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A review by lpm100
Date-Onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game by Jon Birger
informative
fast-paced
3.0
Book Review
Dateonomics
Jon Birger
3/5 stars
"Unnecessarily college-centric view of hoeflation"
*******
Of the book:
- 178 pages over a chapters; 22 pages per chapter average.
-index
-No bibliography, No point citations, no idea of how well sourced the book is.
-Much is anecdotal. Plural of "anecdote" is not "data"
*******
This book only takes a few hours to read, and that's fine because that's probably all it's worth.
There are a few problems:
1. It is a bit too college centric. A lot of people don't realize this, but something like 61% of Americans do not go to undergraduate. Author even says that (p.104) "challenges faced by Blue collar men do not receive nearly the attention nor sympathy heaped on the dating rules of urban, professional women."
2. A lot of these strictures described are self-imposed.
a. So, if someone insists on ONLY dating college graduates, they are deliberately excluding 61% of the market.
b. If you are a college graduate who is working at Starbucks as a barista, is a well-paid skilled tradesman really so beneath you? Same thing with people that are working Uber as an adjunct in spite of having a PhD in English.
Let's be realistic here.
3. He does not take into account this phenomenon called "hoeflation" (defined in the Urban Dictionary for those who don't know). In real life, 90% of women are after 10% of men under ordinary circumstances. So, I wonder how much difference the lopsidedness really makes?
And it does seem true that the last people to realize that female beauty depreciates quickly is women who let a few too many years get away from them.
4. In some sense, this idea of "knowing your value" and "finding your market" is something that everybody goes through. (Do we really need to go over the sociological cliché of black men with overweight white women?)
The author notices some changing behaviors in response to differences in the dating market-- and none of them are exactly unpredictable, to be honest.
It is nice to see them discussed in one place, albeit it in a desultory way.
Everybody else in the world has to figure out That changing conditions in the dating market require different strategies, but fluffy white college educated women seem to be worth an entire book.
5. Author talks about the manufactured shidduch crisis in Orthodoxy; As somebody who is on the inside of this, I would have to say that it is just that: MANUFACTURED.
a. It seems like I've heard the story 1001 times before of people passing over a perfectly normal, healthy people because of some imaginary philosophical barrier. (And other orthodox Jewish authors have noticed this self-generated morass: Penina Shtauber, Chananiya Weissman. Some authors have even written their own stories about failure to match because of their own stupidity: Sarah Lavane.)
b. The author described some number of Jewish women having anorexia because they were afraid they would be unmatchable.
Like these women have never heard of black men? (As quiet as it is kept, there is even a subset of white men who like big women.)
*******
I am interested in this because I have several sons and I'd like to have some ideas about their prospects - - even though this book is 12 years old at this point.
There are some things that are true with the benefit of hindsight, and caveats that I would give my own sons:
1. Even if you go someplace where you have your pick of the women (let's say the fabled, multiply mentioned Sarah Lawrence college), that has its own downside:
a. A person's whole life is not spent in undergraduate, and that high availability will be true but for a short period of life.
b. A guy could start putting his expectations too high when he is in a situation where access to trim is too easy.
And it is really hard to lower one's expectations than it is to have them already low and be pleasantly surprised. (Trust me on this.)
c. As much as the author talks about Sarah Lawrence, the price tag for that is $90,920 per annum (with all the fees included). Over a 4-year degree: $363,680. Or, at the rate of one sexual encounter per day for an entire 4 years of university, that works out to $249.10 per day. $7,567.67 per month. (Sarah Lawrence has 1,671 people on campus. About the size of a large high school.)
WAY too much to pay just for trim--And we are assuming 0% interest for this example. (Sugar babies are $1,500 to $2000 per month. Top tier sugar babies are $6,000. If you have 363K to burn, a $2,000 a month sugar baby for 4 years would be $96,000, and You could go to a respectable State College for Engineering for maybe $40,000 and still have enough money left over to completely pay the mortgage off on a house.)
Son: "Getting access to a woman's moist bits is going to have some type of cost, and that is to be expected.
"But you really have to think about how much you are willing to forgo for something that one of every two people on the planet has."
2. College is not the whole world.
3. You can find good women at shul that are marriage minded and have little to no mileage on them.
4. I have a number of relatives (male and female) that had WAY TOO MUCH sexual choice, and it led to either:
a. no children,
b. outside children
c. children that turned into a child support liability (baby mamas don't need permission to put you on child support).
5. If you spend 4 years at undergraduate (or maybe six?) for a degree that is useless, that is time that you cannot get back.
Verdict: This book is okay to sketch some ideas, but it does require thinking beyond the first step.
Dateonomics
Jon Birger
3/5 stars
"Unnecessarily college-centric view of hoeflation"
*******
Of the book:
- 178 pages over a chapters; 22 pages per chapter average.
-index
-No bibliography, No point citations, no idea of how well sourced the book is.
-Much is anecdotal. Plural of "anecdote" is not "data"
*******
This book only takes a few hours to read, and that's fine because that's probably all it's worth.
There are a few problems:
1. It is a bit too college centric. A lot of people don't realize this, but something like 61% of Americans do not go to undergraduate. Author even says that (p.104) "challenges faced by Blue collar men do not receive nearly the attention nor sympathy heaped on the dating rules of urban, professional women."
2. A lot of these strictures described are self-imposed.
a. So, if someone insists on ONLY dating college graduates, they are deliberately excluding 61% of the market.
b. If you are a college graduate who is working at Starbucks as a barista, is a well-paid skilled tradesman really so beneath you? Same thing with people that are working Uber as an adjunct in spite of having a PhD in English.
Let's be realistic here.
3. He does not take into account this phenomenon called "hoeflation" (defined in the Urban Dictionary for those who don't know). In real life, 90% of women are after 10% of men under ordinary circumstances. So, I wonder how much difference the lopsidedness really makes?
And it does seem true that the last people to realize that female beauty depreciates quickly is women who let a few too many years get away from them.
4. In some sense, this idea of "knowing your value" and "finding your market" is something that everybody goes through. (Do we really need to go over the sociological cliché of black men with overweight white women?)
The author notices some changing behaviors in response to differences in the dating market-- and none of them are exactly unpredictable, to be honest.
It is nice to see them discussed in one place, albeit it in a desultory way.
Everybody else in the world has to figure out That changing conditions in the dating market require different strategies, but fluffy white college educated women seem to be worth an entire book.
5. Author talks about the manufactured shidduch crisis in Orthodoxy; As somebody who is on the inside of this, I would have to say that it is just that: MANUFACTURED.
a. It seems like I've heard the story 1001 times before of people passing over a perfectly normal, healthy people because of some imaginary philosophical barrier. (And other orthodox Jewish authors have noticed this self-generated morass: Penina Shtauber, Chananiya Weissman. Some authors have even written their own stories about failure to match because of their own stupidity: Sarah Lavane.)
b. The author described some number of Jewish women having anorexia because they were afraid they would be unmatchable.
Like these women have never heard of black men? (As quiet as it is kept, there is even a subset of white men who like big women.)
*******
I am interested in this because I have several sons and I'd like to have some ideas about their prospects - - even though this book is 12 years old at this point.
There are some things that are true with the benefit of hindsight, and caveats that I would give my own sons:
1. Even if you go someplace where you have your pick of the women (let's say the fabled, multiply mentioned Sarah Lawrence college), that has its own downside:
a. A person's whole life is not spent in undergraduate, and that high availability will be true but for a short period of life.
b. A guy could start putting his expectations too high when he is in a situation where access to trim is too easy.
And it is really hard to lower one's expectations than it is to have them already low and be pleasantly surprised. (Trust me on this.)
c. As much as the author talks about Sarah Lawrence, the price tag for that is $90,920 per annum (with all the fees included). Over a 4-year degree: $363,680. Or, at the rate of one sexual encounter per day for an entire 4 years of university, that works out to $249.10 per day. $7,567.67 per month. (Sarah Lawrence has 1,671 people on campus. About the size of a large high school.)
WAY too much to pay just for trim--And we are assuming 0% interest for this example. (Sugar babies are $1,500 to $2000 per month. Top tier sugar babies are $6,000. If you have 363K to burn, a $2,000 a month sugar baby for 4 years would be $96,000, and You could go to a respectable State College for Engineering for maybe $40,000 and still have enough money left over to completely pay the mortgage off on a house.)
Son: "Getting access to a woman's moist bits is going to have some type of cost, and that is to be expected.
"But you really have to think about how much you are willing to forgo for something that one of every two people on the planet has."
2. College is not the whole world.
3. You can find good women at shul that are marriage minded and have little to no mileage on them.
4. I have a number of relatives (male and female) that had WAY TOO MUCH sexual choice, and it led to either:
a. no children,
b. outside children
c. children that turned into a child support liability (baby mamas don't need permission to put you on child support).
5. If you spend 4 years at undergraduate (or maybe six?) for a degree that is useless, that is time that you cannot get back.
Verdict: This book is okay to sketch some ideas, but it does require thinking beyond the first step.