Lord of the Flies, Bruce Lee, Assortative Mating
Podcast appearance + links and recommendations
Here is my recent conversation with Vivek Ramaswamy on his podcast:
Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.
Apologies to those who planned to see me yesterday at the Leeds Literary Festival. I had an unforeseen medical issue that required immediate attention. I’m fine now, but regrettably had to cancel my book talk.
From the archives
Why people with dark triad personality traits (narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) strategically employ victimhood.
Links and recommendations
Absent-mindedness as dominance behaviour by Joseph Heath
Confessions from an unpleasant woman by Tove K
The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months by Rutger Bregman
No, we haven’t reached ‘peak woke’, it’s going mainstream by Eric Kaufmann
Don’t Legalize Drugs by Theodore Dalrymple
Why I Left Academia (Since You're Wondering) by William Deresiewicz
Follow me on Instagram here. The platform is less volatile and more chill than Twitter, so I post some spicier excerpts from my readings on my IG stories
Three interesting findings
1. The top 1% of earners pay 45.8% of the federal income taxes. (source). I’m far from 1%, but I am learning the truth of that old adage about the government, “the more you make, the more they take.” I’m fine with a progressive tax system. Still, one of the rare times I miss being poor is during tax season. I used to get a few hundred or even a thousand bucks back. Now I send the money I owe and briefly contemplate jumping out a window.
2. The famous actor and martial artist Bruce Lee had a cocaine habit, cheated on his wife, and was found dead in his mistress's hotel room in 1973 (source). So often if you scratch the surface any figure from the late 60s and early 70s, you find this pattern. Then people rewrite history to conceal the pervasive debauchery of that era. I’m curious to see how director Ang Lee is going to approach this in the upcoming Bruce Lee biopic.
3. Correlations between spouses (source)
Extraversion: r= .005
Neuroticism: .082
Height: .227
Weight: .154
Education: .5
Political party: .6
The researchers note that “Mates tend to be positively but weakly concordant on personality and physical traits, but concordance of political attitudes is extremely high.”
Political orientation is a rough proxy for values. And education is a rough proxy for intelligence. People generally favor partners who are similar to themselves in terms of these two characteristics.
In his essay on hypergamy, Scott Alexander writes:
“I know many rich male Google programmers, but I have never seen any of them marry a stunning black girl from the ghetto. Why not? Wouldn’t the hypergamy hypothesis pronounce this a good deal for both of them? He gets a beautiful wife, she gets a rich husband? And it’s not just a race thing, I’ve also never seen them marry a beautiful hillbilly from West Virginia, or a beautiful farmer’s daughter from Modesto. I don’t even really see them marry a beautiful girl from the suburbs with a community college degree.”
I’ve never seen anything like this either. Research from Gregory Clark suggests assortative mating (the trend whereby people choose spouses who are similar to themselves not just in terms of appearance, but in terms of education, intellect, and class background) has endured for centuries and hasn’t changed all that much. People point to the mid-twentieth century and speak about male executives marrying their secretaries. But Clark’s work suggests that smarter executives tended to marry smarter secretaries. In terms of occupational prestige, there was a gap. But underlying abilities still drew people together. What’s on your resume doesn’t seem to matter as much as what’s in your head; though nowadays, as social barriers have dissolved, those two things are more tightly correlated than before. People are pretty good at picking up on these invisible attributes when seeking a long-term partner. This is why I think males dropping out of higher ed won’t have much of an effect on assortative mating. Women can still detect a man’s intellect and overall competence by relying on signals other than educational credentials.
For what it’s worth, I’ve noticed my own long-term relationship history reflects this assortative mating pattern along class lines: