The economics of why women who believe 'men are trash' are selecting for the type of man they get

In economics you get what you incentivise for. Women who believe 'men are trash' are very likely operating their dating life in such a manner which excludes average and more sought out for men from the markets they engage in. They are preselecting for the type of men they are dating.

Second Hand Cars and Lemons

In some markets, the second hand car you buy is almost certain to be a so-called lemon, a car which is low quality. This is because the better options have all been pushed out by market forces, leaving only the sellers of bad cars in the market.

Someone selling a good second hand car wants a good price for it. But the presence of unexpected bad cars lowers what a buyer is willing to risk. The sellers of good cars therefore do not find the price their car is worth and do not try to sell it. That leaves only the average and the bad cars in the market. But, the chances of buying a bad car go up significantly as the good cars are removed from the market. The seller of an average car therefore will not realise the value of the car on the market and not attempt to sell it. Only bad, appropriately priced cars therefore remain on the market. They have been preselected. 

So how does economics get out of this slump? Easily enough. Mechanisms to undo the inequality of information about cars between buyers and sellers and to stop preselection for bad cars need to be introduced. 

Experts such as mechanics are employed to inspect second hand vehicles for a buyer, leading to less likelihood of discoverable defects. Independent services which verify number of accidents, number of previous owners of a car, service history, and likely sale price can also emerge. These increase the equality of information between buyer and seller.

The most common approach is the introduction of second hand car dealers, on the basis that such dealers can engage in all the above, and then offer a warranty on the car so that if it breaks down in a certain amount of time they will fix it. This assumption of risk, and the linking of the reputation of the seller to their ability to sell vehicles, will bring the sellers of average and good cars back to the market. 

Insurance and preselection for the sick

Insurance faces a similar natural market problem. Sick people are most likely to buy insurance. Healthy people are unlikely to. The cross-subsidisation of insurance therefore is impacted, prices go up, and only the sick take out insurance. Prices go up, and only the really sick do. The insurance thus goes out of business.

Insurers can combat this is several ways, such as excluding people with preconditions, pricing people differently according to their health profile and risks, pricing them differently according to their statistical demographic risks (e.g. pricing car insurance cheaper for women of a certain age), or by selling insurance to groups rather than the end user. In the case of group insurance, a company can be sold insurance for their entire staff, not just those of ill health, allowing good cross-subsidisation. Likewise, it can be sold to an industry as a whole, etc, or to a husband or wife in order to cover their whole family.

Mechanisms which preselect for the sick in the sale of medical insurance essentially have to be combatted to bring insurers back to dealing with the general population.

Social Media 

Social media in the current era is very toxic. In the past mechanisms such as anonymity as default allowed ordinary people to engage in more honest debate with little threat of backlash on their careers for a misstatement. 

Social media companies which encourage social media mobbing via their algorithms and incentives and at the same time encourage people via incentives to use their real names create a market where over time reasonable voices of ordinary people are pushed out, and generally only those who are roughest and most prepared to engage in costly debate remain in the debate. Only those with already established tough to hurt reputations remain in the game at the end.

When social media companies then take political sides on questions, it further disincentivises ordinary people from debate. It also encourages those who are worst on the side favoured to pursue others by means other than rational debate. 

There is a reason Twitter for instance is often called a 'dumpster fire' or 'hell site'. Extreme partisanship and pursuit of status via trying to take down any named opponent are commonplace. Eventually, given the group dynamics at play, even the most ardent debater is likely to set their account to private, leave the site, or avoid certain topics.

Most ordinary users of social media will tend to set their profiles to private and avoid controversial topics. A few will develop skills and abilities to engage meaningfully, but even then, any statement can become 'problematic' via social media mobs who are increasingly looking for the slightest weakness, of which far less is available, to pursue someone for, or for weaknesses emerging via the passing of time. 

Those seeking to up their reputation by cancelling others initially have an easy time, grabbing the low hanging fruit, but, to use another economic concept, variable costs of units of production increase with each additional unit produced ... the more of something you seek, the more effort you have to put into it with each new instance. On social media, where mobbing occurs, the low hanging fruit is quickly picked, and increasingly innocuous 'offenders' must thus be pursued for status.

As a social media site becomes more toxic, it enters the sort of death spiral Google Plus did, where engagement is eventually discouraged to an extent that the social media site dies.

Atheism and Intelligence

The other day I watched a YouTube video which highly amused me, but not for the reasons the YouTuber may have intended. An academic thinker who makes a lot of interesting heterodox arguments, which I enjoy engaging with, mentally, was challenging a recent study. The study, a meta-study, had found that religious people are no less intelligent than average people. This makes sense, as most Nobel prize winning scientists are religious, and as religious people, per longitudinal studies, generally, statistically live longer, are happier, and tend to have higher levels of community in their lives.

Religiosity is also selected for in the dating market, as religious men and women are more likely to get married younger, statistically, and to have more children. Atheists, per demographics, are less likely to marry early or at all and generally have fewer children when they do. Levels of religiosity are also genetic to a degree, meaning that people who are less religious are essentially evolutionarily selected against (something also true of veganism, which appears to only generally be stuck to by people with certain genetics).

In fact, atheism is a bit like a peacock's tail. The peacock who survives despite his bright tail highlighting him to predators is likely to have survived despite, not because of, his plumage. Atheists, in being genetically selected against, are likely to have specific other genes which combat this, genes such as those for higher intelligence. Such genes are more likely to combat an atheist's lack of community, general shorter life span, and lower chances of passing on more of his genes.

The YouTuber had decided to use dating site data in order to prove what he thought was his point that religious people were less intelligent, and that the more religious they were, the less intelligent still. 

The first problem is that religiosity is generally associated with marrying earlier, and is often a prized trait in dating. Religious people also tend to meet up physically at churches and youth groups and bingo nights, etc. Like smart insurers, they have entered to deep sea of the general population, rather than the lemon car markets of online dating. In these blue oceans, the religious people using online dating apps were unable to find a mate. They thus turned to online dating.

The second problem is that the more religious someone is, the earlier they are likely to marry and the more likely they are to stay married even if they are unhappy in a marriage. More desired religious people are less likely to use dating websites.

The third problem is that dating websites are heavily associated with pickup culture. In contrast, religious people are much less likely to engage in casual sexual activity. A game which encourages hookups selects against the sexually prudent.

The YouTuber used only the data from users who had answered many questions, and then selected questions which resemble standardised testing questions, in order to gauge intelligence based on the answers given by the online daters. He then found that Catholics in the west in his view had an average IQ of about 98 (2 below average) and that the more religious someone was, the more likely they would answer the questions on the dating site incorrectly. People who go to great efforts to answer questions to be better matched on dating sites, likely are more desperate to find a mate or more mates, again meaning the YouTuber preselected for people who are struggling to find a partner or enough partners. He also chose a secular dating site when specific religious sites existed, meaning he again preselected for the result he got.

However, given the fact that religiosity is an advantage in dating, and is more likely to expose the religious to more of the general population, and the other factors, a religious person using a secular online dating website is more likely to have something else which is holding them back from finding a good partner. In other words, the YouTuber, in using secular dating site datasets, preselected against the religious people who are most likely to score higher on datasets, and thus caused his own conclusion, instead of disproving the accepted scientific consensus that ordinary religiosity and intelligence are not connected. 

Dating Websites and Preselection

Women on dating sites rate almost all men as below average, and select an even smaller percentage of the men on the sites to date. A tiny proportion of men on dating websites and applications essentially get their pick of the women. The vast majority of men are thus excluded from the market, and are unlikely to stick around, or if they do stick around are more likely to be desperate, and to spend hours each day seeking even one female partner. Given spending hours a day on a dating website or application takes a lot more effort than meeting women at a church, work, hobby group or pub, these men are likely either not succeeding in finding women by these ordinary means, or are promiscuous and not finding enough women to satisfy their increased appetite.

As for the small percentage of highly sought after men on dating apps, they are likely to be swimming in women's affection. The women pursuing them are likely to be engaged in heavy competition for them. If the men in question are looking for a life partner, they are likely to quickly leave the market. If they are promiscuous, they are incentivised to stay and keep satisfying their enhanced appetite for a variety of women. 

Overall, dating websites and applications therefore select for men who are more likely to be more promiscuous and less successful in the ordinary world. As I set out above, they also select for men who are less religious, less engaged in their communities, and more likely not to marry early.

Hypergamy and reproductive prime

Women generally will select against men who they believe have low potential to gather resources to support them and potential children. This is an evolutionary preference known as hypergamy. It is not the pursuit of wealth or the wealthy, but the pursuit of a man capable of producing wealth. Productivity is a prized trait for humans, and women tend to date on the same level as they are or to date up, seeking men who are successful or show potential. 

Men tend to become successful later, as the workplace has been shown to favour women in their sexual or reproductive prime in regards salaries, promotions, and availability of work, but not to favour women once they pass their sexual or reproductive prime. 

Women in their sexual or reproductive prime years tend to have many male suitors. In the case of women past their sexual/reproductive prime, this tends to be reversed. The evolutionary purpose below dating is reproduction.

Dating in many modern workplaces is highly discouraged by sexual harassment policies, which also tend to exist in universities. Women also tend to outnumber men among university graduates, despite the fact women tend to prefer to date up, and educated women tend not to date men of lesser education than they have. Women, due to evolution, generally favour men who have material success.

Men in contrast tend to date women of lower or equal academic achievement to them, and to not really care what a potential dating partner does in their career to anything near the same extent as women do. Men tend to favour women of good health, in their sexual prime, who look younger, have had fewer sexual partners (the more previous partners a married woman has had, the higher the chance of divorce, statistically), seem more likely to be faithful to them and who are more likely to survive childbirths. A man who unwittingly raises another man's child like a bird raising the egg of a cuckoo, is putting a lot more effort into something which will not prolong his own genetic line, hence evolution favouring loyalty in women and fewer sexual partners.

The type of woman who says men are trash

The sort of woman who says men are trash is generally older, more likely to have attended university, has a career at the forefront of her mind, and is more likely to be liberal, or a non-egalitarian feminist. 

Viewing dating as a marketplace where people essentially offer their partnership to others in exchange for the partnership of the other, the price of a date depends on what is offered. Things such as looks, ability to gain resources, worldview, personality, general disposition, and treatment of a partner all come into play.

A woman who believes all men are rapists, is unlikely to find a quality man who agrees with her. A rapist may be prepared to be treated as a rapist, just as a seller of a defective car will be prepared to accept the payment the car is due, but as with the example of the second hand cars above, the average and good men in the market are pushed out by the risk of dating such a woman.

A similar example can be found in white proponents of critical race theory, who claim or accept as true that it is somehow or other impossible for whites not to be racist, they inevitably are making an admission about themselves, that they are racist, while not properly placed to make it about any other white, most of whom, statistically, have relatively low racial in-preferences according to polling companies. 

A woman who believes all men are oppressors is likewise much less likely to find a quality man who is prepared to be treated as oppressive when he isn't. An oppressive man in contrast is fine with being treated as what he is.

A woman who believes all men are cheaters and liars, is unlikely to find a man prepared to date her who isn't one. Sexual harassment policies in universities and workplace also make it more likely that in such environments a man who is prepared to risk punishment to pursue a woman is more likely to have a greater sexual appetite and to be promiscuous.

Women who believe men are trash tend to be highly educated, limiting the men they are likely to pursue, having been career focussed in the prime of their life, likely to marry later, less likely to attend church or hobby clubs or places like pubs (after all, the male gaze is often spoken of), and more likely to resort to things such as online dating later in life. One of the biggest factors, though, is that men who know they are not trash are unlikely to want to date a woman who sees them as trash and may treat them accordingly. Essentially, women who say men are trash have generally economically-speaking preselected in such a manner as to exclude more highly desired men from dating them. You generally get what you incentivise in the marketplace.