From Smart Money via Instapundit
So Happy Together: Sex and Spending
Valentine’s Day...may be a multibillion-dollar industry. But the larger driver of economic progress is the sex drive itself.
What drives us to create and produce? What drives us to consume? Why are love and money so intimately intertwined?
...let’s look at how sex drives people’s spending.
There are obvious ways sex gets people to spend more money (flowers, presents, dates… not to mention the direct, usually illegal, purchase of sex), but a tremendous amount of economic activity also goes into what’s called “signaling” — buying things to communicate one’s status, and thus one’s desirability as a mate.
Ah, so it's all about signalling. How do women and men differ at this?
Even more revealing, however, is how men and women respond in an economic experiment when “romantically primed” — that is, when they are shown pictures of attractive people of the opposite sex and then asked to make various consumption decisions.
Romantically primed men, in a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2007, proved much more willing to splurge on things like flashy watches and expensive cars (while they showed no difference in their spending on boring, non-flashy things like tissues and headache medicine).
Women, meanwhile, didn’t adjust their consumption at all when romantically primed. Instead, romantically primed women indicated that they were more willing to spend time volunteering (such as at a children’s hospital or a homeless shelter).
So all this time I thought that women signalled through getting all gussied up with botox and blow drys and boob jobs...
But as it turns out men use stuff and women use actions to signal
What does all this tell us? It tells us that these consumption decisions are most likely about signaling: for men, of status and access to resources; for women, of altruism. Romantic priming made men no more likely to want to spend time volunteering; and romantically primed women only wanted to volunteer more when their effort would be visible, not when it would be inconspicuous.
So one way or the other, at least for women and their altruistic actions, it is all about the show.
The article goes on to discuss the evolutionary ramifications of all of this and suggests that men are at their prime, in terms of their creative output, when they are around 30 years old, because that period coincides with their greatest competition from other men for finding mates.
Personally, I'd like to leave all the analysis out of Valentine's Day...and the flowers and the chocolate....and just celebrate with caviar and champagne.
