women above 30 seem to be the only group that ever refers to a "shortage of suitable males" - in my experience, younger women and men are generally surprised as to why such thing should ever exist. Furthermore, the theory that men are trying hard to marry, and the most attractive ones "succeed" to marry at a younger age, just does not seem to be realistic, especially not in modern society. There are good reasons for men not to marry early.
  - dannyj 18y ago
    But it seems that men in their early 20s are trying harder to get laid. Thus the agressivness of the "weak"bidders..
vaksel 18y ago

lacker 18y ago

A better explanation is that older men date younger women more often than older women date younger men. So there are extra old women and young men. No need for combinatorial game theory, just supply and demand.

spot 18y ago

the Gale-Shapley algorithm requires an authority (like the medical school establishment) to make it work. in real life, if you want to get married, you face a much more amorphous situation: a series of prospects, and with each a decision, "are they good enough"? i can't find it anymore, but iirc the answer was, to estimate the length of the game (say 20 years on the marriage market) and then just date for the first 1/e fraction of this time. and then say "yes" to the next person as good or better than the best you could have had during your trial/dating period. can anyone name the theorem or is this apocryphal?

carterschonwald 18y ago
thats only a nice algorithm if you can go through the process several times, because i think that its a bound in expectation rather than point wise.
wallflower 18y ago
37% rule > Estimate how many people you’re likely to date in your life, dump the first 37% but keep a photo of your favourite on your bedside table. Then, marry the first one after that who beats your sweetheart! Of course, every rule has exceptions and sometimes you get an offer that’s too good to refuse, 37% or not. Sometimes, mathematics doesn’t have all the answers! > Using this process, we find that we can be successful in selecting the best from a group of N by letting approximately 37% of the available positions go by, then selecting the first choice better than any seen before about 37% of the time. And this is true no matter how large N is! This is a strikingly high probability. http://www.illuminatingscience.org/moving-house-part-i/ http://www.illuminatingscience.org/moving-house-part-i/ http://courses.ncssm.edu/math/Talks/PDFS/spouse.pdf http://courses.ncssm.edu/math/Talks/PDFS/spouse.pdf

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

vaksel 18y ago

I think additional part of the problem is that men are starting to realize that they really don't have anything to gain by being married. And they are so afraid of having to go through a divorce that can wipe them out, that they don't feel like trying. I mean a 50% divorce rate in this country, is pretty much a coin toss on whether or not you lose everything. Seriously the only thing to gain by being married is saving a few bucks on taxes. And you lose pretty much everything else. Every single married guy I know is MISERABLE. The sex pretty much stops within the first couple of years. And the woman gains mega weight, because now that they "got" you, they don't need to keep in shape. And then the whole bitchy wife comes out treating the guy as a second class citizen. Marrying an American woman is pretty much the worst decision you can make. If you really want to get married, go find a nice European girl to marry, unlike American women, at least they know that marriage is not a one way street.

time_management 18y ago
And they are so afraid of having to go through a divorce that can wipe them out, that they don't feel like trying. Yep. It's an utterly broken system where the wife can decide she's not into her husband any more and walk away with half of his shit. Every single married guy I know is MISERABLE. The sex pretty much stops within the first couple of years. And the woman gains mega weight, because now that they "got" you, they don't need to keep in shape. I think this is far from universal. You seem to know some really unhappy married people. It seems like this is more often the case among less educated couples who marry too young. Marrying an American woman is pretty much the worst decision you can make. If you really want to get married, go find a nice European girl to marry, unlike American women, at least they know that marriage is not a one way street. Why European? My observation is that E. European, Asian, Latin American, and African women are around the same level of quality: very high, because the educated women from those areas are cultured and would be at the pinnacle of refinement by the US standard. Next is W. Europe, Canada, and the Pacific Northwest. Urban sophisticate and minority American women are probably at the same level as Pacific NW ladies: not bad, and not nearly as bad as the reputation of American women would suggest. However, the suburban-bred office cows, raised on Sex and the City and burned out on college casual sex, are at the cellulite-ridden, lumpy, bottom. They're the ones who give American women a bad name. In truth, you can find quality women anywhere, even in the US... it's just much harder in some places. There seems to be a criticality situation regarding the number of decent women in a given nationality. What might be at root a 2% shortage (in quality American women vs. men) blows up, on account of some sort of a positive feedback loop. The advantage conferred by the shortage causes (some) women to become spoiled, which further erodes the quality of the women, leading to more shortage, and so on.

tyn 18y ago

Why is it not the case that attractive men postpone their decision too, just as attractive women do?

jcl 18y ago
In isolated cases perhaps attractive men also postpone their decision, but I believe that the idealization given in the article is pretty close to reality: women decide and men settle for what they can get. I recall reading about some research showing that overweight women actually have sex more often than their peers, which seems to support this theory. (http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2008/10/31/Overweight_women_have_more_sex/UPI-68841225431194/ http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2008/10/31/Overweight_women_h...)

miked 18y ago

It's been a while since I read his explanation, but an economist -- I believe it was Tim Harford in _The Undercover Economist_, but it may have been Tyler Cowan -- has already solved this, and with a very different answer. Several factors are operating. First, due to a higher death rate among males, the number of women begins to exceed the number of men (of a given age) starting at age 23. Next, there are about 10 times as many men in prison as women. Also, there seem to be rather more gay men than lesbian women. There are far more women in large US cities, where articles like this are written, than men (who are disproportionately rural). then, women like to "marry up", whereas men are willing to marry down. Now comes the key point. Even a rather small discrepancy between supply and demand in an auction market can quickly drive prices thru the roof, or the floor. Great example: recent oil prices. Back when the economy was going well prices could shoot up rapidly as oil fields became exhausted and development of new ones was blocked. When the economy talked and demand dropped just a few percent, prices collapsed from $147 to $39, or some such. I read his account too quickly to fully follow it, and I'm sorry I can't remember it, but small-supply-imbalances-can-produce-huge-price-swings was the gist of it. Sorry, I don't have the book available to check it. >> This is how you come to the Eligible-Bachelor Paradox, which is no longer so paradoxical. The pool of appealing men shrinks as many are married off and taken out of the game, leaving a disproportionate number of men who are notably imperfect (perhaps they are short, socially awkward, underemployed).

huherto 18y ago
"Several factors are operating...". Also lot of men are ineligible. (Drink too much, Do not have a stable job, very unfaithful)
ardit33 18y ago
I think the author has never been Silicon Valley. It is a huge sausage fest in here, everywhere. San Jose is called Man Jose for a good reason. Smart and educated girls, that are also cute are rarely single. I have so many great male friends that are single, and yet I don't know a good looking/smart girl that is single. This is my major disappointment with the SF Bay Area.
- 18y ago