More Obvious Stuff On Sexual Attraction And Marriage

• "Why Aren't More Wives Outearning Their Husbands?" asks Derek Thompson in The Atlantic. The distribution of the wife's share of income has a hard break around 50%, as shown here, with a significant disparity on the right side. This is not a normal distribution (emboldening mine):
  
  
  
  
  

  This drop-off is simply too steep to be explained by randomness or classical economics. If men and women were forming marriages without concern for relative incomes, we'd expect a smoother distribution curve...
  
  In a cool new paper, Marianne Bertrand, Jessica Pan, and Emir Kamenica pose a theory that some people might find controversial but others might find intuitive: What if there's a deficit of marriages where the wife is the top earner because -- to put things bluntly -- husbands hate being out-earned by their wives, and wives hate living with husbands who resent them?
  
  If this were true, we would expect to see at least three four other things to be true. First, we'd expect marriages with female breadwinners to be surprisingly rare. Second, we'd expect them to produce unhappier marriages. Third, we might expect these women to cut back on hours, do more household [chores], or make other gestures to make their husbands feel better. Fourth, we'd expect these marriages to end more in divorce. Lo and behold (as you no doubt guessed), the economists found all of those assumptions borne out by the evidence.

  The assumption that women have nothing to do with these choices is a peculiar one, especially considering the next item...
• "Different impacts of resources on opposite sex ratings of physical attractiveness by males and females", Guanlin Wang, et al., Evolution and Human Behavior, March, 2018, pp. 220-225. Abstract:

  Parental investment hypotheses regarding mate selection suggest that human males should seek partners featured by youth and high fertility. However, females should be more sensitive to resources that can be invested on themselves and their offspring. Previous studies indicate that economic status is indeed important in male attractiveness. However, no previous study has quantified and compared the impact of equivalent resources on male and female attractiveness. Annual salary is a direct way to evaluate economic status. Here, we combined images of male and female body shape with information on annual salary to elucidate the influence of economic status on the attractiveness ratings by opposite sex raters in American, Chinese and European populations. We found that ratings of attractiveness were around 1000 times more sensitive to salary for females rating males, compared to males rating females. These results indicate that higher economic status can offset lower physical attractiveness in men much more easily than in women. Neither raters' BMI nor age influenced this effect for females rating male attractiveness. This difference explains many features of human mating behavior and may pose a barrier for male engagement in low-consumption lifestyles.