Friday, November 09, 2007

Proof of Impossibility Theorem: Step 2

This is a sequel to the previous post.

Ray Fisman, an economist at Columbia University's business school, empirically proved the following. (These are quotations from Fisman's column at Slate.) In choosing whom to date with,

Finding #1: "Men avoided women whom they perceived to be smarter than themselves. The same held true for measures of career ambition—a woman could be ambitious, just not more ambitious than the man considering her for a date. When women were the ones choosing, the more intelligence and ambition the men had, the better."

Finding #2: "Women of all the races we studied revealed a strong preference for men of their own race: White women were more likely to choose white men; black women preferred black men; East Asian women preferred East Asian men; Hispanic women preferred Hispanic men."

Finding #2 is a serious threat to my marriage perspective. In Stockholm, there are very few East Asian women. What's worse, an additional finding says,

"East Asian women did not discriminate against white men (only against black and Hispanic men). As a result, the white man-Asian woman pairing was the most common form of interracial dating—but because of the women's neutrality, not the men's pronounced preference."
So the precious East Asian women in Stockholm are likely to date with white men. (Of course, this assumes external validity of the finding. What happens in U.S. is the same as in Stockholm.)

Proof of the Impossibility Theorem moves one step forward.

Finding #1, on the other hand, implies that the smartest and most ambitious women and the dumbest and least ambitious men are left out. This could be a good news for me, because I'm an outlier. I don't mind dating with a woman who is smarter and more ambitious than myself. But for some reason, finding the smartest and most ambitious women left out in the marriage market is extremely difficult in this world. (The only explanation of this seems to be that the smartest and most ambitious men are smarter and more ambitious than the smartest and most ambitious women, but I don't want to go down this line of reasoning.) Or I'm probably the dumbest and least ambitious man in the world, especially in terms of communication skills.

Proof of the Impossibility Theorem moves one more step forward.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A question for a cosmopolitan Japanese, connoisseur and graduated in the art of living: where is that, in this city called London, I can order for delivery Japanese and oriental flowers?

Thanks,

P
(Humble stonemason of the York Minster)