Ten men and ten women of average looks walk into a meat market bar in Shanghai. Since they are in China the men must use crass displays of wealth and status to attract mates, and each expect to gain 500,000Y of status from marrying (at least their parents will stop bothering them.) These will be split evenly between the two partners in a 50:50 split. Harmony ensues.

If instead there are 10 men and 9 women, as a result of Momma and Pappa Zhou slavishly adhering to cultural taboos that demand production of a male offspring, the results change dramatically: one man will be unpaired, and if everything is equal and he is rational (and wants p00n), he should be willing to spend all of his surplus to securing the affections of a woman. This quickly reduces men’s payoff to just over zero, and women gain 499,999Y from the exchange. Harmony does not ensue as the unpaired male must resort to a selective combination of World of Warcraft and pillow marriage.

Several ‘long-term-mating’ equilibriums will emerge among different social strata. Yuppie urbanites will find a relatively equal gender balance, since they need marriage and children for status. The ultra-wealthy will enjoy multiple partners as the rewards to being an extremely high status male go up, so also will the effort that goes into acquiring the attention of an extremely high status male. Very poor rural migrants will be left with an even worse gender imbalance, and move into some sort of sharing arrangement with lower status females.

For Chinese men, a house is a very important asset in attracting a woman, and not unreasonably as it represents stability amid a rapidly transitioning economy with no real social safety net. Previously I’ve asserted that the link between getting-some (and having a family, I guess) was not that strong, since the low-status men group wouldn’t be in much of a position to afford houses anyway. This paper presents convincing evidence to the contrary, as household savings rates are higher in provinces with higher gender imbalances. A summary:

“The increased pressure on the marriage market in China might induce men and parents with sons to do things to make themselves more competitive,” Wei says. “Increasing savings is one logical way to do that, to the extent that wealth helps to increase a man’s competitive edge. Parents increase household savings mostly by cutting down their own consumption.”

… “We find not only that households with sons save more than households with daughters in all regions,” Wei says, “but that households with sons tend to raise their savings rate if they also happen to live in a region with a more skewed sex ratio.”

Calling something an ‘inflated asset’ and ‘bubble’ requires an a-priori notion of what a non-distortionary equilibrium would produce. If gender imbalances are affecting competition, and as a result, reservation prices for apartments, there will be considerable skew vis-a-vis models that consider income alone.

There have been lots of articles recently about the changing role of the American male motivated by an increase in long-term unemployment among young men. This hits close to home as I am a young male, with (apparently) increasingly dubious prospects for future income security. I am also (apparently) increasingly less likely to get married or sire stable offspring. In the increasingly unlikely event I do marry, it will (apparently) be to a higher educated woman with higher earning capacity than myself, which (apparently) will make me less appealing to her in the long term.

There’s no direct link to Chinese gender issues aside from anecdotes; in general I consider China to still be a very patriarchal society, though men don’t seem to fit the modern definition of masculinity at all. Despite popular narratives of manly aboriginal hunters, extreme gender identities are a modern product of wealth and higher income levels. China’s gender imbalance, unique in the world in terms of its scale, will be felt most acutely amongst the very poor, the results decidedly uncomfortable for men and women at the bottom of the social ladder. Still, a visit to an internet cafe or university dormitory filled with better-off urbanites reveals the zeal with which a large swath of young mainland men have for the most exquisite forms of escapism. Something is certainly not right. Surely talking to girls is more interesting than getting to level 70.

Back to the US: it would be nice to figure out exactly what is going on. If decreased income prospects for men make marriage a more insecure institution by increasing the probability of divorce, and if single-parent households have deleterious effects on children, finding a way out of the cycle seems extremely important. Having been a stupid-mistake-prone adolescent male, it would seem very useful to adopt a different set of strategies when raising adolescent males, such that they do not make similar stupid mistakes, especially if alternate child raising tactics are relatively cheap to implement. Bearing the above in mind, I’m personally not convinced the problem is as simple as a “generation of men raised by women,” though existing social problems that gave rise to that idea are certainly going to be exacerbated by these economics trends if gender norms don’t radically change (evolution being terribly slow in reprogramming our desires.)

Marriage as an institution for child rearing seems more personally relevant as of late, having hit the age where biological clocks start ticking. Numerous 20-something female Western and progressive Shanghainese friends lament the dearth of actual interested date requests they receive, presumably to placate some sort of nagging evolutionary desire to feel pursued. The expectation, it seems, is for males to take the socially aggressive role while simultaneously being emotionally sensitive enough to… Not quite sure to what end. Learning to walk this kind of tightrope perhaps requires further maturation. Until then, numerous males my age will probably continue to be intentionally aloof. Gender equality in that sense may end up meaning universally equivalent odds when playing the see who we wake up next to today roulette. No idea what this might mean for the long-term efficacy of social taboos for child rearing. Perhaps it has always been this way, and we’ve only now the luxury of noticing it.