The Sexual Market Is The Prime Market

Forget the free market economy. The sexual market is the one market to rule them all. As if my preening weren’t already supremely ostentatious, here’s a recent SCIENCE! study confirming another Heartiste axiom: every human interaction and transaction is downstream from the existential struggle to find a quality mate, fuck, and procreate.

Fewer romantic prospects may lead to riskier investments

Encountering information suggesting that it may be tough to find a romantic partner shifts people’s decision making toward riskier options, according to new findings from a series of studies published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

“Environmental cues indicating that one will have a relatively difficult time finding a mate can drive people to concentrate their investment choices into a few high-risk, high-return options,” says psychological scientist Joshua Ackerman of the University of Michigan, lead author on the research. “This is true even when the decisions people are making are not explicitly relevant to romantic outcomes.”

I’ve received some scoffing from spergy types projecting their spergitude onto this ‘umble outpost of love concerning the assertion often made here that the sexual market governs, consciously or subconsciously it doesn’t really matter, the machinations and ultimately the outcomes of the more palpable activity that takes place in the economic market. But here we have a study proving the truth of the CH observation that ripples and undercurrents of sexual compulsion and romantic desperation are the “invisible loin” that guides all human behavior in the secondary market of the economy and its supporting markets (like academia).

“This is exactly opposite from the pattern of investing we would predict if we assumed people were using an economically ‘rational’ decision strategy,” Ackerman explains. “From an evolutionary perspective, if the options are to do whatever it takes to find a romantic partner or risk not finding one, the more rational choice may be to do whatever it takes.”

This is a stone cold truth that no libertardian like Alex Tabbarak or Cheap Chalupas will ever get. Humans aren’t rational actors; they’re rationalizing actors. And what they rationalize are choices, in all spheres of transaction, that directly or indirectly improve their chances of landing that alpha male or that hot babe.

In a second online study, 105 participants read a newspaper article discussing demographic trends in the U.S. They then evaluated stock packages with equivalent values (e.g., 100 shares in 8 companies, 200 shares in 4 companies, etc.) and chose which package they would invest in.

Again, the data showed that both male and female participants who read about unfavorable sex ratios opted for riskier investments, choosing more shares in fewer companies, than those who read about favorable ratios.

In practice, “riskier strategies” for women amounts to what we see today on college campuses, where women outnumber men 60-40. The zeitgeist is a sexual pornucopia for a few alpha men getting the milk for free without buying the cow, and a lot of disappointment and depression among marginally pretty women who thought they could turn that fling into a thing.

The fact that sex ratio had an impact on decisions that were not directly linked with mating success suggests that sexual competition elicits a general mindset geared toward achieving the largest possible reward, regardless of the risk involved.

Polygyny, as is the norm throughout Africa, can induce the same risky investment strategizing from men as can an unfavorable sex skew. When a few men lock up many women, each individual man has an incentive to throw caution to the wind to be one of those few winner men.

As such, the researchers argue, these findings could have implications for decision making in domains as diverse as retirement planning, gambling, and even making consumer purchases.

Executive Summary: The meaning of life is to fuck.