#173： Date-onomics -- How Skewed Sex Ratios on College Campuses Are Affecting Courtship and Marriage
Episode Stats
Summary
In the past few decades, there s been a lot of ink spilled about the changing mores in the world of romance in the western world. Social critics have been sounding alarm about the hookup culture, the declining rates of marriage, and the rise of cohabitation. Well, my guest today on the podcast has just published a book where he says it s not so much changing values as changing demographics that s underlying the shift in dating and marriage behaviors. His name is John Berger and he s the author of the book Datanomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast in the past few
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decades there's been a lot of ink spilled about the changing mores in the world of romance in
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the western world a lot of social critics have been sounding alarm about the hookup culture
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the declining rates of marriage and the rise of cohabitation there's often times a lot of the
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reasons put out there why these shifts are happening is you know changing values in the
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western world well my guest today on the podcast has just published a book where he says it's not
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so much changing values as changing demographics that's underlying the shift in dating in marriage
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behaviors his name is john berger he's the author of the book datanomics how dating became a lopsided
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numbers game and today on the podcast we discuss the research that john highlights in his book about
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how sex ratios that is the number of men to women or women and men can affect dating behavior mating
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behavior in men and women it's a really fascinating discussion about dating so if you are in the dating
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world right now you're going to find a lot of insights even if you're not you might find some
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insights as a parent that you've probably seen and you've wondered why what's going on here now you'll
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understand maybe have a new way to look at what understand what's going on so without further ado
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john berger welcome to the show brett thanks for having me on you just published a really interesting
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book it's called datanomics and it takes a really interesting approach to dating and love life and
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romance and marriage it takes a looks at demographics and almost takes it like a economic approach and
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so this led you to these interesting sociological even uh darwinian theories about how sex ratios or
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demographics can affect i guess we'll call it mating behavior or dating behavior so how what are some
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these theories about how sex ratios can affect how men and women uh mate or partner up well so there's
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been a surprising amount of social science and behavioral science on gender ratios um and actually
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most of it kind of grew out of of animal studies out of zoology so zoologists who who've looked at
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species that are nominally monogamous or at least monogamous during mating season one of the
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things that they found is that the odds of the of the male abandoning his feet or his female mate
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tend to rise and fall depending upon the prevailing sex ratio in the mating population
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um so sociologists and psychologists kind of use the the animal research to look at human behavior
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and what they found is that when men are the ones in oversupply the whole dating culture is more
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likely to emphasize monogamy and courtship and romance and marriage rates are higher that kind of
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thing but when women are in oversupply um the dating culture does not emphasize monogamy there's kind of a
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more freewheeling sexuality um marriage rates go down divorce rates go up out of wedlock births go up
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and basically the whole culture becomes more sexualized because men are in no rush to settle
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down right so this kind of this is where the economics sort of angle comes in at it right so
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i guess when there's more women available there's more opportunity for men like there's really no
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reason to settle down and you can cast your wild oats right there's more of a you're more for men
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there's more in their self-interest to do that than to settle down with just one woman
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right no exactly so and and i should i should preface this by saying overall in the u.s
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there are just as many women as men um the the problem i write about in the book specifically refers
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to college educated people right so this is what you mean by the man deficit right right so so the
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obviously the u.s is not china we're not india um there isn't like this this structural imbalance
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where you actually have more men than women overall because of female infanticide or sex
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selection or things like that uh overall you know our our numbers are about the same the problem is
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that women have been have been attending college at a much higher rate than men going back you know
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like for the past 10 years it's been four women graduating for every three men 20 years ago it was
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about five women for every four men so basically for millennials you have about 35 percent more
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female college graduates than male college graduates and this might not matter if we were all more
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open-minded about whom we date and marry but at the same time this has happened there's been an
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increase in what sociologists uh like to call assortative mating which is a fancy way of saying we tend to
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marry our own type um in other words college grads tend to marry other college grads and and and people
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have become more rigid about this over time you know the the odds of a college grad marrying a non-college
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grad are lower today than any point over the past 50 years so for men this kind of i guess you could
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call it classism or closed-mindedness it doesn't really penalize them because there's such a big
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oversupply of women but for women for college educated women it has two effects one by limiting
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their dating pool to only college educated men they're making it statistically harder for them
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to find a match but but they're also kind of um giving those college college grad men too much leverage
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and they're kind of giving them the ability to act badly because these guys know they're in in high
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supply i'm sorry high demand yeah so i mean there's a lot to unpack there so i mean why have fewer men
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been going to college in the world why have more women going to college than men is it a matter of is it
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economics where it's i mean men could um there's more of a payoff to just go to work right away than to
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go to college or is it just the changing the economy what's going on there well you could talk
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to you could interview 10 people on this and you might get you know 10 different answers i'll give
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you my answer but i'm going to preface it by saying yeah there are other thoughts on this but i i don't
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think it's the economy um i think this basically boils down to some child development issues which we all
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need to focus on more so if we had this conversation in the 50s the numbers would have
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essentially been reversed um it would have been about 60 men in college for every 40 women and
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obviously you know 50 years ago there were different things going on that you know the college
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the school public school curricula kind of um uh advantaged boys and discriminated against girls and
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certainly colleges when it came to admissions um were clearly discriminating against female
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applicants because there was this this silly embedded idea out there that women only went to college to
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get their mrs degree um and the the passage of title nine in the 70s leveled the playing field
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and it made discrimination in in education illegal um so over time that leveled the playing field and
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and by the early 80s we got to 50 50 when it comes to college enrollment um so the question is how do we
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get from um equal numbers of men and women attending college in the early 80s to 35 percent more women than
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men today and my argument is that the old discrimination that used to exist um against women it kind of
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obscured a fundamental biological truth and that is that boys brains lag about a year behind girls
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brains when it comes to intellectual and social maturity and if you if you're a parent we all kind of
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intuit this and feel this i mean if i mean my i have teenage boys and hopefully they won't listen to
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this but maybe they they probably know it as well i mean if you if you are around teenagers you kind of
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know that a 16 or a 17 year old girl is essentially a young woman while a 16 year old boy
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is still very much a boy and um and this comes out in in education and researchers and and neurologists
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who've studied this will tell you that um a the boy of the brain of say a 10 year old girl um is
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close to that of an 11 year old boy when it comes to development and brain development so the boys are
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like lagging a year behind the girls and that's why when it comes to actual school work and college
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preparation the girls are better at it gotcha so the more more boys aren't going to college they're just
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not ready for it right well they're they're falling behind in school so 70 of high school
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valedictorians last year were girls girls get better grades they have fewer behavioral problems
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when it comes to school so when it comes to you know primary and secondary education boys are falling
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behind and the fact that they're falling behind one of the consequences is that girls are attending
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college at a higher rate gotcha gotcha that makes sense um so we i guess one of the solutions and
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we'll get to that i guess we probably better talk about at the end is uh possibly holding boys back
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in school yes right we'll talk more detail about that in a bit but um let's go back to this
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assortative mating because i think it's interesting because yeah there's a lot of there's been a lot of
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writing uh ink spilled about this topic that the rich are marrying the rich while the poor are
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marrying the poor where there was a time in our country's history where there's a lot more
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uh inter i guess cross social um relationships but i think it's interesting it wasn't wasn't that
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like primarily men who would marry like college educated men who would marry women who didn't
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have a college education and i guess is it like women are there's something going on there either
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because we're conditioned socially where there's this tendency not to want to marry quote unquote down
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right well i i think the trend has been that way for both men and it's for both men and women okay
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so so men are less likely to marry down i don't love that i hate that phrase but i guess like it's
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the only way to right convey it um men are less likely to a college educated man is also less
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likely to marry somebody lacking a college degree compared to 50 years ago but as i said that that
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the man who who is close-minded about dating he's not penalized in the same way the woman is because
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the supply of college educated women is so great right so so the the trend has been the same for men
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and women in terms of of of this increase in the sorts of mating um it just affects the women
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differently gotcha so um where are i mean you talk about there's pockets in the country where
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this man deficit is pretty extreme what are some of those pockets and maybe you can highlight some
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of the stories you've heard uh of i don't know what you want to call it but just debauchery or just
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like you know uh men who are just going out and just basically having a great time while it's
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really hard for women yeah well let's start with the geography so i have to admit when i began work
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on the book um i thought my research was going to end up someplace different from where it did
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initially i assumed what i call the man deficit was some kind of of a phenomenon unique to
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big cosmopolitan cities like new york or la or or chicago or london places like that what was so
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interesting was that that this is not a big city phenomenon and in fact the the man deficit in say
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montana is bigger than it is in new york city so um and actually there are lots of rural states where
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that the the the dating market is much more lopsided than what you find in in big cities so
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montana has 52 percent um more college grad women than men who are age 22 to 29 um oklahoma it's 45
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percent uh texas 40 percent west virginia 61 percent so new york state it's 30 percent which is still big
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but um you know what's interesting is that some of these more rural states the the the dating market
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is even more lopsided when it comes to college educated people than than in new york or california
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interesting so to your your your question about behavior um let me just say from the start that i'm i try
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hard in the book and when talking about the book not to come across like the morality police yeah i
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noticed that you did a good job with that yeah i mean i'm not you know i'm not um i'm not trying to
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shame people about their sex lives or say that only men are into the hookup culture or no men want to
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get married or women can't enjoy you know enjoy sexual freedoms i mean i really i'm not even endorsing
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marriage for that matter so i i you know i when i talk sometimes when i tell these stories it makes
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it sound like i'm judging these people for their sex lives and i'm really not i'm just trying to
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explain why the world is the way it is sure okay so but but it is clear to me that that in
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in in dating markets where men have all the leverage um the men become pickier and they become
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uh less inclined to settle down and the women sensing that they're at a disadvantage um
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and i don't know whether this is conscious or subconscious but but the whole dating climate
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and sexual climate becomes looser because the men are the ones who are essentially making the rules
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um so yeah i interviewed plenty of of women who felt like they were being used and taken advantage of
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uh by uh by men who only wanted to sleep with them and then after a date or two you know they never
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heard from them again um or from men who kind of felt like um you know they didn't have much success
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dating wise in high school or college and suddenly things are going pretty well for that for them in
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the late 20s and of course they're going to be in no rush to settle down because they finally have a chance
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to do what they always wanted to do so i would i would hear you know stories like that if you want more
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you want me to go into more more details no i mean i think we can begin to kind of people get the
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general idea um i think it's interesting too but you talk about you go into depth about campuses
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colleges yeah right and this was sort of i mean it is sort of controversial there's all this um in the
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past year or so a lot of this uh a lot of controversy about you know the rape culture that exists on
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campuses and there's uh i guess there's some folks out there they're making the case that
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because that there are more women on college campuses than men it's sort of i don't want to
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say it promotes it but it encourages more like looser sexual mores and then you get something that
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looks i don't know if you want to say that it's that's the rape culture but it kind of promotes
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that in a way well i mean that's my argument and that now that there's been there's been a ton of
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research on how sex ratios affect or correlations between gender ratios and rates of sexual
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assault and all these studies what they point to and it sounds counterintuitive but what they point
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to is that um when men are scarce um rates of sexual assault are higher and it doesn't make sense
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when like you why would you why you know why would there being fewer men lead to more rapes
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but what seems to be happening is that men um value women less and protect them less when women are in
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an oversupply you know and there was a fascinating study that came out of china uh it was done by an
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economist at columbia university and she looked at crime rates in china as china's overall
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gender ratio among young people began to skew more and more male for you know for well-known reasons
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um and what she found is that um most types of crime as the population became disproportionately male
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most types of crime went up and that kind of makes sense because men are more prone to criminality so
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when it came to property crimes or or murder or things like that the crime rates went up as as as
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uh the male population grew in relation to the female population the only type of major crime where
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there was a a um a significant decline was sexual assault um that so as the as in china as the
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population became more male it actually became safer for women when it came to sexual assault
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and again the argument is that that when when men when women are scarce men treat them better and i know
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it sounds awful in some ways but that seems to be what the science indicates it's interesting and i
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think it's interesting you'd highlight there's college counselors or you know people on on can
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universities who are aware of this research but they can't talk about it because of title nine and
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that's kind of the the gist that i got from the book look i mean i do think that there's a there's a
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a fundamental awareness that there's a correlate i mean not everybody but i do think
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people on college campuses and i i quote a um a student like a student counselor a psychologist at
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nyu and and certainly in her own in her research she's aware that there's a correlation between
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um increasingly lopsided gender ratios on campus nyu has 50 percent more women than men
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uh and the hookup culture uh and the hookup culture i you know i don't want to push this too far and say
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that the hookup culture is the same as the rape culture because it's it's different um um but i i think
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i i think that the the the lopsided gender ratios kind of uh contribute to similar things so in with the
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hookup culture it it um it it basically gives men more leverage and allows them to um uh to to de-emphasize
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commitment in favor of opportunity so to speak and then when it comes to rape i i do believe that um
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that you know i i had one woman in new york when she was taught she wasn't talking about sexual assault
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but she made a comment that i found um uh perfect you know moving in some ways she she told me a lot
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of men don't view don't view women as people uh when she was complaining about her dating situation
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and i kind of feel that's what's going on when it comes to sexual assault that that um that women
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have been devalued in some way in the minds of men on these campuses and that that is contributing
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to um to sexual violence on college campuses now i i'm not like excusing it i don't think it's
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inevitable i do believe if we if colleges you know we're a little more i think colleges should be
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looking at this topic and investing it investigating it and talking about it and i believe if we focus
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more attention on it and and and shine the spotlight on it the behavior would change because
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that's what happens i mean if you unless you talk about it you're not going to be able to change the
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behavior right so the idea you kind of made the case that you know by talking about it maybe you'll
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have more women decide to go to colleges where there are more men right and sort of everything
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was sort of even out eventually wasn't that kind of right well yeah i mean that's part of it but i also
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think yeah it's more than that so i mean the the the human brain this is a a different example but
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the human brain is also hardwired to uh we have we have an extreme panic reflex and um we tend to fear
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the unknown and that's because the human brain evolved at the time when escaping bad weather or
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escaping um uh wild animals or a unfamiliar tribe or something like that that it was in the it was
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in humans best interest to in terms of self-preservation to escape so we have kind of a an exaggerated
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panic reflex now so you could if i wanted to or somebody could make the argument that racism
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is kind of hardwired into our brains because we're pre-programmed to fear the unknown well the reality
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is that you know that that you know humans learn and we have an ability to kind of overcome um our our
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kind of natural inclinations and and and when it comes to issues of race and ethnicity i think this
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is a good example of that that that that we don't give in to kind of our worst instincts and we we learn
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from them and i kind of feel like something similar could happen on college campuses if we were more
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up front and and kind of confronted the fact that these gender ratios do tend to devalue women so i
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think it's interesting in the book you talk about the sex demographic problems that are unique to two
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specific religious groups uh mormons and jews first i mean why did you or not just jews it's orthodox
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jews let's get specific here um how did you uncover these two why did you highlight these
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two groups are they just microcosms of that illuminate the general issues that are coming up
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with uh skewed sex ratios well this was actually the last chapter i wrote but it happened to be
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it turned out to be my favorite um so you know as i was writing and researching the book i would have
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people come up to me and people either so people i interviewed for the book or just friends and
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family who i talked to about the book they would say things like well you know with the hookup culture
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and people not getting married in in as great numbers as they used to couldn't it just be the
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times have changed couldn't it be that that sexual mores have changed and that's why there's more of a
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hookup culture and that argument always irritated me because the thing is sexual mores do not change for
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no reason you know like that like there's there seemed to be this this notion out there that all
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these kind of social values and and sexual mores kind of inevitably moved from from conservative to
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libertine over time and i don't agree with that i think i think there's always a root cause behind why
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why why our values why our mores change and the reason i began to look at religious groups is
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because i wanted to see if i could find a religious group that had um an imbalanced gender ratio um and i
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could show that despite the fact that this group was rooted in very conservative values that gen that
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lopsided gender ratios were affecting marriage or affecting behavior in these communities the same way
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it affects um secular people on the upper east side of manhattan um so i i began to look at the agenda
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ratios within um religious communities and one of the things i found is that while um pretty much all
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religious groups have slightly more women than men because men tend to fall away from organized religion
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at a higher rate um mormons particularly mormons in utah tend to have a particularly lopsided gender
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ratio uh one of the studies out there indicated that there are um three mormon women for every two
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mormon men in the state of utah it's a little less imbalanced outside of utah but but um but in utah
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it's very lopsided so i began exploring how this affects dating and marriage and as i was working on
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and i actually got a call from a hedge fund manager who wanted to interview me about a job and i
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explained that he was a friend of a friend and i explained to him that i was working on this book
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and i told him about the mormons and he he paused he said huh that sounds a lot like the shidduk crisis
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and i mean i'm jewish but obviously not jewish enough because the shidduk crisis refers to a marriage
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crisis within the the orthodox particularly the ultra orthodox um community um within you know
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the ultra ortho it's a orthodox jews are not the majority of jews in the in the u.s but they're a
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very tight-knit group um and there's a they have their own marriage crisis and it's in in their case
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it's also because of of lopsided gender ratios although it's not that overall there are more
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women than men it's that you have 18 year old men 18 year old women marrying 22 year old men
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and because they're the orthodox birth rate is so high each one-year age cohort um has more people
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than the one that preceded it so there are more 18 year olds than 19 year olds more 19 year olds and
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20 year olds and so on and so on so if you have 22 year old men marrying 18 year old women there
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aren't going to be enough women i'm sorry they're not going to meet up men um and and that's why you
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have this imbalance in the orthodox community and for both mormons and orthodox jews this oversupply of
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women has created problems it's it's basically um created a sense of entitlement among the men
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and it's created a sense of competition among the women yeah i mean you talked about something i guess
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because these are fairly conservative religious groups i mean they're not they're not uh the men
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aren't uh having sex all the time they're probably i guess they're putting off marriage longer than
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the norms would would would want them to hold off marriage yeah i i i don't get the sense that
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you know that uh good mormons in salt lake city are spending a lot of time on tinder
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or kind of watching explicit rap videos or things like that um so it's not it's not pop culture that's
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affecting sexual mores in in utah or in um in in ultra orthodox neighborhoods in brooklyn or or other
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parts of the country but uh you did notice some of the behavior that you see that's being that people
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have noticed that's changed in these two communities amongst women so the men are you know they're
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putting off marriage and i guess the women are getting more competitive so i guess you talked
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about in utah there's um a lot of plastic surgery amongst women yeah so there's there's a um
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a a consumer review site that's kind of like the leading online review site for plastic surgery and and
00:28:30.840
they did a survey a couple years ago and they found that on a per capita basis salt lake city leads the
00:28:36.680
nation in breast augmentation yeah which is which is you know to somebody who's not from utah and who's
00:28:43.620
not mormon i mean to me that's like confounding and baffling because the idea of mormons rushing out
00:28:51.540
to get breast augmentation it just doesn't mesh with with what the rest of us think of that community
00:28:59.320
as being so so kind of buttoned down conservative right i mean it's a i mean it's a
00:29:06.680
i don't know if there's a way to prove this scientifically but i do have a sense that um
00:29:12.200
you know women in utah are already above average in terms of attractive right it's that whole like
00:29:19.800
swedish decennia they came over the pioneers i don't know maybe i'll get in trouble for saying
00:29:24.620
that right my sense so so if you're you know it's already a very competitive marriage market for
00:29:32.380
women so i just think there's this added pressure on women to um to do everything they can to improve
00:29:40.840
their marriage odds and i spoke to to to women mormon women in utah who were telling me when they go to a
00:29:47.260
singles event you know it's it's very common for there to be twice as many women as men um which is
00:29:54.940
even worse than the numbers i you know i've um cited from that trinity college study and this
00:30:02.380
effect on women isn't just having affecting mormon women but you talk about in the orthodox jewish
00:30:07.500
community uh there's this pressure to lose a lot of weight and so there's um eating disorders
00:30:13.040
problems there's eating disorders and plastic surgery so so we'll start i mean the
00:30:17.860
in the ultra orthodox community um typically they're using matchmakers to pair young men and
00:30:28.360
women for marriage and they're not exactly arranged marriages but they're kind of guided you know i mean
00:30:36.020
people can say no obviously um and nobody's there are no shotgun weddings but but but the tradition is
00:30:42.500
to use matchmakers to kind of pair young men and women for marriage and one of the expectations for
00:30:49.520
the women is that they will provide a resume um which which the men can look over and 20 years ago the
00:30:57.280
resume was pretty mundane it included things like you know who your parents are who your grandparents
00:31:03.020
were you know if you if if you had a great grandparent who was a famous rabbi that would actually
00:31:08.200
improve your odds your your your um your standing in the marriage market actually still does um but
00:31:15.220
but but most of most you know may ask like your religious background things like that how religious
00:31:20.520
you are and what what branch of orthodox judaism you come from nowadays these resumes um you know a lot
00:31:29.080
of the women include glossy glamour photos with the resumes and one of the questions or a couple of the
00:31:36.080
questions the women are expected to answer is not only their own um dress size or weight but the the young
00:31:45.200
men want to know the dress size of their moms too and that's because they want to be able to project
00:31:51.680
after she has five or six kids is she going to be able to keep her figure and you know i mean it's it's funny
00:31:59.220
in some respects but it's it's sickening in in when you think about it because these are not 22 or 23
00:32:07.720
year old women who are going through this which would be bad enough these are 17 and 18 year old young
00:32:13.020
women who are expected to appear as marriageable as possible um at a very young age when this is when
00:32:21.100
this should not be what they're worried about and as you said there is this problem of uh of anorexia
00:32:28.500
within the orthodox community um and the plastic surgery thing is out there as well so there was a
00:32:36.420
an author um uh a woman who wrote a uh she writes a lot of jewish religious books and she wrote a
00:32:45.860
column for a jewish newspaper um basically urging the parents of young women to invest in plastic surgery
00:32:55.620
in order to um to improve their their daughter's marriage odds and i mean i i in the book as you may
00:33:05.900
recall i i ripped into this author um and she was really mad at me after the fact and she emailed me
00:33:12.460
and called me all sorts of names and one of her arguments in response was well i arranged plastics or i
00:33:19.500
arranged nose jobs for a bunch of these girls for free and wouldn't you know it some of these
00:33:25.040
18 year old girls wound up getting getting married after i got them nose jobs and like i'm thinking to
00:33:32.040
myself like i mean it it drives me bonkers that she she thinks this is rationalizing the objectification
00:33:40.460
of of of young women but that seems to be the culture interesting i mean were you in your research
00:33:46.840
you able to uncover like are these two groups doing anything to solve this problem are they
00:33:51.280
taking proactive steps or are they just like well it's just the way it is yeah i mean i i think there
00:33:55.620
are definitely components or elements in both communities who realize what's going on so so for
00:34:00.400
mormons um you know i i don't think you would get any leaders in the church to admit this but i i do
00:34:07.800
believe that one of the motivations when they lowered the mission age um i think it was you would know
00:34:14.660
bearer than me but it used to be used to be 19 used to be 19 and now it's what 17 or 18 18 18 um i think
00:34:21.900
what was happening so the age in which young men are most likely to become apostates or to leave
00:34:27.520
organized religion is in their late teens and early 20s and for mormons that's a problem because that's the
00:34:35.280
exact time when they go on mission and there's no doubt there are plenty of um young men who would
00:34:42.140
rather get on with their lives either education or work rather than take two years off to do mission
00:34:48.620
plus the mission as you know is expensive i mean it's the missionaries and their families pay for
00:34:53.900
the mission not the church um so uh now again you would know better than me but certainly 30 40 years
00:35:02.800
ago i think there was less pressure on on lds men to to go on mission you could you could skip a mission
00:35:11.480
and um there wouldn't necessarily be a huge stigma attached to it it wouldn't be a great thing but but
00:35:18.120
you could still have a leadership role in the lds church if you had not been a missionary nowadays
00:35:23.660
there's a lot of social pressure as you know to go on mission and you'll see mormon blogs with
00:35:29.800
young women debating whether it's okay to marry or date a non-rm which non-returning missionary um
00:35:35.960
in this so this social pressure on the men who forego missions i think has has increased the
00:35:43.760
the um the apostasy rate among men and because if they stay in the church there's a stigma attached to
00:35:52.580
them and i think this kind of incentivizes them to leave but but getting back to the point about the
00:35:59.440
mission age i think if you can i think if the if young men begin their mission before they start
00:36:05.620
work or before they begin school maybe they're they're more likely or less likely to forego a
00:36:12.120
mission and based on the missionary numbers i i think there definitely are a lot more young men
00:36:18.860
doing missions now than there were before the um yeah there was a big bump yeah right afterwards so
00:36:24.960
what about in the um the orthodox jewish community so uh what's so fascinating about the orthodox
00:36:32.000
community is that there's this natural control group um so for about half the orthodox community
00:36:39.160
there's this significant age gap um between the sexes of marriage you have 18 19 year old young women
00:36:46.720
marrying men who are 22 23 or 24 and that's because the young men don't get married until they finish
00:36:54.920
um attending yeshiva which is a jewish seminary and maybe there's a year of religious study in
00:37:01.220
israel involved as well so until they're done with their religious studies they typically don't get
00:37:06.160
married however there is a segment of the orthodox community known as hasidic jews who don't do this
00:37:13.400
basically everybody gets married at age 18 and in the hasidic community there is no shudda crisis
00:37:20.000
um you know the and when you talk to hasidic jews about this supposed marriage crisis and this
00:37:26.160
oversupply of women that they have no idea what you're talking about and that's because that they
00:37:32.240
are they're um you know the men and women are marrying at the same age and i think in the non-hasidic
00:37:39.480
um orthodox community i think some of the rabbis have realized what's going on and they understand
00:37:46.160
that this basically boils down to a demographic problem that there are just more 18 year old
00:37:52.360
women than 22 year old men and they've been they've been trying to encourage um men to marry women their
00:38:01.040
own age um and there have been some incentives put in place to do that i don't know how much success
00:38:08.240
it's having and my own take on this and i'm you know i'm not i'm not a highly religious person and i'm
00:38:14.920
sure an orthodox rabbi would would offer up many reasons why my suggestion is is wrong but it's my
00:38:23.820
belief that it would be an act of kindness if um orthodox rabbis would uh basically um refuse to
00:38:33.020
marry off women until they turn 20 or 21 or 22 because that would allow some of the the older women have
00:38:42.060
yet to find their match to to get married and it would it would and also there shouldn't be this
00:38:47.340
this pressure on 17 and 18 year old young women or girls to appear marriageable um and i think i think
00:38:55.080
it would be healthier if if the community would just sort of say look let's push back the age of
00:39:01.360
marriage particularly for women gotcha so i know your book's primarily descriptive you're describing
00:39:06.360
things that are going on but you do make some prescriptions based off of the data some
00:39:11.280
suggestions you know as i was reading this look i'm i'm a father of a girl she's only two but when
00:39:17.920
i was reading i was like i was getting like really depressed for her it's like man that's that's a
00:39:21.500
rough world you're going into and and i don't want her to have to go to these crazy extremes that you
00:39:25.680
highlight in the book you know of having to like be really hyper sensitive about how you how she looks
00:39:31.220
and just decided to go through all this rigmarole with guys who are kind of flaky yeah so i mean any
00:39:35.460
advice for parents out there who have daughters that they can help prepare them for a fulfilling
00:39:41.420
romantic life and eventually a family life without all the stress that a lot of women are facing today
00:39:47.180
well i mean this is advice i guess for for the women themselves as well as for the parents and i think
00:39:54.000
one of them would be to um uh to kind of consider geography when you're um when you're settling down
00:40:04.420
so um there are certain cities like providence rhode island or new york city that are just particularly
00:40:11.080
bad for women um and there are other cities like seattle or or san francisco or san jose or san diego
00:40:19.460
where where the demographics are more women friendly now the obvious caveat is that most
00:40:26.080
people are not going to like plan their whole lives around gender ratios so right this is like
00:40:32.500
advice i think if you had a daughter who was just graduating from college this this coming may or
00:40:37.280
june i think that's the kind of thing you might want might want to be on her checklist if she's
00:40:42.200
marriage-minded uh but again i'm not assuming everybody is marriage-minded um another thing to keep in
00:40:48.600
mind would be um if you do want to get married and you put a high priority on on marriage and becoming
00:40:56.860
a mother um there's an advantage to getting serious about dating earlier rather than later so i i guess i
00:41:06.320
i interviewed and i know a lot of women who decided to put all their their focus on career in their 20s
00:41:14.020
and early 30s and figured they would just meet somebody at at 32 or 33 and i'm certainly not
00:41:20.200
saying that that's a bad idea if if you're career-minded i mean it's a great idea if you're
00:41:26.220
career-minded the the problem is that if you start out in a lopsided dating pool um the numbers move
00:41:34.220
against you over time which is why holding out becomes a bad strategy so i assume you and most of
00:41:41.900
your listeners probably played musical chairs as a child right yeah so as you may recall in the first
00:41:47.460
round of musical chairs i mean there's one fewer chair than players but but really in the first round
00:41:52.800
like everybody gets a chair except for the kid who's not paying attention right yeah um but in the last
00:41:58.180
round of musical chairs you have a 50 chance of losing the game and that's kind of what happens in
00:42:04.760
dating so i'm just going to use round numbers if you start out with a dating pool that has 140
00:42:10.700
women and 100 men which is 1.4 women for every one man it's it starts out lopsided but it gets worse
00:42:20.420
over time so once half of those women once 70 of those women marry 70 of the men the remaining dating
00:42:28.480
pool becomes 70 single women versus 30 single men which is a greater than two to one ratio so i think
00:42:37.380
this explains why in cities like new york and la and chicago we all know these fabulous women in
00:42:45.060
their 30s who who can't seem to meet a decent guy and it's it's not because they're not attractive or
00:42:52.240
they're not good company or anything like that it's because the demographics have moved against them
00:42:57.400
so so this is a long-winded way of me saying you know get serious about dating a little bit younger
00:43:02.660
it doesn't mean you have to have kids i mean i got married in my when i was 24 and i didn't have
00:43:07.180
kids until i was 30 yeah but um and then finally um and this gets back to what we talked about earlier
00:43:16.200
i i think we all need to be more open-minded when it comes to educational background um you know they
00:43:23.640
the the the idea that that a college degree makes you a better husband or a better wife i mean i i don't
00:43:31.060
think that's true um and i think we need you know we need to get past this idea that we can only date
00:43:38.640
or marry people who are just like us um and in fact you know not long after the book came out i got
00:43:44.780
a um i got a a twitter message from a woman who told me she met her husband of four or five years
00:43:54.320
um after she unchecked the college graduate box on her online dating site interesting
00:44:00.380
so yeah it's kind of help your daughters realize you can marry a firefighter who doesn't have a
00:44:06.000
college degree but he's a good solid dude exactly gotcha so uh as i was reading this too i mean it
00:44:12.400
seems like the man deficit if you're a man you're a young guy in your 20s even you know in your 40s
00:44:17.120
it sounds like uh it could be an unmitigated boon for you if what you're looking for is just as
00:44:22.120
many sexual relationships as you as possible but it seems like the downside would be that there
00:44:27.160
there are guys who might be you know they want to settle down they have that in mind but
00:44:31.960
they it could cause them to be too picky and they eventually just don't settle down because
00:44:37.280
they're trying to maximize wife i guess material has i don't know that's kind of a dumb way to put
00:44:42.360
it is that a problem with i have a friend who wrote a a much uh talked about story for the new
00:44:49.120
york times a couple weeks ago about this very topic and he's uh he's a a manhattan man in his
00:44:55.960
early 30s in his i'm sorry his early 40s who um you know he's been enjoying the single life for a
00:45:02.020
while but now all of his friends are married and he's kind of feeling lonely so there is this kind
00:45:08.220
of issue of of men who don't know when it's time to time to stop so i mean what are you suggestions
00:45:15.240
for them just kind of they have to decide like okay i'm going to get married by this age and so
00:45:19.600
they can get out of that loop of trying to maximize i don't know i i don't know i i tried i tried
00:45:27.460
carefully i'm not assuming everybody wants to get right or everybody's heterosexual or right certain
00:45:33.720
no doubt marriage is not for everyone you know i mean i i acknowledge that so some of these guys might
00:45:40.720
be better off never getting married some women may be better off never getting married too but
00:45:46.840
i i guess what i would say is that if you do want to get married someday um and you're with somebody
00:45:57.180
who truly makes you happy and who you know you're compatible with um you know don't treat the
00:46:05.140
relationship casually just because you know that there are many more fish in the sea
00:46:08.960
that makes perfect sense common sense advice there so john this has been a really fascinating
00:46:14.620
conversation and we could there's a lot more we could talk about but i know you have to go
00:46:17.920
um where can people learn more about your book well um my uh my website is uh dateonomics.com
00:46:27.560
d-a-t-e-o-n-o-m-i-c-s.com um the books available for sale at all your local um booksellers bookstores
00:46:36.780
online at amazon and lines of double.com um if you google me or the book title you'll find
00:46:44.500
speeches and interviews and news stories and like awesome well john berger thank you so much for your
00:46:50.120
time it's been a pleasure thanks brett my guest there is john berger he's the author of the book
00:46:54.440
datanomics and you can find out more information about the book at datanomics.com and you can find
00:46:58.180
it on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness
00:47:05.820
podcast for more manly tips and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at
00:47:09.340
artofmanliness.com and if you enjoy this podcast i'd really appreciate it if you give us a review
00:47:13.380
on itunes or stitcher as always appreciate your support and until next time this is brett mckay