Bishop Sampson thought that our group might enjoy this article from the Washington Post - Happy Valentine's Week!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/06/AR200...
How to Get a Bead on Your True Love
By Kevin Hassett
Sunday, February 8, 2009; B01
My grandmother spent her whole youth hearing that she should stay away from strange men. Then she went and married one. But our family had a secret: She was a little strange, too. The two of them together were perfection.
Great matches have inspired philosophy and verse for as long as we have possessed charcoal to scratch with. But before a match can be celebrated, it has to happen. How do people do it? How do they sort through all the potential mates and find their true loves?
So often, it seems impossible. But to an economist, the most striking characteristic of sublime matches is that they are ubiquitous, in both society and nature. In fact, if Easter has the bunny, then Valentine's Day should have the albatross.
Like humans, albatrosses often mate for life, but only after a lengthy period of awkward dancing. They nest on remote oceanic islands, where their hatchlings take up to 10 months to mature. The birds can live more than 50 years, and a nesting pair will return to the same site year after year. But when one of them dies, a funny thing happens: The surviving partner will often find a new partner that has also lost its mate.
A large brooding colony has hundreds and hundreds of, shall we say, chicks, so you have to wonder: Exactly how do these birds find one another? How do they sort through all the possible matches and find such perfect partners?
As daunting as that challenge may seem, the fact is that humans face a much steeper hurdle. If you're not a numbers person, you might not have noticed how awe-inspiring the matching problem is.
There are approximately 6.7 billion people on earth. But finding your perfect mate is not as simple as evaluating the attractiveness of each world citizen one by one. Their feelings matter, too. A relationship worthy of song only happens when you are the best possible match for your mate, and he is the best possible match for you.
That little qualification makes the marriage problem almost unfathomable. The number of possible pairs of two in a population of 6.7 billion is very, very large, and an omniscient observer could find the best partners only by inspecting each and every possible match. There are 28 million times more possible romantic matches among people in this world than there are stars in the Milky Way. If God spent a minute evaluating each match before assigning people their spouses, the procedure would take 21.4 trillion years to complete. By then, the chocolates would be stale.
So how does it work?
Economists have made a science of studying the mechanisms humans have developed over time to achieve good matches. The pioneering work was published in 1962 by David Gale and Lloyd Shapley and was titled "College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage." They explored the question of whether a population of men and women could be sorted into stable "marriages" -- that is, pairings that would not be dissolved by defection. A marriage would dissolve if there were alternative interested partners whom each spouse would prefer to their own.
The revolutionary accomplishment of Gale and Shapley is that they proved that a simple algorithm could produce a stable set of matches that assign everyone a spouse. You might say that they proved with math that there is someone for everyone.
The algorithm, which was a purely theoretical construct, is simple and eerily reminiscent of historical social convention. Suppose that we put 10 men and 10 women, all heterosexual, in a room. The Gale-Shapley algorithm would assign their mates as follows: The men line up and,
one by one, propose to their favorite woman. The women can either reject the proposal or defer it until the next round by becoming "engaged." In the next round, each unengaged fellow tries again with his next favorite woman. A woman who was previously engaged can ditch her fiancé and become engaged to her new suitor if she wishes. The game continues until everyone is engaged, at which point, in cult-like fashion, everyone is married all at once.
The beauty of the approach is that it distributes people into stable matches. But there is a dark side to it as well. A matching game that proceeds with men signaling their interest and women choosing from among their suitors seems as though it gives women the power. But in fact, it does the reverse. Since each man proposes to the women starting with his most favorite and continuing through lesser choices, he is eventually matched with the woman who is his most favorite among the set of all women who would have him. The opposite is true for the women, whose most favorite men may not ever even propose to them.
Compared to the real world, there's also a little sleight of hand here. We began by placing 20 people in a room. Perhaps the biggest challenge is getting people into the room in the first place.
Since Gale and Shapley wrote, the literature identifying the methods we use to reduce the set of possible partners has grown enormously. The basic idea is, again, a simple one: We develop signals that we send one another to help us narrow the search.
A well known example in the economics community illustrates the function of such signals. Muriel Niederle is a renowned game theorist at Stanford. The dating Web site Cupid.com recently asked her to help solve a common problem: Women were being inundated by offers from men, which made it difficult for them to find good matches.
Niederle offered up a solution: Cupid.com should give each man two electronic roses per month to send to two women of his choice, along with an introductory note. Since the men were only allowed to send two roses, women found that they were choosing from a much better and smaller pool of candidates. Cupid.com chief executive Eric Straus told the Wall Street Journal that this approach improved a suitor's chances of success by 35 percent. This simple insight, of course, only replicates in electronic form the ritual that males of many species have followed since the dawn of time. A costly gift is a valuable signal.
That striking increase in the matching success rate is notable, because people presumably resorted to the dating service in the first place thinking that it was a better option than the bar or the water cooler. In other words, society as a whole is clearly not doing a good job at providing signaling opportunities.
But as albatrosses can attest, good signals make all the difference. The wild gesticulations of the albatross are not so much a dance as a language, and researchers report that old couples develop their own unique one over time. Widows probably find widowers in a crowded colony because birds signal their sad status to one another by performing half a dance.
Which brings us to Valentine's Day.
When I was very young, it was the practice at school for each child to give a valentine to all his classmates. Since everyone received a valentine, they provided no signal. Given our age, that was irrefutably a good thing. As we grew older, valentines dwindled and disappeared. As adults, it seems that most people who receive valentines have already found their matches.
But if you consider how difficult matching is, then you have to conclude that Valentine's Day has become an enormous missed opportunity. People have an almost impossible task in finding a mate. Society can do a better job of providing opportunities for them to signal interest in one another. We can start with Feb. 14. If every unattached person selected a few individuals they might be interested in and sent them a valentine, the literature suggests that it would significantly improve the quality of matches, just as a simple electronic rose launched thousands of Cupid's online arrows.
In addition to smoothing the matching process, a Valentine's Day revival would have a second effect. If both sexes signaled equally, then the whole process would no longer be slanted in favor of men.
This can begin only if a sufficient mass of citizens decides to start a new tradition. As albatrosses know, each would-be signaler needs the cover of a raucous colony.
Valentine's Day is next Saturday. Get moving. You still have time to send a few valentines.
Who knows, you might even end up as lucky as my grandfather.
khass...@aei.org
Kevin Hassett is director of economic policy studies and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He met his match in economics class and has been married to her for 22 years.
