Riches and bitches

Summary: This post investigates myths and anecdotes, which link male wealth to sexual market value.

Suppose I found a way to get wealthy, but it required huge amounts of work.
Would it be worth it? Would it be progress towards my long-term goals in life?

Mere correlation is not enough

Ice cream doesn't cause drowning despite both being common during hot weather. Similarly tallness and good social skills help both popularity among women and promotion prospects to better paid jobs. Instead of correlation, we need to find out the mechanism through which wealth affects marrigeability. That are better described in anecdotes rather than statistics.

You can buy status symbols with wealth

The traditional claim is that wealth enables you to buy status symbols and status signals attract women. This does not stand much closer scrutiny.

On the small scale, signaling wealth by buying women drinks in a bar labels you as an exploitable dupe. I have noticed it myself that I am instantly dubious towards people who insist on giving things away, asking myself "What does he want in exchange? Am I now in an unwritten agreement, where he expects something unreasonable from me, starting drama when he doesn't get it?" Ritualized, reciprocal giving like a house party host making food to guests is an exception.

There is some evidence that big houses are beneficial. Years ago there was an article in NY Times where women rejected potential boyfriends after seeing their apartments. In a later chapter there is a personal anecdote about deriving benefit from a summer cottage.

Regarding cars and watches which lose half of their worth the moment you walk out of the shop we have another type of signaling problem.

Do you signal wealth or future time orientation?

People have different financial future time orientations (FTO). On the one end are the spendthrifts who live from hand to mouth. The other contains millionaire-next-door types who save most of their income and never spend it in their lifetime. Jantunen described the shades of grey last year.

According to research, couples with similar financial FTO have least arguments about money. Although short-FTO and long-FTO persons are attracted to each others as they remedy each others' weaknesses, their marriages are unhappy. If you become wealthy by being a tightwad, it is stupid to signal wealth by flashy cars and expensive clocks, since it attracts attention from wrong kinds of people.

	Short FTO	Long FTO
What to signal?	Wealth	Future time orientation, since wealth comes to the working thrifty in the long run.
What new cars, iPhones, etc. signal	The person is wealthy as he can afford it.	The person will not become very wealthy, if he wastes mediocre income on expensive consumption.
Used car, using coupon codes	The person is too poor to afford a better car.	The person is not wasting money when just as good cheap alternative is available.
Company having headquarters in run-down area	The company is not doing very well.	The company uses its money productively rather than on shiny surfaces.

This chapter concluded that signaling wealth by buying expensive items and services is a sucker's bet, so striving for wealth for this purpose is useless to begin with.

Personal experiences about the wealthy

Once I was in a meeting of relatives, where about 30 persons from three generations gathered for a weekend in a summer cottage. There were two millionaires present. Self-made man was an entrepreneur who had found a company and grown it organically to over 100 employees. His wealth was measured in tens of millions. Nokia millionaire had had a hard life when young. During post-war poverty he had learned the motto "Don't buy what you need, buy what you can't do without." Millionaire-next-door lifestyle enabled him to get into Hymy (a Finnish scandal sheet) list of Nokia millionaires in 2000. He wasn't a fool who puts all his eggs into one basket, so he probably owns a million euros now.

The self-made man also had alpha personality; he hosted the meeting in his cottage, and showed various expensive items in there (which he could well afford, as they took so small % of his income) and was also one of 2 skilled musicians in gathering. Before getting introduced to his wife, I first though she was one generation younger, so much effort she had seen to stay slim and good-looking.

The Nokia millionaire didn't seem to use his wealth to buy anything you couldn't get on average industrial worker's salary. His wife is fat and their relationship is not that good.

It seems that wealth increases sexual market value if you use it to play yourself into higher status positions, for example by hosting a party. Having wealth to put into apartments and summer cottages is an advantage, but we still have no evidence that non-real-estate spending increases male attractiveness. Without social skills, wealth is useless.

Wealth as an abstract measure of human worth

OkCupid Trends is a blog which posts data mining articles about the dating site OkCupid. They showed a correlation between male income and unsolicited contacts. Also in this Feissarimokat article high income in itself is an argument for male fitness. ("Mika tekee yli 100 000e vuodessa plus Nokian bonukset. Kummatkaan eivät olleet mitään tyhjäntoimittajia toisin kuin pari lusmua joita en nyt nimeltä mainitse...")

This is a genuine riddle: Women seem to value high income in itself, while not valuing "beta providers" who use that high income to buy them things.

Maybe what women really value is "millionaire personality" which is characterized by learning alpha behaviour from young age and working at management jobs which both pay well and signal high social skills. This would mean that wealth has to be accumulated at young age in order to have any effect on personality. This is in line with my personal experiences about the wealthy.

You can buy sex with wealth

This post is about attracting a spouse into a long-term relationship, so buying sex for an hour doesn't count.

According to Roissy, paying for sex because you can't get enough for free signals low attractiveness. Done regularly it definitely is a huge waste of money.

However, women's preference for preselection complicates the picture. Married men are twice as likely to visit prostitutes than singles. (Sources: A Finnish prostitute wrote that 75% - 80% of her customers are married while only 56% of men aged 30 - 65 in 2006 were married) It is possible that some character trait both makes men visit prostitutes and also makes them better at attracting spouses.

It definitely isn't wealth, as married men always say that family takes all their money. The character trait may be a well-developed dark triad. Or maybe not being fully dependent on wife for sex makes the husband less needy, making the marriage last longer.

Millionaire couples

Thomas J Stanley gathered statistics and interviews from American millionaries for his book. He found out that 90% of them are married. Marriages have lasted on average for 28 years.

This research is the polar opposite of Roissy. The couples co-operate to accumulate wealth and the men say that they couldn't have amassed the fortune without help from their viwes. It also confirms that the truly wealthy have long-FTO lifestyle rather than need to signal wealth. Instead of dumping the loser, the women tough it out with their men in times of hardship, leading to success in the long run. This is so different from what I hear from other sources that I doubt the honesty of this source.

Conclusions

The link between male wealth and marrigeability is highly muddled. Character traits which enable high earnings seem more important than the money itself. Different signaling systems for short and long FTO compilicate the picture further. Becoming a millionaire seems to get you married with 90% probability, but the anecdotes sound too good to be true, casting doubt on the reliability of the source.