I can see the concern, but I'd place it way down the list of things that could make the wealth gap worse.
Debutante balls and other such classist dating practice have been around basically forever. I don't think digitizing them adds a particular new dimension of concern.
Came here to say that. I don't think it will worsen the current gap, dating has mostly been done among one's peer group, so using an app won't change anything.
The app can increase the degree to which the existing norms are realized rather than aspirational; to the extent that individual acheivement of the goals of the existing norm has adverse social consequences, that is rightfully a source of concern even if it involves nothing personally blameworthy and no change of norms.
Agree, dating for the most part happens within social circles, so being super wealthy means you get introduced to other super wealthy potential partners on a regular basis through your network of friends at whatever yacht club, private school, nightclub VIP, ect. Almost every girl I've dated was because I went to a party, camping trip, dinner, beach or bar somewhere and a friend of a friend brought a single friend and introduced us. Online dating is just a way to expand search from your local social network.
It really is, and it appears to be intentional. It makes sense when you think about it - socially controversial articles get clicks, so they are a great vehicle for advertorials.
I can’t help but think that this is really grasping for straws. Sure technically the headline may be correct...but there’s nothing wrong with wanting to date someone in the same socioeconomic class as you. On top of that, the amount that this contributes to the actual gap is probably minuscule relative to the other big contributors that are more systemic and policy-oriented rather than cultural.
I signed up for the "The League" a few months ago.
I appreciate that they added in options to be discrete, by excluding people at your employer or friends on facebook. Not that that kind of discretion was necessary, or worth the price.
As for results, well, imho they have been no better than tinder. Lots of flakes, and seemingly random matches. Funnily enough I met my current partner on OkCupid, which seems antiquated by modern dating app standards.
I feel like I hear more random success stories on OkCupid than anywhere else. It seems the commitment of swiping on <insert any of 20 apps here> is really thin. Not to mention that most people probably aren't looking to marry (or even date) someone from Tinder.
I'm curious about your experience. Do you feel that anything in particular made OkCupid more successful for you? I feel that the level of information / detail in profiles might help for a more successful match, but I haven't put in any time on the platform myself.
Online dating is just 90% random chance that both parties will be compatible, which is why quick swipe apps are so popular now (and what OKC has recently transitioned to as well). It allows for a greater throughput of matches, so you can eventually boil it down faster.
I think the more detailed profile of OKC has always been very helpful conversationally, but really that's about it. I think the greater fraction of successful OKC dates is simply a result of it being around longer.
I met my current dating partner on OKcupid a couple years ago. I've tried Tinder and while I've had more matches on there, and got more dates from it (before I got serious with this girl), I think OKC is better for finding compatible people for the reasons you name: there's simply a lot more information and detail in the profiles. OKC makes it easy to weed out people who have incompatibilities because you can see this stuff in the profiles in also in the answers to the many questions. The only problem with OKC in my view is that Tinder and similar low-information phone apps have basically taken over, so it seems like the traditional sites like OKC are basically dying out from lack of users. Just like any social network, these sites depend on a "critical mass" of users to work well.
Maybe the audience for this was always smaller, but the niche of "find people who share interests with you" is under explored. FB cornered the social network market, but it was always deliberately the opposite of this: you only add people you already know.
I used to be a part of a social network which had more of an open-world policy, and I miss it.
Well, there is meetup.com for that: it's all about local groups organized around common interests. It's not meant for dating specifically (though there are singles' groups), but many people do say a good way to meet dating partners is to attend events that you have an interest in so you might meet someone who shares that interest.
> Funnily enough I met my current partner on OkCupid, which seems like antiquated by modern dating app standards.
There's a bit of demographic selection here (people who are likely to use OkCupid may be more of your type), but OkCupid's whole proposition, early on, was gathering a boatload of information about you, via personality tests and data experiments, and hopefully presenting people who are at least likely to keep a conversation going.
As teirce points out, the see picture, swipe dynamic of mobile-native apps is more conducive to casual encounters. It certainly puts more weight on physical appearance and status signals.
OkCupid used to publish detailed posts about their experiments, but I can't recall what ratio they found of "people who are contacted frequently" to "people who mostly initiate contact", but I'd hazard a guess that it's much higher on Tinder. Such an app tends to be winner-takes-all, with a long tail of people who are mostly ignored.
Historically, men date down (professionals marrying their executive admins, nurses marrying doctors) whereas women will not, so this percentage is based on how many college eduated women can find equally or greater educated, eligible men. Citation below.
Outside of major cities, the rate drops substantially.
Also, many more women than men are college educated now, which is distorting dating in interesting ways, since most women (and some men) tend to want to date someone who is at least their equal with employment and/or education.
Err -- did you look at your graph? Your first link shows that 2017 was the first year that more women were educated then men....and your second link is from 2015, before the flip.
Of course I looked at the graph. Even though women earned more degrees than men in 2017, for nearly the entire history of the country, men earned substantially more college degrees than women. Thus, men currently hold significantly more than half of the college degrees right now. We're talking about prevalence, not incidence.
You are correct, but current college graduates (so 56% of them women) are in the "dating pool" much more so than the 60-year olds (where a higher percentage of men are educated, but not much dating going on).
Keep in mind that these appear to be for the population as a whole. Since women have overtaken men recently from what used to be a pretty significant disparity, that should mean that recent years have seen a significantly higher proportion of women getting college degrees vs. men.
It's not significantly higher. And we are talking about the population as a whole. I'm refuting the point that "many more women than men are college educated now". This is incorrect. See my other response regarding incidence vs. prevalence.
But we should not be talking about the population as a whole - just the 25-35 year-old segment who are in the dating pool. And in that age group, college-educated women may outnumber men.
Only 1/3 of adults have four-year degrees. If dating were purely random you’d expect about 11% of marriages to be between partners with degrees, so this figure is perhaps a little lower than what I’d expect but not too far off.
Adults is a very wide range, younger people are more likely to get married (aka not be married) and significantly more likely to have a collage education.
Sure, but the original quote about 15% of couples having dual degrees also looked at the whole population. What you’re saying is true but isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison in this case.
To be more clear, the married population is very different from the total population. People are also likely to match with people of similar ages.
20-24 years 9.7%
25-29 years 32.9%
30-34 years 52.4%
35-39 years 63.3%
40-44 years 65.5%
45-49 years 65.4%
50-54 years 65.3%
55-64 years 65.6%
65-74 years 64.4%
75-84 years 54.2%
85+ years 33.4%
So 50+ population is more than twice as likely to be married vs 20-29, but the 20-29 population is significantly more likely to have a degree. Modeling this correctly would be a little more difficult than just saying % married with degree vs. total population with degree as you need to look at population sizes and age ranges that get married etc.
Colleges themselves are a much bigger factor. If you go to an elitist college, you are much more likely to marry someone from that elitist college, and then to have a two-high-income household. It just seems inevitable, though - people want to date other people like themselves.
Yes - elite colleges, and top B-schools and the like, are often seen as part education, part networking...and part spouse-finding. For B-schools, more networking/signaling and spouse-finding than education.
Most people date/marry someones equally attractive, from an equal class, with equal education. That's fairly standard and always has been, which is why most people marry someone from their college, a job, church, or some other shared experience. It's the shared experience that typically brings people together, and keeps them together.
And of course there are many cultures around the world with arranged marriages, and those almost always specifically aim to match equals from the same class background (or higher).
> Most people date/marry someones equally attractive, from an equal class, with equal education.
Historically, the second has been strongly true, the first much less so, and the last basically false, though somewhat less untrue if you read “equal” as “in a roughly similar point on the distribution for their gender”.
> And of course there are many cultures around the world with arranged marriages, and those almost always specifically aim to match equals from the same class background (or higher).
If someone is getting higher, the other partner is getting lower. There is a necessary symmetry there.
Since women weren't typically attend higher schooling until very recently, it doesn't make sense to compare it historically. I've seen people go higher and lower within their class, but not really go from one class to another, unless the person is supermodel worthy.
The really funny part is that SA demonstrated that it is also the case is arrangement - pretty much no one cares about the bottom 80% and people pay a boatload of money for early access to the top 5%.
Dating/marriage outside of your economic upbringing presents some difficult challenges that should not be trivialized. I don't think it's unreasonable to want to date someone that has a similar background to you. Relationships are much easier when you are with someone who share similar economic backgrounds and religious beliefs.
I agree completely. Been there, done that. Never again will I date someone from a a different socioeconomic class or who has any significant religious beliefs. I tried being open-minded and it was a disaster.
Was the issue the socioeconomic class or the religious beliefs?
I can see how different religious beliefs can be a very practical issue but it seems like socioeconomic class is a little less "dogmatic" and it would be easier to find a middle ground? That being said I can't really give life lessons here, I don't think I ever dated anybody outside of my "socioeconomic class", whatever that is.
Both, but the socioeconomic thing really killed it more than the religion. With religion, at least you can agree to disagree usually. But in a marriage, finances are shared to some extent, and you just can't get past that. When one partner is frugal and manages money carefully, and the other thinks "we're making all this money! why can't I spend it on xyz/tithe to my church/buy expensive gifts for my family/etc.?" the results won't be good.
I understand this scenario completely, but I was able to make it work with my wife (who grew up very poor). Ironically, many people that grow up poor seem to not realize that many people who have money tend to be frugal with it- that's it's not a sign of weakness to be frugal. My wife and I are on the same page now-a-days (I definitely learned some things from her as well), but it was a struggle for a while hence why I don't think it's good to trivialize in the name of social equality.
I tried too, but finally gave up. We just couldn't see eye-to-eye on it, and I am not willing to try again.
My new girlfriend comes from an entirely different culture geographically, but has extremely similar money-management practices as me, even though she didn't grow up in the same country (though it was also a rich first-world nation). There's challenges with her too, but finances aren't one of them.
>If we date someone from a different economic class then one party is prone to abuse that power imbalance and take advantage...
Yep, been there, done that. It isn't even always intentional, it's just that when someone from a very different economic background, and who has a very different approach to handling finances, marries someone who has high earning potential, I've found they just can't reconcile these very different viewpoints.
Elite dating apps are the absolute worst. I was invited to an Ivy League alum dating app, and I swear Mensa and /r/atheism on their worst days never came close to the amount of smug, self-satisfied posturing as I saw there. I don't even think there was a lot of actual dating going on, most people were just there to show off.
On the last of major socioeconomic problems in America, I really don't think "new apps for peacocking" is up there.
First, aren’t people going to be looking to pair up with someone in the same socioeconomic class anyway? That’s what we’ve mostly been doing over the course of history. That an app is based on this is not surprising. And I have a hard time believe apps perpetuate what we are already doing or exacerbate it.
The second is the graph in the middle regarding distance from city center and population with a degree. Haven’t we, in general, been getting more degrees since the points of comparison? How is this, again not already distributed according to pre-existing trends? The curve also does not change significantly besides being shifted up (corresponding a generally high rate of university degrees). Is there a actually significant shift happening with those without college degrees with regard to distance from city center? I think not, or they would have showed it and it would have been more convincing.
On a societal level, yes it's bad when romance stratifies along classist lines, not only because people miss out on potential compatible partners, but also because it increases inequality and cements generational wealth/prestige.
On an individual level, it's definitely a good idea if you're wealthy. Since so many things correlate so well with wealth, or have wealth as a prerequisite, it could highly reduce someone's signal-noise ratio if they're looking for someone with those traits. For example, if you're an entrepreneur, or an amateur tennis player, or someone trying to play the corporate ladder climbing game like the example in the article, and you want to find someone similar, you'll have much more success finding someone similar to you among wealthy people, even though wealth is not necessarily a prerequisite to any of those things.
> On a societal level, yes it's bad when romance stratifies along classist lines
I disagree. It's bad when the society has poor mechanisms for distribution of the gains of economy, and with certain deficiencies the magnitude of the impact will be exacerbated by wealth-stratified life partner selection, independent of the degree to which this associated with romance. However I partner selection is not th source of the harm, it's a factor which aggravates the impact of some actual distributional defects if they are present.
If class-based partner selection is not the source of the harm, but exacerbates the harm of inequality, how is it preferable to the alternative? If something is on fire, I would generally say it's "bad" to add fuel to it, hence my opinion. Of course I agree that this is more of an emergent effect of the classist society we inhabit than a cause of it, but most of the reasons that class-based partner selection can be "good" are precisely due to class inequalities in the first place.
"Classist society" is instinctive to all animals, it's just how mating and evolution works. I don't think we should, or are even able to, curb class-based partner selection to try and reduce wealth and income inequality.
My preference would be to strive make sure that all people have the opportunity for a quality education and upbringing, by ways of guaranteeing shelter, quality food, and work protections to allow parents to spend time with children.
Honestly, this is just the modern version of a process that has taken place since the beginning of time. It's called assortative mating. Basically, people tend to end up married to people who are of an equivalent class/quality/caliber. Now there is a dating app which augments the role of country clubs, private schools, and expensive neighborhoods in enabling the elite to find each other. NBD.
IMO, a much more troubling development is the way that the rise of college education in the 20th century has systematically pulled the cognitive elite out of most of the country and concentrated them in urban centers (where all the high paying jobs that demand elite cognition are located). Whereas the elites have always lived an existence far disconnected from the rest of us, now the upper middle class and lower middle class are similarly disconnected from each other.
I've learned to ignore news articles that talk about what could or might happen. That's not news, it's just speculation. The news is supposed to be things that did happen.
Could elite dating apps exacerbate wealth inequality? Maybe. But people already segregate themselves by wealth pretty effectively. They would have to actually show that people who might have otherwise married someone of lower socioeconomic status didn't because of the app, and of course that's not available.
Doubt it. More than anything I believe this caters to a population who enjoys the feeling of being "exclusive" or "elite". Whatever, if someone is buying someone will sell.
...no, they don't. Or at least not in the way that this article suggests.
First, we should divide "dating" into two markets -- one for sex and one for long-term relationships.
In my experience, existing dating apps overwhelmingly cater to the sex market. Even the ones supposedly designed to set up professionals are used by both genders to find quality people for quick flings. There IS massive "inequality" in the sex market -- women overwhelmingly judge men by a Pareto distribution, as evidenced by multiple studies (that I can cite upon request) -- but the fact that the average woman is uninterested in the average man doesn't stir within me a call for equitable distribution of sex partners.
Then there's the long-term relationship market, which I admittedly don't know has been successfully addressed by any app. OKCupid's premise was that it would set up compatible people for long-term relationships, but I think OKC is out of vogue now. This is the void that apps like The League are trying to fill, I guess, though I'm baffled as to their appeal.
For women (or either gender that wants to secure long-term commitment from a high-status, high-income mate), The League sort of makes sense. When you're done with your Tinder carousel and want to move on to a relationship, here's a pool of wealthy, connected men whose bank accounts suit your lifestyle aspirations. That's not a pitch that will inspire lust, but at least it's more palatable than admitting to being a sugar baby.
For men, though... why would you want The League? Even if you're an unattractive guy, making what amounts to a Tinder profile for your bank account is just a terrible idea. If you're attractive enough, you can just have sex via Tinder. If you want to pay for sex, there are existing options. If you want someone to love... apps that brag "half of its active members earn more than $500,000" and its kin are frankly not going to provide that.
- - - - -
This article conflates two important ideas without really addressing either. There IS a very real, accelerating trend of what's called "assortive mating," where highly intelligent people move out of Nowhere, Kentucky to major cities where they meet spouses in line with their intelligence and success. These successful couples have more successful children, who then mate with other successful children, and so on. The less successful people are left behind, mate with other less successful people, and have less successful children who mate with other left behind children. This brain drain is both international and intranational.
Then you have the question of mating strategies, particularly the (traditionally female) interest in securing long-term commitment. The recent book "Date-onomics" did a decent job describing the massive demographic challenge facing educated women in this market -- educated women overwhelmingly desire more successful men, but men generally don't care about their mates' education or status. In fact, as men prefer to date younger women, aging women face the twin challenges of narrowing interest and increasing competition (due to population growth or cultural differentials like age gaps). The League and its kind deserve some respect for nakedly addressing these mating strategies -- men offer up their status and wealth, and women presumably only need to be young and attractive.
Dating apps probably DO accelerate assortive mating. Women are particularly sensitive toward status in men, especially educational attainment. (At least in the long-term relationship market, not necessarily in the sex market.) So ideas like The League and its competitors aren't necessarily a bad idea -- if you can market it as "OKCupid for successful people" rather than "Saudi prince seeking Instagram model." As far as I can tell though, anyone mature enough to want a long-term relationship is not in the douchey Vegas-ish market that The League is targeting. An...
> Ladies, you asked for quality gentlemen: Men are verified grads of top universities
So was the "quality gentleman" that sexually harassed a friend of mine.
Get an OKCupid account, and actually answer the questions. You'll get a list of people that are actually compatible with your values and beliefs. It's a far better way to date than any system that's based on superficial crap.
People on OKC actually took the time to sit down and think about their relationship goals. You shouldn't be surprised that people that are good at communicating goals generally tend to be good at accomplishing other goals too. So you end up with a better way to find goal-oriented people like that (if that's your thing) than this approach would ever provide anyways.
I propose that the more wages stagnate and the COL increases, the more people are going to stick to dating and marrying people in their own socioeconomic class. I think there will be a threshold in which there is a clear choice to made between romance and lifestyle between two socioeconomic classes (barring the ultra rich). i.e., dating someone in a lower class than you incurs a higher cost that will have a significant impact on your financial plans (retirement, housing, edit: children, etc).
This is silly. Wealth inequality is a serious concern, but implying that wealthy people dating other wealthy people is making it worse is ridiculous. People can date whoever they want, it makes progressive movements look terrible if you push the notion that there must be economic balance among all relationships...
"Elites are studiously silent about the familial basis of their relative success. Marital stability is now a form of competitive advantage for the upper tier ... amplified by the insistence that family formation is ... an obstacle to autonomy." - Patrick Deneen
Most of the upper crust finds marital/family stability to be very necessary to success, while many cultural currents try to express that its not a big deal (or that it is better to be a forever bachelor and forever child). Many of the upper crust probably try to downplay it too.
Think of how even the Clintons and Weiners[1] and Trumps are together and stay together, for instance.
The problem isn't elite dating apps though, the problem is the common man and woman's perception and treatment of marriages/families. Elite dating apps are just signaling out in the open something that the elite have known for a very long time. The big advantage that the elite have here is recognizing the importance.
[1] wiki says:
> Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner withdrew their divorce case from court in January 2018, claiming they did so in order to spare their six year-old son further embarrassment.
The claim is one thing, but the truth is that in spite of his terrible flaws/nature/whatever, they both agreed they still have work to do, be it ambition or family.
> "Elites are studiously silent about the familial basis of their relative success. Marital stability is now a form of competitive advantage for the upper tier ... amplified by the insistence that family formation is ... an obstacle to autonomy." - Patrick Deneen
Divorce destroys wealth. Wealthy people understand that marrying partnering is a partnership which a sprinkle of romantic interest. Middle class and below is fixated on "finding the one" who will complete them and with whom he or she can be happy together in a crappy studio apartment without realizing that the crappy studio apartment they are going to be stuck in because "love conquers all" is going to seriously negatively affect their relationship.
86 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadDebutante balls and other such classist dating practice have been around basically forever. I don't think digitizing them adds a particular new dimension of concern.
https://lifehacker.com/how-online-dating-is-making-u-s-marri...
So perhaps the effect of this will be a return (total or partial) to how things always were.
http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
> But the med student says he prefers Tinder, a site with a reputation for facilitating hookups, and the League.
That suffixed ", and the League".
I appreciate that they added in options to be discrete, by excluding people at your employer or friends on facebook. Not that that kind of discretion was necessary, or worth the price.
As for results, well, imho they have been no better than tinder. Lots of flakes, and seemingly random matches. Funnily enough I met my current partner on OkCupid, which seems antiquated by modern dating app standards.
I'm curious about your experience. Do you feel that anything in particular made OkCupid more successful for you? I feel that the level of information / detail in profiles might help for a more successful match, but I haven't put in any time on the platform myself.
I think the more detailed profile of OKC has always been very helpful conversationally, but really that's about it. I think the greater fraction of successful OKC dates is simply a result of it being around longer.
I used to be a part of a social network which had more of an open-world policy, and I miss it.
There's a bit of demographic selection here (people who are likely to use OkCupid may be more of your type), but OkCupid's whole proposition, early on, was gathering a boatload of information about you, via personality tests and data experiments, and hopefully presenting people who are at least likely to keep a conversation going.
As teirce points out, the see picture, swipe dynamic of mobile-native apps is more conducive to casual encounters. It certainly puts more weight on physical appearance and status signals.
OkCupid used to publish detailed posts about their experiments, but I can't recall what ratio they found of "people who are contacted frequently" to "people who mostly initiate contact", but I'd hazard a guess that it's much higher on Tinder. Such an app tends to be winner-takes-all, with a long tail of people who are mostly ignored.
Wow I'm out of touch with the real world.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/10/dating-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15736410
Also, many more women than men are college educated now, which is distorting dating in interesting ways, since most women (and some men) tend to want to date someone who is at least their equal with employment and/or education.
No, not even close:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attai...
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
Here is some additional data from the Department of Education demonstrating that women make up 56% of college students nationwide:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_303.70.a...
And some lighter reading on the topic if you're not into reviewing raw numbers.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/08/why-me...
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/11/gender-...
You might have a personal opinion on the data, or maybe you don't like the data, but data is data.
There are a lot of people attending community colleges or getting their associate’s degrees.
Otherwise I’d be pretty shocked if it was all degrees. 15% is way too low for that....at least I’d think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
Data from https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2016/demo/families/cps-20..., though I did some basic math to compare Married Spouse Present + Married Spouse Absent vs total population.
Water finds its own level.
Most people date/marry someones equally attractive, from an equal class, with equal education. That's fairly standard and always has been, which is why most people marry someone from their college, a job, church, or some other shared experience. It's the shared experience that typically brings people together, and keeps them together.
And of course there are many cultures around the world with arranged marriages, and those almost always specifically aim to match equals from the same class background (or higher).
Historically, the second has been strongly true, the first much less so, and the last basically false, though somewhat less untrue if you read “equal” as “in a roughly similar point on the distribution for their gender”.
> And of course there are many cultures around the world with arranged marriages, and those almost always specifically aim to match equals from the same class background (or higher).
If someone is getting higher, the other partner is getting lower. There is a necessary symmetry there.
I can see how different religious beliefs can be a very practical issue but it seems like socioeconomic class is a little less "dogmatic" and it would be easier to find a middle ground? That being said I can't really give life lessons here, I don't think I ever dated anybody outside of my "socioeconomic class", whatever that is.
My new girlfriend comes from an entirely different culture geographically, but has extremely similar money-management practices as me, even though she didn't grow up in the same country (though it was also a rich first-world nation). There's challenges with her too, but finances aren't one of them.
Except if you are a Sugar Daddy looking to pamper a Sugar Baby....
If we date someone from a different economic class then one party is prone to abuse that power imbalance and take advantage...
Sounds like what we all need is an app that just randomly assigns partners to fuck each other.
It's really the only fair thing to do...
Sign up for the Beta at www.sex-with-randos.com.
Yep, been there, done that. It isn't even always intentional, it's just that when someone from a very different economic background, and who has a very different approach to handling finances, marries someone who has high earning potential, I've found they just can't reconcile these very different viewpoints.
On the last of major socioeconomic problems in America, I really don't think "new apps for peacocking" is up there.
First, aren’t people going to be looking to pair up with someone in the same socioeconomic class anyway? That’s what we’ve mostly been doing over the course of history. That an app is based on this is not surprising. And I have a hard time believe apps perpetuate what we are already doing or exacerbate it.
The second is the graph in the middle regarding distance from city center and population with a degree. Haven’t we, in general, been getting more degrees since the points of comparison? How is this, again not already distributed according to pre-existing trends? The curve also does not change significantly besides being shifted up (corresponding a generally high rate of university degrees). Is there a actually significant shift happening with those without college degrees with regard to distance from city center? I think not, or they would have showed it and it would have been more convincing.
On an individual level, it's definitely a good idea if you're wealthy. Since so many things correlate so well with wealth, or have wealth as a prerequisite, it could highly reduce someone's signal-noise ratio if they're looking for someone with those traits. For example, if you're an entrepreneur, or an amateur tennis player, or someone trying to play the corporate ladder climbing game like the example in the article, and you want to find someone similar, you'll have much more success finding someone similar to you among wealthy people, even though wealth is not necessarily a prerequisite to any of those things.
I disagree. It's bad when the society has poor mechanisms for distribution of the gains of economy, and with certain deficiencies the magnitude of the impact will be exacerbated by wealth-stratified life partner selection, independent of the degree to which this associated with romance. However I partner selection is not th source of the harm, it's a factor which aggravates the impact of some actual distributional defects if they are present.
My preference would be to strive make sure that all people have the opportunity for a quality education and upbringing, by ways of guaranteeing shelter, quality food, and work protections to allow parents to spend time with children.
IMO, a much more troubling development is the way that the rise of college education in the 20th century has systematically pulled the cognitive elite out of most of the country and concentrated them in urban centers (where all the high paying jobs that demand elite cognition are located). Whereas the elites have always lived an existence far disconnected from the rest of us, now the upper middle class and lower middle class are similarly disconnected from each other.
Could elite dating apps exacerbate wealth inequality? Maybe. But people already segregate themselves by wealth pretty effectively. They would have to actually show that people who might have otherwise married someone of lower socioeconomic status didn't because of the app, and of course that's not available.
First, we should divide "dating" into two markets -- one for sex and one for long-term relationships.
In my experience, existing dating apps overwhelmingly cater to the sex market. Even the ones supposedly designed to set up professionals are used by both genders to find quality people for quick flings. There IS massive "inequality" in the sex market -- women overwhelmingly judge men by a Pareto distribution, as evidenced by multiple studies (that I can cite upon request) -- but the fact that the average woman is uninterested in the average man doesn't stir within me a call for equitable distribution of sex partners.
Then there's the long-term relationship market, which I admittedly don't know has been successfully addressed by any app. OKCupid's premise was that it would set up compatible people for long-term relationships, but I think OKC is out of vogue now. This is the void that apps like The League are trying to fill, I guess, though I'm baffled as to their appeal.
For women (or either gender that wants to secure long-term commitment from a high-status, high-income mate), The League sort of makes sense. When you're done with your Tinder carousel and want to move on to a relationship, here's a pool of wealthy, connected men whose bank accounts suit your lifestyle aspirations. That's not a pitch that will inspire lust, but at least it's more palatable than admitting to being a sugar baby.
For men, though... why would you want The League? Even if you're an unattractive guy, making what amounts to a Tinder profile for your bank account is just a terrible idea. If you're attractive enough, you can just have sex via Tinder. If you want to pay for sex, there are existing options. If you want someone to love... apps that brag "half of its active members earn more than $500,000" and its kin are frankly not going to provide that.
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This article conflates two important ideas without really addressing either. There IS a very real, accelerating trend of what's called "assortive mating," where highly intelligent people move out of Nowhere, Kentucky to major cities where they meet spouses in line with their intelligence and success. These successful couples have more successful children, who then mate with other successful children, and so on. The less successful people are left behind, mate with other less successful people, and have less successful children who mate with other left behind children. This brain drain is both international and intranational.
Then you have the question of mating strategies, particularly the (traditionally female) interest in securing long-term commitment. The recent book "Date-onomics" did a decent job describing the massive demographic challenge facing educated women in this market -- educated women overwhelmingly desire more successful men, but men generally don't care about their mates' education or status. In fact, as men prefer to date younger women, aging women face the twin challenges of narrowing interest and increasing competition (due to population growth or cultural differentials like age gaps). The League and its kind deserve some respect for nakedly addressing these mating strategies -- men offer up their status and wealth, and women presumably only need to be young and attractive.
Dating apps probably DO accelerate assortive mating. Women are particularly sensitive toward status in men, especially educational attainment. (At least in the long-term relationship market, not necessarily in the sex market.) So ideas like The League and its competitors aren't necessarily a bad idea -- if you can market it as "OKCupid for successful people" rather than "Saudi prince seeking Instagram model." As far as I can tell though, anyone mature enough to want a long-term relationship is not in the douchey Vegas-ish market that The League is targeting. An...
So was the "quality gentleman" that sexually harassed a friend of mine.
Get an OKCupid account, and actually answer the questions. You'll get a list of people that are actually compatible with your values and beliefs. It's a far better way to date than any system that's based on superficial crap.
People on OKC actually took the time to sit down and think about their relationship goals. You shouldn't be surprised that people that are good at communicating goals generally tend to be good at accomplishing other goals too. So you end up with a better way to find goal-oriented people like that (if that's your thing) than this approach would ever provide anyways.
Most of the upper crust finds marital/family stability to be very necessary to success, while many cultural currents try to express that its not a big deal (or that it is better to be a forever bachelor and forever child). Many of the upper crust probably try to downplay it too.
Think of how even the Clintons and Weiners[1] and Trumps are together and stay together, for instance.
The problem isn't elite dating apps though, the problem is the common man and woman's perception and treatment of marriages/families. Elite dating apps are just signaling out in the open something that the elite have known for a very long time. The big advantage that the elite have here is recognizing the importance.
[1] wiki says:
> Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner withdrew their divorce case from court in January 2018, claiming they did so in order to spare their six year-old son further embarrassment.
The claim is one thing, but the truth is that in spite of his terrible flaws/nature/whatever, they both agreed they still have work to do, be it ambition or family.
Divorce destroys wealth. Wealthy people understand that marrying partnering is a partnership which a sprinkle of romantic interest. Middle class and below is fixated on "finding the one" who will complete them and with whom he or she can be happy together in a crappy studio apartment without realizing that the crappy studio apartment they are going to be stuck in because "love conquers all" is going to seriously negatively affect their relationship.