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ShareOver the last one year, most celebrity economists have sounded nothing less than the Grim Reaper. But Tim Harford, a columnist with the Financial Times and also best-selling author of The Undercover Economist, The Logic of Life and now Dear Undercover Economist, is different.
On the sidelines of the TED India Conference at the beautiful, spanking new Infosys Technologies campus in Mysore on Wednesday, he told Vivek Kaul how to find that someone special in his life, how not to bother about his lost socks, how to leave the lavatory seat down ... and other such problems of everyday life. "You are going through these everyday experiences, everyday things the same way as everybody else does, but you see it differently because you are economist," Harford said of himself. Excerpts from the interaction:
I am looking for 'the one'. Is she out there?
I will answer this question using my favourite piece of economics research, which is about speed dating. In a speed date, you have got maybe 20 men, 20 women, 20 tables, 20 candles, 20 large glasses of beer and 20 large glasses of wine, because everyone's going to need a drink.
Each man meets a woman for three minutes. They talk to the women for three minutes, which, of course, is a mistake. They should be listening. But they talk. At the end of the date, they move on and they talk to other women. You get to meet everybody at a speed date. Now, a couple of economists -- Michele Belot and Marco Franscesconi -- have got hold of data on thousands and thousands of speed dates. And also questionnaires that people filled in about their height, weight, income, education etc. All information that we have never had in the past. And we found a lot of fun stuff. Women like tall, rich, well-educated men. Men like slim, educated women who do not smoke. These things were not surprises.
So what were?
One thing that is a surprise is that on a speed date, where all the guys are attractive or rich, you might think that a women might propose more dates because more people meet her standards. That isn't what happens. What happens is that the woman immediately raises her standards, thinking, "Hey I never realised that the speed dating market was so great!" She raises her standards, and proposes very few dates. Conversely, a speed dating evening where all the guys are short, and they were all smokers, not educated, not rich, you might expect that the woman might not propose any date. But instead, the Bridget Jones part of the brain kicks in. She thinks, "I never realised that the dating market was so tough. I have got to propose some dates." And so she lowers her standards.
I know that what I am saying sounds very sexist. But men acted exactly the same way. They raised or lowered their standards depending on the attractiveness of the pool in front.
So what does that mean for the question you have asked? It means that anybody can be 'the one', you just have to compare them with the right people. This is because we don't have fixed standards, that there is this one person, who is the right person for us.
Basically, we are moving our standards up and down all the time depending on what is available.
By the way, if you are ever going on a speed date, make sure you take short, ugly friends with you. It's going to increase your chances.
Traditionally women wait for a guy to propose or for that matter even ask her out on a date. Does that help?
I guess the interesting question is, does it make a difference? Is it to men's advantage that they do the asking-out? But that is not obvious. On the one hand, men get to choose and the women just have to wait, but on the other men have to go through quite a few decisions. It turns out there is a highly mathematical model of the matching process.
Actually, it could be anything. It doesn't have to be men and women, marrying ... it could be doctors applying for training in hospitals or students applying to universities. So you would need an algorithm to generate who matches up with whom. At the same time, you have to decide who gets to go first. Does the university make its offers first and then sees which students accept? Does the training hospital make its offers first? Do the men make their offers first and see which women accept them? Or the other way around? Does it make a difference? It turns out that it does make a difference. And it is advantageous to be the people asking, and that's proved with mathematics. My message to the women of this world is that they should throw off this tradition and get out there and start asking the guys first and that is the way they play the game to their advantage.
Should women fake orgasms?
This is the only example, I think, where the economist got it wrong. Normally, I defend economists. The economist was a guy called Hugo Mialon. He got interested in faking orgasms because he was originally interested in whether people would lie to the police or not when arrested. And he said, hang on, I have a model for lying and I could apply it to orgasms too. He had quantitative data from the 2,000 Orgasm Survey. I think that was a survey done in the year 2000, and not a survey of 2,000 orgasms, but I am not sure. And the main problem with his research is that he assumes there is nothing you can do to make an orgasm more likely. So, basically, you either have an orgasm or you don't, and then you got to decide whether to fake. That's crazy because the whole point is that your partner could try a bit harder. This is an important omission because it denies your partner the feedback he or she needs to improve. So my advice is that forget about faking orgasms, make sure that your partner doesn't fake foreplay. And I have no idea whether you can publish that!
I just want to be happy. What is the way out?
There are a huge number of different pieces of research answering this question. Some of the research on this is done by Daniel Kahneman, who shared a Nobel Prize in economics -- despite not being an economist --and Alan Kruger, who is one of the deputy treasury secretaries in the US currently advising president (Barack) Obama. And their method of working out what makes people happy is not to ask them, "Are you happy?", because there will be a lot of problems with that. Instead, they just say, "Just talk us through yesterday. What did you do? How did the day start? What was the first thing you did? How long did it take? Who were you with? And how did you feel on a scale of 1 to 10? What was your dominant emotion? Stressed, bored, tired, excited, in love, happy, relaxed?" They just work out how likely people are to be in a negative mental state for each activity. And how long people spend in a negative mental state.
