Money can't buy me love
The movie "Love Don't Cost A Thing"
was excellent in the sense that since it was so completely formulaic,
once you knew the basic premise you could just watch it in occasional
short pieces during channel flipping and still know what was going on
and what phase of the story you were currently in. Uh oh, here comes
the crisis! Even so, I had to wonder if the title was intentionally
meant to be ironic, since the basic premise of the movie was that the
main character had to spend a huge amount of money so that the girl
would even know his name or talk to him, let alone fall in love with
him. But I guess that after all the invisible and costly preparatory
work had been done, then the love didn't cost a thing but somehow
naturally emerged on its own.
I am happy to see the blog "Ihmissuhteet" become active again, since this guy if any is able to find and point out all kinds of hypocrisies about how relationships really work and are formed under real-world constraints, as opposed to the romantic fantasy world. In his post "Köyhien miesten synkkä kohtalo" ("The sad fate of poor men") he refers to a 1993 study by famous Finnish sex and relationships researchers Osmo Kontula and Elina Haavio-Mannila. As wryly summarized by the researcher, women seem to value a thick wallet as the most attractive feature in men, according to the results of this study.
When asked whether he had had sex during the past 24 hours, half of the well-earning men answered yes, but only a third of the low-earning men answered yes. For women, the difference was significantly smaller. For long-term relationships, if a man's meager monthly net income was below 3,500 marks, he had a 34% chance of being married and 43% chance of being totally alone, whereas a monthly net income of over 9,500 marks gave a man a 91% chance of being married and only a 2% chance of being totally alone. (This wasn't mentioned in the post, but I assume 3,500 and 9,500 were the cutoff values for the bottom and top quartiles or something like that.) Again for women, the difference was nowhere as drastic and actually turned out to work to the opposite direction: the best female earners were more likely to remain alone than the average woman.
Such numbers cast serious doubt on the popular airheaded idea that sexual pairings are formed essentially randomly. Of course, all available real-world data indicates that pairings are statistically highly predictable in the sense that I can safely bet that no NFL cheerleader or Victoria's Secret model will ever marry a homeless midget during her active professional career. After all, people have different desires and preferences in what they consider attractive, right? Similarly, when both Howard Stern and Mike Myers recently left their dumpy wives and went back to the dating scene, I predicted that these two middle-aged guys (who are both, in the end, rather average-looking) would have no trouble getting dates and could even picture in my mind what their new squeezes would look like. Let me guess: their new girlfriends were comparable to their ex-wives in age, looks and weight? No?
Such extreme cases aside, it would be interesting to see a study in which a large representative sample of married women were somehow rated for their attractiveness, after which these ratings were plotted against the annual salaries of their husbands. I predict that there would be a noticeable positive correlation between these two quantities. However, those who deny that economics and market thinking could ever possibly apply to the sacred notion of "falling in love" would necessarily have to claim that this correlation is zero. Or, since that prediction would fall flat and they would certainly have the common sense not to bet any money on it, start the usual denial with the bumper sticker "correlation is not causality".
I am happy to see the blog "Ihmissuhteet" become active again, since this guy if any is able to find and point out all kinds of hypocrisies about how relationships really work and are formed under real-world constraints, as opposed to the romantic fantasy world. In his post "Köyhien miesten synkkä kohtalo" ("The sad fate of poor men") he refers to a 1993 study by famous Finnish sex and relationships researchers Osmo Kontula and Elina Haavio-Mannila. As wryly summarized by the researcher, women seem to value a thick wallet as the most attractive feature in men, according to the results of this study.
When asked whether he had had sex during the past 24 hours, half of the well-earning men answered yes, but only a third of the low-earning men answered yes. For women, the difference was significantly smaller. For long-term relationships, if a man's meager monthly net income was below 3,500 marks, he had a 34% chance of being married and 43% chance of being totally alone, whereas a monthly net income of over 9,500 marks gave a man a 91% chance of being married and only a 2% chance of being totally alone. (This wasn't mentioned in the post, but I assume 3,500 and 9,500 were the cutoff values for the bottom and top quartiles or something like that.) Again for women, the difference was nowhere as drastic and actually turned out to work to the opposite direction: the best female earners were more likely to remain alone than the average woman.
Such numbers cast serious doubt on the popular airheaded idea that sexual pairings are formed essentially randomly. Of course, all available real-world data indicates that pairings are statistically highly predictable in the sense that I can safely bet that no NFL cheerleader or Victoria's Secret model will ever marry a homeless midget during her active professional career. After all, people have different desires and preferences in what they consider attractive, right? Similarly, when both Howard Stern and Mike Myers recently left their dumpy wives and went back to the dating scene, I predicted that these two middle-aged guys (who are both, in the end, rather average-looking) would have no trouble getting dates and could even picture in my mind what their new squeezes would look like. Let me guess: their new girlfriends were comparable to their ex-wives in age, looks and weight? No?
Such extreme cases aside, it would be interesting to see a study in which a large representative sample of married women were somehow rated for their attractiveness, after which these ratings were plotted against the annual salaries of their husbands. I predict that there would be a noticeable positive correlation between these two quantities. However, those who deny that economics and market thinking could ever possibly apply to the sacred notion of "falling in love" would necessarily have to claim that this correlation is zero. Or, since that prediction would fall flat and they would certainly have the common sense not to bet any money on it, start the usual denial with the bumper sticker "correlation is not causality".
Correlation is not causality :-)
I agree on that women go after big wallet. But some part of that is only a correlation, some part is causality.
I think women go more after people, who are succesful than people with money, altough succesful people tend to make money too. Being something (job, whatever)makes you status higher (and you get money for it...)
My hypothesis is that women look those same (1)traits that makes people succesful, plus they look (2) status, which comes with success and they look (3)money (which comes from success).
My hypothesis can be tested and falsified.
1. Find people who were succesful and made their own money
2. Find people who got their money by sheer luck (lottery etc) or via heritage (make sure that these people are not succesful on their own)
3. Find people with heritaged money and self-made success
4. Find people with success and status, but no money (for example famous poor poet)
5. Invent more by yourself
Then just compare them.
- Syltty
Posted by Anonymous | 12:19 PM