MADELINE GRANT looks at the mating game- and concludes it's all about the numbers - Institute of Economic Affairs
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
MADELINE GRANT looks at the mating game –
and concludes it’s all about the numbers…
c s D a t i n g
The
Eco n o m i o f
11
I
n 1992, Gary Becker with helping turn the tide to recommend them, were
received the Nobel Prize towards romantic love and the shipped out to colonial India
for extending economic nuclear family by living out to find mates. Nicknamed the
analysis to spheres of their domestic idyll in public. ‘Fishing Fleet,’ these groups
human behaviour previously The couple popularised sought to take advantage of the
considered the preserve of many of the romantic huge surplus of men working
sociologists and psychologists. traditions we nowadays there, compared to available
These included education, take for granted, including ‘marriageable’ women.
racial discrimination, medicine, engagement rings, the white It didn’t take long for East
drug addiction and even wedding dress and gift-giving India Company officials to see
traffic flows. on anniversaries. a business opportunity. Rather
Becker’s ‘people-centric’ Yet the expansion of the than paying women to travel
approach has been hugely family unit developed from out to India, the company
influential, and he remains one economic realities as well as realised they could start
of the most cited economists of changing sensibilities. charging husband-seekers
the last 50 years. who had been unable to
Industrialisation and the make a good match at home,
One of Becker’s key insights boom in material wealth so desperate were families
was simply that humans triggered a huge expansion to offload their unwed
respond to supply, demand of the middle classes. Millions daughters.
and incentives away from of additional households
traditional arenas like the could establish themselves as In China, the legacy and
labour market. independent economic units skewed demographics of the
for the first time, away from One Child Policy have left a
In a seminal paper, he highly competitive marriage
emphasised marriage as a extended families.
market, where decision-making
crucial, if neglected issue The inward-looking, power rests with women.
to which economic analysis traditional nuclear family
should be applied. with its emphasis on This, combined with the
companionship and division of fact that Chinese women are
‘Econ 101’ may seem like a increasingly well-educated
clunky and unromantic way labour into ‘separate spheres’,
was hugely influenced by and financially independent,
to view love, but people have means that men must work
harder than ever to capture a
ROYAL COURTSHIP… IT WASN’T woman’s heart, by signalling
their trustworthiness and
UNTIL THE VICTORIAN ERA THAT ability to provide.
LOVE AND COMPANIONSHIP WERE Chances of marrying in this
female-scarce environment
WIDELY ACCEPTED AS are materially increased by
PRE-REQUISITES FOR MARRIAGE owning your own home. One
survey of Chinese mothers
found that more than four
employed economic principles these shifts. Even the concept fifths would object to their
in their relationship decision- of ‘dating’ didn’t exist until daughters marrying a non-
making for generations. industrialisation and changing homeowner.
demographic trends expanded In contrast, societies where
Economic trends govern freedom, leisure time and
even our basic understanding men are in short supply tend
disposable income. towards permissiveness and
of love. Although Jane
Austen wrote about it, and Throughout history, scarcity lower levels of commitment.
Shakespeare’s Romeo and on the dating market has The First World War had a
Juliet acted it out, it wasn’t impacted our behaviour in seismic impact on romantic
until the Victorian era that significant, if hidden ways. behaviour. More than 700,000
love and companionship Between the 17th and early British men were killed during
were widely accepted as pre- 20th centuries, thousands of World War One, with as many
requisites for marriage. otherwise ‘unmarriageable’ left seriously wounded or
In Britain, Queen Victoria British women, the illegitimate incapacitated. According to
and Prince Albert are credited or those without dowries the 1921 UK census, there
12
COVER STORY
Recent years have seen a surge
in online dating apps, led by
number-crunchers and maths
majors in Silicon Valley. These
allow users to bypass many
of the traditional obstacles to
meeting new people, thereby
expanding their own personal
dating market.
According to economic
theory, increasing the size of
were 1,209 single women for the market in this way should In heterosexual apps, women
every 1,000 men aged 25-29. improve dating by making are often in short supply
successful matches more likely, and effectively the ‘shared
Following the war, many
which is largely borne out in resource’. Female users of apps
blamed jazz music and even
the evidence. like Tinder tend to lose patience
the burgeoning automobile
and interest if bombarded
for the emergence of the Survey data suggest that
with ‘low-quality’ messages.
‘Flapper’ generation and online dating generally
Since it usually costs no
the growing permissiveness leads to ‘better matches’ and
money to match with
documented in poems like TS greater reported happiness
someone, the opportunities
Eliot’s The Waste Land. – presumably because of the
for such messages are
Yet a far more likely wider choice of partners.
explanation is simply a good
old-fashioned
game. Author Jon Birger
numbers APP-Y EVER AFTER? SURVEY DATA
hypothesises that the wartime SUGGESTS ONLINE DATING GENERALLY
death toll created a lopsided
dating market which persisted
LEADS TO BETTER MATCHES AND
into the ‘Roaring 20s’. The GREATER REPORTED HAPPINESS
remaining men, responding
to their inflated value on the Online and app-based dating practically endless.
marriage market, ‘shopped carry especial benefits for
The app Bumble has
around’ and postponed people whose preferences make
attempted to correct this
commitment. discovering partners harder
by only letting women send
Birger believes similar due to social or geographical
messages first, thus shifting
demographic disparities isolation. One big winner
the power balance, lowering
drive contemporary ‘hookup has been same-sex dating,
the possibility of vast amounts
culture’, particularly on which necessarily operates in a
of meaningless messages
college campuses. smaller pool than heterosexual
being sent from men (and of
romance and is illegal or socially
Women in the UK are now women abandoning the app
unacceptable in many places
35% more likely than men to in frustration).
around the world.
attend university. American One of the most powerful
women outnumber men at Yet the skewed gender
arguments against the
most universities, sometimes ratio on many apps can
hubris of central planners is
by ratios of more than 3-1. also destabilise. Men, in the
the ubiquity of markets. As
When men ‘control’ the main, outnumber women on
Gary Becker knew - and the
dating market through supply heterosexual apps (two-to-
modern-day dating scene
and demand, hookup culture one on Tinder).
attests - even our personal
quickly becomes the norm, This disparity can in turn relationships can’t be divorced
as single males, like their trigger an economic effect from economics•
forebears in the 1920s, play known as the ‘Tragedy of the
the field and delay marriage. Madeline Grant
Commons’, where individuals
Madeline is the former
However, just as economic try to reap the greatest benefit
Editorial Manager at the
trends shape our fates on from a given resource, yet end
Institute of Economic Affairs.
the dating market, data and up hurting the common good of
She’s now on the Comment
algorithms offer solutions to all individuals in their
team at the Daily Telegraph.
some of the associated pitfalls. shared setting.
13You can also read
