As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, I’m sure that none of you will be shocked to learn that women rate 80 percent of men as “worse-looking than medium.” So, basically, four out of five of us are ugly. Meanwhile, men – the more statistically rigorous of the sexes, it would seem – rate only 50 percent of women as worse-looking than medium.
It’s all laid out in a fascinating article about what happens when you apply the Gini coefficient, a tool used by economists to study inequality, to the dating economy. It’s…not good. “Technology,” concludes Bradford Tuckfield, “has not enabled us to escape the brutal social inequalities dictated by our animal natures.”
This is not to say that we haven’t tried. The institution of monogamy is itself a “redistributive” type of policy: like capping the income of billionaires, it caps the total allowed romantic partners of the most attractive, so that unattractive people have much better chances to find a partner. The marriages that we read about in historical accounts that are based on prudence and family arrangement make more sense when we realize that basing marriage on mutual attraction leads so many—both men and women—to be unsatisfied with the outcome, since most women find most men unattractive.
Explains so much, doesn’t it?
