Marginal Revolution

Serial monogamy and hypergamous women

In her analysis, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder found that although Pimbwe men were somewhat more likely than their female counterparts to marry multiple times, women held their own and even outshone men in the upper Zsa Zsa Gabor end of the scale, of five consecutive spouses and counting. And when Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder looked at who extracted the greatest reproductive payoff from serial monogamy, as measured by who had the most children survive past the first five hazardous years of life, she found a small but significant advantage female. Women who worked their way through more than two husbands had, on average, higher reproductive success, a greater number of surviving children, than either the more sedately mating women, or than men regardless of wifetime total.

Here is more.  I believe those last two words -- "wifetime total" -- should in fact be "lifetime total."  This was interesting:

Provocatively, the character sketches of the male versus female serialists proved to be inversely related. Among the women, those with the greatest number of spouses were themselves considered high-quality mates, the hardest working, the most reliable, with scant taste for the strong maize beer the Pimbwe famously brew. Among the men, by contrast, the higher the nuptial count, the lower the customer ranking, and the likelier the men were to be layabout drunks.

“We’re so wedded to the model that men will benefit from multiple marriages and women won’t, that women are victims of the game,” Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said. “But what my data suggest is that Pimbwe women are strategically choosing men, abandoning men and remarrying men as their economic situation goes up and down.”

Dare one whisper "hypergamy"?

Africa fact of the day

About 10 percent of infants die in their first year of life in Africa -- still shockingly high, but considerably lower than the European average less than 100 years ago, let alone 800 years past. And about two thirds of Africans are literate -- a level achieved in Spain only in the 1920s.

Here is more.  The article makes additional interesting observations.

Against satiation

Why not apply behavioral economics to s**?  C., an MR reader, writes to me:

The theory, put plainly by me, is that the female (or male) partner in a couple is never cuter or more loved than just before fertilization, so why fertilize as much as we do? Why not once a fortnight or so (with sex without satiation 2x a day in between)?

I am told this will preserve true love forever.  Here is a related article.  Here is a related book, which I have yet to read.  Here is the main Google blast on the topic.

How many of you read this and then revise downwards how much you think you desire true love forever?

Antitrust and Marginal Revolution

Bryan Caplan asks under what conditions would the antitrust authorities prosecute me and Tyler?  When we raise our price?  When we require MR readers to promise not to read any other blogs?  When we merge with a competitor?  Or when we predate by producing so many high-quality posts at such a low price that it forces other blogs out of business?  (heh, isn't that what we are doing right now?)

As Bryan points out, raising price wouldn't cause legal problems but all the other actions would.  Why?

Assorted links

1. How much will TARP have cost?

2. Google trends: Wolfram Alpha.

3. Within a company, the powerful think that rules are more important.

4. Which countries are hardest for informed people to find on a map?  Kiribati appears to come in first; source here.

5. Underwear as an economic indicator.

Will there be another Milton Friedman?

Dan Klein, guest-blogging at AustrianEconomists, poses the question and says no, there will not be a classical liberal advocate of comparable stature.  At least not anytime soon:

With the postwar re-awakenings, bold thinkers defied the cultural ruts of their times. They rediscovered pieces of the liberal understanding. Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Buchanan, Tullock, Rothbard, Kirzner, Alchian, Sowell, Coase, Bauer, Simon and Demsetz developed new statements of parts of liberal wisdom. Because it had been dead and buried, it now seemed fresh and original. They earned status as epic figures by fresh pioneering and academic kudos. But what they formulated and taught to all of us was the low-hanging fruit of all that had been forgotten.  I’m not saying that everything they teach had been taught 150 years prior. But a lot of it had, and the basic verities pretty much all had....

I don’t think that a clone of Milton Friedman could today become Milton Friedman. To get on in Econ he’d have to do a lot more math, and identify with “normal scientists.” Back in the day, Hayek, Coase, and Buchanan could eschew math and still end up with Nobel prizes. Not today. Normal scientists won’t embrace you academically if you don’t seem like their kind. You would have to become their kind. You wouldn’t develop liberal vision and motivation. Or, if you did you wouldn’t become first among your peers at a top department (even, that is, if you had the endowments of a Milton Friedman).

The culture generally is becoming more fragmented, because of technology. But technology is making the academic discipline more integrated and monolithic, even at the international level. There is no “freshwater” vs. “saltwater” and so on. It is like the baseball player market, one big pyramid. The top departments are alike and the rest strive to maintain their standing in the pyramid. Regardless of academic standing, how is the modern clone of Milton Friedman to cut a figure? The low-hanging fruit has been plucked and digested by the liberal movement. A new young brilliant dynamo could write a nice book like Free to Choose or Road to Serfdom, but who would care? It’s all available in another dozen books that have appeared since 1960.

There is more at the link and of course you can see the link to David Hume's ideas about the posts of honour being filled.  I agree with Dan.

Andy Warhol would be happy

David Reilly at Bloomberg notes that the pricing of credit default swaps on both the US government debt and Campbell’s is the same...

Here is the link. Hat tip goes to TheBrowser.

Very good sentences

That’s right: someday soon scientists may be working to develop a pill that can mimic the placebo effect.

That's from Tom Lee, my source was here.

Nova Scotia bleg

Natasha and I lucked out with frequent flyer miles and soon we will have two lovely days in Nova Scotia, starting in Halifax but with a rental car.  What should we do?  Where should we eat?  Your thoughts would be most welcome.  I've never had a visit to Canada which was less than excellent and that includes a good fifteen trips at least.

Against obviousness

Things can be obvious if they are simple. If something complicated is obvious, such as anything that anybody seriously studies, then for it to be simple you must be abstracting it a lot. When people find such things obvious, what they often mean is that the abstraction is so clear and simple its implications are unarguable. This is answering the wrong question. Most of the reasons such conclusions might be false are hidden in what you abstracted away. The question is whether you have the right abstraction for reality, not whether the abstraction has the implications it seems to.

That's from Katja Grace.  Here is a good post on murder and evil.

Addendum: I liked this bit too:

Perhaps mysterious forces are just more trustworthy than social institutions? Or perhaps karma seems nice because its promotion is read as ‘everyone will get what they deserve’, while markets seem nasty because their promotion is read as ‘everyone deserves what they’ve got’. Better ideas?