Tag Archives: loveonomics

129 Ways To Get a Husband. An Economist’s Answer – Part II

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Good morning, dear readers. There is nothing better than being up earlier than the others on a Sunday morning, whipping up a hot chocolate from scratch and writing about…loveonomics.

– If you don’t burn the chocolate, that is. But baked chocolate is also an inspiring taste. Trust me. Ok, where were we.. yes, let’s continue our review of the 129 ways..

4 Join a hiking club

On the one hand, this seems to be a good idea independently of wanting to date or not. Getting out, getting exercise, meeting new friends. On the other hand, if you want to do it with the particular aim of finding a partner, you need to do some prior research: who is in that hiking club, which demographics by age, gender, education, profession? Would these demographics appeal to you? Also, how much do you love to hike vs. other sports or causes? The day only has 24 hours and the hiking club competes with several other options. You should join causes and sports close to your heart and vision for yourself. If it is not clear to you which those are, your first step is to sit down with yourself and figure them out.

5 Look in the census for places with the most single men. (McCalls suggests Nevada)

It definitely matters where you are, as I wrote here before. One very important factor for quality of place when it comes to dating is the gender-ratio. A whole book as well as several of my blog posts have been written about the importance of gender-ratios for dating and it can hardly be emphasized enough. The gender in the minority will have more choice and will therefore set the terms. (Unless extremely powerful social or legal norms limit its decision-power or self-expression.) In that way, dating follows indeed the logic of a market and the influence over the result moves to the party that is in higher demand and shorter supply.

A remark on McCall’s choice of Nevada, which apparently had one of the highest single male/female ratios in the 1950s. It still performs well on this score, although cities on the West Coast, especially California, but also Oregon, and the state of Washington are all great places for women to date under this perspective. The metropolitan areas of the East Coast are the opposite (says the American Community Survey 2017). If you don’t live in America, look up the gender statistics of your country’s most recent census.

6 Read the obituaries to find eligible widowers.

This is weird. You don’t want to feed on someone else’s grieving. Such an attitude may disqualify you in the long run even if your company is appreciated in the short run. You also don’t know how long people need to grieve. The dating prospect may not be emotionally available for quite some time.

7 Take up golf and go to different golf courses.

Much better. Kindly refer to what I said on the hiking club. Note that the demographics of your nearest golf club may be quite different from the demographics of your nearest hiking club. The same may apply to the member fee. Assess and pick according to your preference.

To be continued next week.

Without burning the chocolate.

129 Ways To Get a Husband: What an Economist Would Say

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You may have seen the hilarious, now viral, article from a 1950s McCalls Magazine: 129 ways to get a husband. A lot has already been written about how this advice may be cringeworthy, outdated, and how off the underlying assumption that every woman needs a husband. I trust a healthy distance to any publication can be taken for granted among my readers and have therefore no vocation to join the choir of the outraged.

Rather, for those who are actually interested in how the 129 ways might perform in real life, let me explore them under an economist’s lens. I will do so in several installments, starting with the first three.

1 Get a dog and walk it

Getting out of the house and meeting people is definitely good. Frequency of encounters is vital to build acquaintance (see for example ‘How do friendships form?’). But that does not require a dog. Also, for courtship purposes it matters where you walk the dog. Are there a lot of sympathetic joggers on that path? Pleasant single dogwalkers?

Better not to get a dog just for courtship purposes. The dog is worth its own purpose. If you love dogs, and want a partner who loves them too, then of course go ahead.

2 Have your car break down at strategic places

Not a good idea. The underlying assumption seems to be that good men will stop and help you fix it, and that they know how to. A couple of things are at odds with reality here. First, the whole concept won’t work in an urban context. In the city, there will hardly be a place for him to stop and park right away, and on the highway, it is dangerous to just stop and park. So already you have to geographically limit the attempt to rural roads and villages. But that context also means that population density and therefore frequency of chance encounters is lower. Finally, 2019’s cars are not as easily fixed as 1950s cars, and car-fixing is no longer a frequent hobby. Bottom line: this strategy fishes in far too small a pond.

3 Attend night school – take courses men like

This one is really good, and the first example of some chance brilliance in this list. For dating purposes, it is a very good idea to seek out places where your own gender is outnumbered. So, ‘courses men like’ may have many men and few women. Excellent for bargaining power. I would still recommend making sure you choose a course you like, too – joint values and interests are great glue for any relationship.

To be continued next week.

It Matters Where You Are

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Carla was a professional in her early forties. She lived and worked outside of her country of origin, putting ambition into her job at an upmarket corporation in a sunny and wealthy city. Things were allright but not exciting exactly. Her career was flowing along, sideways rather than up, despite long hours of work and commute. And her industry was afloat with women and not so many men, letting her wish and wait for more interesting dates. In short, while the city was a gleaming place to be, her professional and personal lives inspired feelings of autumnal fog.

A crisis at work brought the change. Carla was working with a bully who started ‘supervising’ her without ever having received that mandate. Her once loved job descended into drudgery. When I met her one day on the bus, she broke down. She vented, was comforted and gathered enough strength to file a complaint. She also switched perspectives and decided to give notice and move back to her home country. Which happened to be a cool place with mountains in perpetual fog.

Nothing else was foggy though. She started over in all areas: bought a flat, power-organized her things, and began an exciting and influential job that offered good work-life balance. She found enough time for a vigorous exercise regime and meeting friends. She dated online and offline, and in a city that had a natural gender balance. Before long, she started seeing George, an intellectual entrepreneur who shared her passion for travel and the outdoors and who is her partner to this day. Her professional and personal lives are gleaming from all angles. Only the actual weather is permanently autumnal, but that doesn’t keep Carla and George from climbing yet more mountains.

What happened here? It matters where you are. Not because of the weather, but because of who is there, of how people work, and how much control you can take over your life.

Who is there: if your own gender is over-represented, good luck. Unless you are willing to switch sexual orientation, which is rare after all, you will compete and have to line up for the acceptable candidates. Empirically, if you are a woman competing for men, that does not exactly improve men’s behavior. On average, when faced with too much freedom to choose, men tend to be somewhat sloppier in their work and career efforts, less committed and possibly polyamorous. – In other words: find yourself a place, a location, where your own gender is outnumbered. Especially if you are a woman.

How people work: you need spare time to date and have a good relationship. Sometimes a few miles of distance can mean a world of difference. There is comparative sociological evidence comparing the love lives of Eastern and Western Germans in the year of reunification, and as a Wessi I am sad to report that Easterners had more fun. Much more, and better fun. – If you interview women who personally experienced the before and after of communism, they point to shorter work hours, job security and free universal childcare. As a related article in the NYT resumes: “It was state socialism’s answer to work-life balance.”

To be fair, there are other differences in Western and Eastern love lives, and they are still measurable in the 2009 Parship study. One could say that East German relationships are, on average, more companionate and emancipated. Men tend to seek a confident woman that shares their interests, and women care less about their man’s salary than in the West. Eastern couples also talk with much more ease about intimacy. (Not only out of regional patriotism, I would like to point out that these statistics reflect percentages only, and that convergence is already happening. Before long, the twain shall meet.)

It is not just the time factor, it is about taking control of your work and life. That is compatible with working long hours out of choice, and on topics of choice. You may have heard of the Whitehall Studies, which have variously shown that in the same activity (in this case, British public administration), higher ranking officials were healthier than lower ranking officials. The difference was maintained when controlling for observable data that may correlate with rank, such as education and nutrition choices. Especially, stress measured as cortisol, and coronary heart disease showed a rank gradient. While the reasons have not yet been fully explained (and the Whitehall studies continue for a further generation), control over tasks and priorities, as well as predictability of work seem to play a role.

Now, what if you are stuck where you are? Stuck with a gender ratio and labor market that are less than lucky?  The internet is your friend. Online dating can bridge some of the divide to a better location. The gender ratio, for sure, is then no longer limited to the one of your physical dwelling place. Also, you can connect quickly, during your leisure or even your lunch break. It is no silver bullet, but it can un-stick a few constraints to start with.

Carla, of course, is well connected online. Which is while I can keep up with her latest. All I see these days are broad smiling faces, a super tidy creatively furbished flat, high mountains, adventurous trails, shining oceans and fog only in the background.

One man, six dates. What does the Economist think?

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A week ago, @LisettePylant’s account of a six-fold date made headlines in DC. Justin Schweiger had booked six dates in 20-30min slots on a single evening. Basically, he tried to speed date unilaterally, and without announcing that he was doing so. The women noticed rather quickly, got together without him and became friends. Ms. Pylant exposed the experience on twitter. It was later featured in other outlets including the Washington Post.

First of all, this is quite wonderfully hilarious. Guy thinks the world about his own efficiency (and attractiveness?) and finds himself outmaneuvered before you can say ‘think..’. I guess, in future, Justin will only be able to date people who are either masochists or don’t read (the media) and he may or may not enjoy that situation.

What was going on here?

  1. That gender ratio. Why was he able to do that – one man, six women. Aren’t the women too busy, including with other dates? Or does that reflect the actual gender ratio in DC? – Well, 1:6 is a bit strong, but single women do outnumber single men in most neighborhoods in DC, as Holly Thomas blogs here. This situation is still current, and typical for the metropolitan areas of the East Coast. (For an eloquent analysis of gender ratios in the modern American dating world, see Jon Birger.)
  2. The ladies cracked the code. Contrary to much coverage on the event, I fail to find Justin Schweiger especially shocking. Most thinking ladies over 18 have encountered creepy behavior in the dating world at some point; sadly, it’s hardly news. What is new is that this one got public coverage – and that the women outdid the effect in solidarity. That is, by the way, the code to crack in skewed gender ratios: solidarity. Standing together as women and refusing to compete on standards. The principle has been well-known to economists for a long time, it is the good old-fashioned….trade union. It outdoes unequal (power) ratios by bundling individual demands.
  3. What now? While spontaneous and elegant, the ladies’ get together and agreement were indeed a budding trade union, from an economics point of view. (Not that trade unions can’t be spontaneous and elegant.) I would much encourage to continue on that principle and draw up a charter of standards in dating that DC women are not willing to do without. The more women subscribe, the less the gender ratio will be felt. Being the only date during one evening could be one standard, for example; or the only one, at all, before things get cozy. The bar will be as high as you set it, and firmer if many agree on it.

Work-Life-Child Balance in 2017: 5 Myths Busted

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It is 9:25pm and The Husband and I can sit down for dinner. Finally. After I spent two and a half hours bathing and feeding three under 6 year olds. The eldest two fell asleep at 8pm, which is a miracle as they usually tend to hop around until after 9. But the little one, despite his only eleven months, struggled to calm down. It took another one and a half hours of me limbo dancing with him in a baby sling until he eventually dozed off. And in between back rubs and sandwich folding, I checked on various urgent work email trails. (I usually take care to answer only the most important ones, because, under the circumstances, I may end up sounding less composed than I actually am.)

During the same time, The Husband was trekking through Rodman’s and Aldi chasing some vital ingredients to reconstruct a German Christmas in America. (Let me take a sip before I continue. I have just been handed a Cabernet with a blue cheese and fig jam tartine on the side. Hm. Senses slowly coming back.)

How do people do this? I mean, spending quality time with your kids while earning the means to do so and still getting enough sleep to ward off premature dementia? How are you supposed to do it? – The question keeps occupying researchers and I am not sure it is solved yet. Still, my recent dive into the research rewarded me with busting a few myths:

Myth #1: You need to spend a maximum of time with your kids

No. In fact, the quantity of time is irrelevant for children age 3 to 11 as long as it does not drop below the minimum of about 6 hours per week, according to this new large-scale study. Frankly, 6 hours is nothing, like just getting dressed and one meal together six days a week. Or, one weekend afternoon and nothing else. Kids that have this much of parent time, or the double of it, fare just the same in terms of achievement, behavior and emotional well-being.

So there. What have we been stressing about? Mothers in 2016 spend on average 14 hours with their children per week, while mostly, half of it would do. The only group of children for whom more time makes a difference are those that are about to grow out of childhood: for adolescents, 12 years+, more parental time makes a difference in terms of better behavior.

The quality always matters though. The time you spend together should be interactive. If you spend it doing nothing or watching TV, it will be detrimental.  – On the other hand, unstructured alone time is good for children; it has been shown to build executive skills. 

Myth #2: It doesn’t matter if parents sleep less when they have kids

Oh, it does. If parents are stressed and sleep-deprived, parent time will be harmful for children, Milkie’s study found out. As a parent, you should see to your own sleep at least as much as to your children’s sleep. Let’s be realistic, this is unfeasible without enlisting outside help from time to time, as well as taking turns with your spouse in getting up at night and a flexible employer who understands that on some days, your full brain at work at 10:30am is better than half of it at 8:30am.

It’s a tough nut to crack, but I understand it a bit like the oxygen mask in planes: you must put on your own mask first, if you want to have a decent chance at helping your child.

Myth #3: It is a good idea for a mother to give up her job to have more time for children

Better not. Two things that do more than parental time for the future success of a child, according to the above study and others, is family income and a mother’s educational level. Higher income and higher maternal education are always good. Milkie also finds that mothers’ work hours don’t matter much at all.

So, both spouses working is a good thing. I can imagine some non-linear reasoning here though, with the impact of dual earning being particularly strong at lower income levels and less so above a certain level. Further studies should look into this.

Myth #4: Only your kids’ fun matters, your own doesn’t

Actually, your own fun is vital. A study on 6500 children and their fathers published in the British Medical Journal found that the amount of fun fathers had while parenting was much more important than the time they were involved. Fun fathers were 28% less likely to have children with behavior problems.

“The researchers discovered that how secure the fathers felt about their role and their partner, and how emotionally connected they were with their children, were more important in reducing the likelihood of behavioural problems than the time they put in to childcare.”

Myth #5: We want to keep our kids supervised because of the risks they are exposed to.

Nope. We supervise them closely because we find it immoral to do otherwise. It has nothing to do with the actual risks the kids face. As Ashley Thomas and her team carefully researched with an experiment, our brain muddles up the two, morals and risk perception. The less morally acceptable we find the reason why a child is left alone, the more at risk we believe the child is.

This is not to say that there are no risks out there. I am not in the camp of ‘let the kids be in the street alone all day, like it used to be’. Yes, it used to be the case, and I had collected two concussions by age 6, while my 6 year old today has never had one. But we do need to take a step back and realize our risk perceptions are out of whack. Kids need enough unsupervised freedom to develop their own life skills.

So they can make their own blue cheese and fig jam tartines and get themselves to bed. For example. Eventually. Bottom line, parents need to let themselves off the hook a bit more, take license to live, and breathe and have fun, and stress a bit less in 2017.

Power Couples

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Town and Country

I am sitting on an old style white chalked brick veranda with a sweeping view of expansive forests and rolling hills. The woodlands cover about five times the area of the settlements in their midst. I grew up here, so although I cannot see the detail of the boscage from where I sit, I know it to harbor fir, spruce, white oak, maple, beeches and birches. On a warm humid day with wind you can smell the spruce. And with the hindsight of economic studies, I recognize the region to host a wood cluster, from forestry along the value chain of industrial and fine carpentry and about any wood product a house may need. Some of the unpretentious medium sized manufacturers are world market leaders for a random product, like a kind of wood siding, or window caulking. Social networks in the small towns are dense, it is easy to know everyone living in the region, at least a little.

When I left this peaceful place for the first time to live in a big city, one of the things that struck me was the anonymity that reigns once you hit the million person mark. Every day you meet people and families that your parents or other kin did not know before. You have to actively build up a stock of knowledge about them, and several people may not have ‘a reputation’ of some sort because the turnover of interactions is so fast and fluid.
At the same time, the amount of opportunities and choice are wonderful. In the city I moved to, you had a bus for every destination you wanted to get to, a course for any subject you wanted to learn. Out of the 6m inhabitants, you had a pool of at least 1m you could interact with and recruit friends from. It was easy to match preferences, from classical music over poetry to spiritual brand. Sports, music and any other hobby could be practiced at near olympic standards. (And the city we are talking about is Bogota, not Boston. In the 1990s. Just for the record.)

The variety of jobs people did was diverse too. In addition to teachers and doctors, I met salesmen, bankers, engineers, painters, entrepreneurs in retail, textile manufacturing, forwarding and furniture design, employees and managers of multinationals. I could make out a couple of clusters touching the city: the beverage industry, furniture and jewelry design, pharma and cosmetics. Professional activities mingled and overlapped and moving from one to another was a more obvious and more frequent choice than in my original forestial dwelling.

Love in the City

Which surroundings are best for your dating? It depends. As people couple up, they think about compatibility. This includes natural affinity, values and preferences, but it also includes very practical matters. Such as, will both partners work, and where will they work. The industrially more diverse metropolitan environment is likely to hold more options for either half of the couple. If both partners want to work, they will be more able to do that in the city rather than in the country. They are also more likely to find a better job match in the city. I.e. the more demanding and peculiar they are about what they want to do, the more they will benefit from the better odds in the city of actually finding it. In principle.

Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn mined valuable data from the US and corroborated this story in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (Nov 2000). Between 1940 and 1990, the college educated drifted increasingly to cities, and the biggest driver of this drift was the emergence of Dual Earner couples. By far. Husband AND wife started to work, and career minded people increasingly mated with career minded people. (As for why this suddenly happened, see my previous post Opposites Distract.)
This does not mean there are no power couples in the countryside, but if you look closely you will realize they are far fewer. And mostly covering the essential services: medicine, teaching, pharmacy, religion. Unless both partners happen to specialize in the particular local industry.

The emergence of dual earners is a sign of greater equality in couples. But the process of their concentration in cities helps create spaces of two speeds. By attracting qualified people more easily, cities will thrive more. While the countryside suffers brain drain. Over time, town and country may drift apart in productivity and wealth.

Digital Desegregation

However, let’s not forget that this is 2016. The spatial segregation I describe above applies to jobs that are geographically bound, that need a specific place of work and personal presence. This requirement is fading in many industries. Digital jobs like programmer and web designer can be done from any place with an internet connection, and so can many back- and sometimes front office jobs in finance, medicine and retail. Presence jobs in fields as diverse as diplomacy, engineering and science have phases that can be covered effectively and (more) efficiently through telework.

And this is why I can sit on this white veranda and enjoy the clean air and the view of the forests in the evening sun. My blog will soon be posted to the internet, visible in town and country alike. And my man is sitting next door and writing his own.

Opposites Distract

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A Tale of Two Lives

My grandma Ann was a sporty, almost athletic woman who loved to swim. She had learned home economics in an exclusive boarding school and was a highly professional housewife. She knew the nutritional content of every staple food by heart and spent all morning cooking and straightening the house, aided by a maid. The afternoons were for looking after the kids and/ or paying and receiving calls. Her husband, my grandpa, worked long hours in his own law practice. I am not sure how much time their lifestyles left for joint leisure. On Sundays there was mass – which my grandma enjoyed and grandpa didn’t. And a bit of joint paying and receiving calls, according to a code that is no longer in use. (The maid would bring three business cards on a tray to announce a visiting couple: one from the wife and the husband each for grandma, and one from the husband for grandpa. Because a lady would not call on a gentleman.) My grandparents’ marriage project did not include a big plan for joint spare time; that was a secondary question if a question at all. They were from the same broader region but otherwise not very much the same. If they had something you could call hobbies, grandma loved doing sports with the kids, and churchy things. Grandpa went deer hunting with his buddies.Their tastes and views differed in books, music, politics and culture more generally. I know for a fact they voted for different parties all their lives. Opposites had attracted each other very much, they married young. It was more important for them to economically complement each other; grandma’s perfect running of the household including all nooks and crannies allowed grandpa to rise in his career, gain some notoriety in his profession and thereby build modest wealth for his family.

My other granny’s story is quite different. After secondary school, she had learned a trade that would earn her money. She worked several years as a commercial and legal secretary, and ended up running the front office of a regional court. Having turned down several marriage proposals, she may have started to worry parents and acquaintances with her insistence to marry for love alone. Finally, at the (then mature) age of 29, she accepted my grandfather who swept her off her feet. This marriage was two birds of a feather flocking together. Her teacher husband loved soft classical music, historic books and endless conversations with friends at least as much as she did if not more. They were both deeply religious; they also voted for the same party. The part time nature of their work allowed them to spend some leisure together and many family photos show the two of them with the kids. They took vacations and loved adventurous outings on their two huge motorbikes before the war did them part.

Love and technological change

What happened in the few years between my two grannies’ marriage dates? How come one follows a more traditional and one a seemingly more modern pattern? According to a paper by Lundberg and Pollak in 2007, two fundamental technical developments changed the lives of families in the first half of the 20th century: the surgence of household machines, and the pill. Before the advent of the machines, it was useful for partners to specialize, that is, for the husband to work and for the wife to look after the house and any children. Different skills sets and possibly different personalities in either half of the couple would allow this arrangement to work best. Tastes and likes were secondary, as Gary Becker’s seminal work on family economics underlines.

Household machines alleviated a housewife’s workload. A washing machine, even an antique one, allowed to handle multiples of the load that one could do with a scrubbing board on a basin. Coffee machines freed up one soul in the household to do something else for twenty minutes. This meant, that once the kids were in school, the woman could also go to work outside the house. Rewarded work made sense for women, and it made sense for their parents to invest in an education that would prepare for it. The pill (or other accessible forms of family planning) supported this trend as women could complete a full cycle of education well into their childbearing years. (On this one, also see Raquel Fernandez’s work.)

Women grew into a position to earn and to look after themselves. They did not need a breadwinner but won their own bread. In these circumstances, marriage was no longer a must. There were viable outside options for a young woman, at least economically; if probably at a social cost.

Love and leisure

Marriages became more of a choice than a necessity. They needed a joint fun component, and a leisure component. Joint leisure was made possible by the technological revolution in household machinery. In this world, husband and wife want to spend time together that they both enjoy. They want to have conversations for the sake of them, not because they are needed. To this end, it is recommendable to choose a partner that is similar in education and tastes. A partner that likes to do the same things in his leisure rather than a partner that occupies himself most efficiently in a complementary manner while his other half is also efficiently occupied in her job. The more salient joint leisure is in your life, the more opposites distract.

Social atavism?

The coupling of similar people is a feature we observe strongly in contemporary marriages. This so-called assortative mating has increased over time, and keeps increasing still. Partners are now usually close in education and wage, and also height, weight, and age. High-flying athletic lawyers tend to marry high flying athletic lawyers.  This does not mean that a regression on the social evolution over the generations is impossible. Opposites do find and attract each other sometimes, and it is not always clear where likeness ends and opposite-ness begins. In this day and age, however, there can be a tension between the economic reality and a traditional relationship model. Marriages between opposites last less long, on average, than those between well assorted mates.

Memento mori

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“Memento mori – remember you are mortal.” This is really not big news, all our lives will end. But we are most of the time too good at ignoring it.

See, I have to write about death and mortality today because I am seeing too much of it. The Brussels and Ivory Coast hate attacks, people surprised by a diagnosis of terminal illness, young top-of-the-crop talents taking their own lives, car accidents, and again, diverse health struggles lost, heroically. Always untimely. Sorry for not coming up with a more uplifting topic, but bear with me. Because first, it is Good Friday and death is for a while the theme, and second, because by the end of this blog, I will try to extract some beauty from the setting. Somewhere.

Likely, none of us knows for when God has ordered the taxi, or who the driver is. And we repress thoughts about it successfully. We live as if we live forever. We love as if our relationship will last forever and beyond. It is easy to value today as if we had lots more of them coming, and value it barely more highly than tomorrow. Economists call this intertemporal preferences, or discount rate. For example, with a low rate we don’t discount the future strongly because we are convinced we have lots left. Or we are good at waiting. There are advantages to a low personal discount rate, such as willingness to save, invest, delay gratification, to work hard today for a better tomorrow. Most education aims at instilling these values in children.

But they may not be entirely realistic. In the long run, we are all dead, as Keynes wisely observed. We live moving towards death.
Some people get the news about God’s taxi, its driver and the approximate departure years in advance. It is still shocking news. It changes one’s outlook completely, and often quite painfully. Arguably the more painfully, the less prepared one is. There is a sudden realization of the strength of the will to live. An anger with fate or a higher power, sometimes turning one’s faith bitter. And the fear that the driver may be really unpleasant. And of the radical good-byes. (Radical, but not terminal, I believe.)
Even when the taxi is announced at a point in life that one could consider rich in years, and fulfilled, more often than not it pulls the emotional rug from under people.

My lesson from observing this is to get prepared. To live life, love, friendships, faith and work knowing the road will once end. To cherish every day, to worry a little less, to breathe more deeply, to savor food more, to spend more time with your kids, to give more and hoard less, to hold on to good memories and let go of grudges, to care for one’s time wisely and abstain from things, people and situations that drag.
To take liberties and forget others’ approval. To indulge all those who don’t know this. Simply, to put things into perspective. Many annoyances lose their weight in front of the fact that our stay on earth has an expiry date.

It is still fine to work hard and invest in tomorrow. But it is wiser to plant Lutheran apple trees and take joy in the planting rather than doing it only for the harvest. The apples may well be our offspring’s to enjoy without us, which is also worth it.

How To Heal A Broken Heart? A 5-Step Program

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“We broke up”. “It’s over.” “No more.” It can sound so easy. But the hard work sometimes begins right there. If you are done with listening to Sinead O’Connor and a good dose of mourning, and can suffer some humor again, and maybe a fresh outlook, then this article is for you.

What on earth would economists know about this, you may be asking. I must admit, a broken heart is not a topic I would have thought of by myself, but it is one that many friends bring to me these days. So I dug around in the treasure chest of empirical literature and found a few tissues helpful pointers. (Most of them come from Daniel Kahneman’s seminal article in the AER (2003)).

1 Gain perspective. It is not quite as bad as it seems. Human beings experience loss aversion. I.e. we feel a loss of a certain importance more strongly than we would feel a gain of equal importance. In plain English: your sadness without her is bigger than your happiness with her would have been. (Sounds about right?) This is how we humans work.

2 While an end with pain is better than pain without end, your perception may get this wrong. I know it’s hard to believe, but empirically, patients judge the pain of a procedure by the pain they feel at the end. A short procedure that ends with a sharp sting of pain is judged as worse than a much longer procedure with several stings of pain and two sharp stings in the middle. Look back critically: how much *pain* was there already in your time together, which your memory now tries to dismiss?

3 Good riddance indeed. You know, the opportunities you missed while dating your now lost love are likely a bigger loss than losing him now. It will not feel like it. But this is just another way our intuition plays tricks on us. Economists would coldly say ‘out of pocket expenditures are more painful than opportunity costs’. What it really means is that it hurts more to lose an actual mate than missing a good potential mate – even if objectively the latter is the bigger loss. Bottom line: rejoice; you are free to revive the opportunities you had missed in the meantime.

4 Replace the adrenaline and cortisol with endorphines. This advice is not from behavioral economists, but from doctors and experience. Adrenaline and cortisol are hormones caused by stress, such as fear or anger or sadness. Exercise can reduce their levels. Physical activity makes you less stressful. Difficult issues are easier to handle. What is more, exercise produces endorphines that create a sense of peace and pleasure. (Some people call this “runner’s high.”) To be precise, endurance sports are best for this effect: running, rowing, biking, aerobics, for example. For good balance, you may want to throw in something to wind down every other day, such as yoga or pilates.

5 Keep trying. Your past loss has no control over your future success. Meeting good people is a bit like waiting for a taxi, don’t you find? They pass by at rather random intervals. Sometimes you wait and none arrives, sometimes there are lots in parallel lines. The only thing you can predict is that the arrival and departure of one taxi is completely unrelated to the next. In nerdy terms, taxi arrivals follow a Poisson distribution. One arrival (or departure) is no predictor whatsoever of when (or how) the next one will arrive. I would venture that it’s quite similar with dates. Let go of your current pain; it has nothing to do with the next mate.

Love Advice from A Beautiful Mind – 5 Rational Dating Strategies

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Rest In Peace, John Nash, hero of the movie ‘A Beautiful Mind’ and of many an economics student’s a-ha experiences, who died end of last month. Nash received the economics Nobel Prize in 1994 for his findings in game theory. Game theory, which studies interaction and negotiation, is one of the best fields within economics to consult for dating. I thought, within the wealth of Nash’s publications, his paper on “Two-person Cooperative Games” sounded about right for our theme; and indeed it offers a wealth of lessons from both its assumptions and conclusions. While his assumption that people are rational gave me pause, it actually turns out very useful if you wish to err on the side of caution in your strategies.

But let’s begin. Here are 5 essential lessons from Nash’s work for daters.

  1. Make sure you can talk honestly with your date about everything of importance to you. If you want to cooperate at all, if you want to negotiate a good time together and maybe make some agreements, it is indispensable that the communication is open and honest. Otherwise, your agreements will be incomplete, or shaky, i.e. unreliable.
  2. It is important that you can make agreements that work for both. It almost goes without saying, but after all I hear and see happening to many friends that are dating, I am not sure we can take this one for granted. Nash himself felt he needed to point it out as a key assumption before modeling cooperative games. You need to be able to agree on something, so that both of you understand what is meant by the agreement, and understand it in the same way. You also need to able to comply with and fulfil any agreements made. Given that we are talking dating, these agreements can range from the light (like, agreeing on a time to meet to go to the cinema) to the serious (agreeing to go exclusive, or, eventually, marry…). The ability to fulfil agreements implies:
  3. None of you should have outside commitments that interfere with the relationship. Again, it should go without saying, but I am writing up some rational strategies here, based on a level-headed rational economist’s work. And from that perspective, anything can happen. Better check that your date does not come with baggage none of you is able to deal with. Neither should you. Incompatible outside commitments include, for example: being married, having another exclusive dating relationship, or having existing financial or time commitments that leave no money or no time worth mentioning for a new relationship.
  4. Don’t take altruism for granted. It is safer to assume that your counterpart will go as far as he/she can without losing you. Better assume this first and assess any degree of altruism well before agreeing to, like, go steady. (Hint: you want a lot of altruism, while being mindful that all that looks too good to be true probably is.)
  5. You may need an accountability framework. It is great if you can just blindly trust yourself and each other. But this is neither granted nor, possibly, as frequent as we’d like it to be. Nash suggests ‘something like an umpire’ to enforce agreements. Now, as this can prove complicated in dating, what about the following proxies: (i) a joint network of friends that knows or gets to know both of you well, and with whom you are willing to share where you stand dating wise; and (ii) for the younger or the more conservative among us: parents who are kept abreast of essential agreements. The accountability thing is naturally a small circle affair; I don’t advise publishing on facebook. It also should not be something that locks you into a relationship, but rather a trusted group that is in the know but otherwise neutral.

If this sounds too businesslike for love, ask yourself when you last held someone to these standards? If anything, your dating life deserves much more.

All this with the grain of salt that we are sometimes too irrational to apply the rationally obvious. But try and let me know how it goes!