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In the wake of her
weaknessincredible historic strength among young men, Kamala has a new ad out on IG and SC, "Don't Get Popped":https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1847720298335948932
For those who don't want to view it, I'll transcribe the ad and set the scene: a speed dating scenario where women rate the man.
On the face of it, this seems entirely tone-deaf. The theory seems to be "vote Democratic, or we'll Lysistrata you" but I can't imagine a single man who would react in the way the campaign would want them to. Most would just roll their eyes, and, if you're a young man frustrated with dating, it would probably provoke outright hostility. So you might write it off as a clueless campaign hiring a couple of rich white women and gay men trying to imagine a way to make young men vote Harris and failing, just another example of the empathetic gap between who the campaign gets ideological inspiration from and the voters she needs to win.
The surprising bit is that the Harris campaign isn't targeting men with this but women, as indicated by ad targeting spend. My theory here is that Kamala is not offering a threat here, but selling a power fantasy. If you're a woman, vote for Harris, and you'll have a parade of men approaching you, who you can reject at will.
I find the "six figures" part interesting. If you take it to mean 100k, that's...not that impressive.
I'm seeing 80th percentile in the US at age 30. 127/170/300 get you to the 90/95/99th percentile. At age 27, it's 91st percentile; 121/190 get you to 95/99th percentile.
Presumably it's a lower percentile than these for men (but probably higher than that for black men). Downgrade the impressiveness again in blue areas (cities).
This raises the question: what percentile or dollar amount is impressive enough to offset what degree of attractiveness? Or more broadly, what is the marginal utility as you move through those levels?
There have already been some studies on what income is required to ‘make up for’ being a very short man. I don’t know that I believe them, necessarily, but I think they exist.
I think it’s best to model them differently. For women, wealth could make some difference at the margins but not a huge amount; eg. when Adele was fat her ex husband was a schlubby looking also-chubby bearded white guy. Fat female celebrities don’t generally have hot husbands, although exceptions presumably exist. For men, wealth can make a lot of difference, but even so, there are comparatively poor bartenders, line cooks, sound engineers, high school drama teachers and so on who are more successful with more attractive women than many super rich men.
Among the PMC (the truly rich are more heterogenous as a class) assortative mating is now so strong that it largely filters looks-based matching to an intra-class level. The ugly junior banker will marry the ugly junior banker or corporate lawyer or doctor or whatever of the opposite sex. The hot one will do the equivalent. Neither will marry particularly up or down.
According to Gregory Clark, it's always been thus. He claims that in the anglosphere, mating has been assortative on socioeconomic status at a correlation of approximately 0.8 for centuries.
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