Sunday, May 13, 2018

How hypergamy and rise of involuntary celibates affect our personal finances.



The recently Toronto attacks by a single man on women illustrates the danger of involuntary celibates to our modern society. If you have been following this blog, I write about about the rise of the useless caste - Video gamer males who do not participate in the labour and marriage markets. Involuntary celibates are a different archetype. Incels are angry men who are upset that they are being ignored by women or "Staceys" who prefer dating what incels label as jerks.

One of the root causes of involuntary celibacy among males is demographic policy. China is now ticking time-bomb because their rural areas are full of men who cannot find a spouse  thanks to the ago old practice of aborting female fetuses. A nation of millions of Incels is definitely not a safe place for our daughters.

But there is another reason for the rise of Incels.

Hypergamy is the act of marrying someone of a superior caste. The fact that women are generally hypergamous has been researched and generally supported by social science. The following paper rationalises this phenomenon - because women tend to invest much more heavily in offspring, women will tend towards marrying men with higher human capital and men want women with lower human capital because of men's desire to have legitimate children.

( My personal experiences being exposed to family law also seems to give me the impression that men with lower human capital marrying women with higher human capital will result in marriages of poorer quality. )

The effect of hypergamy on personal finances is largely ignored by investment gurus but it is far reaching and can impact your investments.

Face with a dearth of eligible women, men in China work punishing hours to own an apartment to attract a spouse pushing up real estate prices. Interestingly, many people still remains single. Chinese women who are highly-educated  and successful get dissed by society as sheng nu. At the other end of the spectrum, lowly educated rural men sometimes have to resort to kidnapping or sharing spouses.

Imagine our 4G leadership making a decision to re-introduce immigration to deal with our low fertility rate. The Chinese, being so used to high real estate prices, will definitely push up real estate prices in Singapore. This will occur without a corresponding increase in rentals creating price compression in local real estate markets. Wait... i think it's already happening today.

At a personal level, this means that I now see myself as a "corrupting influence" when I hang out with LLB interns.

To me, when a fresh male Law graduate starts a new career, the high starting salaries and career potential allows them some leeway to play a waiting game in the game of marriage. Their human capital is an appreciating asset and hypergamy guarantees that the harder they work on their cases, the more attractive they are as husband material. It's like playing blackjack and only committing the heavy bets when there are more 10s and Aces left in the shoe.

For the female Law graduate, the marriage game is much harder. The university is the last place where they will be surrounded by eligible men who are intellectually compatible with them. One bad move and they will miss out on the marriage markets.

I think this also answers my previous posts as to why we can't make RGS girls marry ITE guys.











4 comments:

  1. Lol good write up. In many cases, as much as our modern sensibilities say NO, the Human condition persists and ladies always look to marry upwards or at least similar level. Final Year Personal Project (FYPP) is damn serious business!

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  2. In Western societies, women are rapidly embracing assortative mating rather than hypergamy. They are marrying their own social class. This turns out even worse for society as it is responsible for much of social inequality in modern societies today.

    So next time someone talks about redistribution and welfare, ask them about the educational qualifications of their spouse.

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  3. Curious - do you think graduating as a lawyer today is still worth it (ROI terms).
    Yes human capital goes up, but with competition from foreign students, it seems red oceanish.

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  4. No. Not worth it.

    Law graduates need to find their blue ocean. It's not worth competing against the very best of every batch of A level students.

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