154. What You Don’t Know About Online Dating

Thick markets, thin markets, and the triumph of attributes over compatibility. This episode is included in the Freakonomics #smartbinge podcast playlist at wnyc.org/smartbinge

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:43Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:11Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:48Speaker 01

  I had been personally on OkCupid on and off for a few years.

• 2:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Ally Reid.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  And I just moved to LA in August and got back on as a way to meet people and get to know the city a little bit.

• 3:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Reid is a comedy writer. She spent a lot of time on her OkCupid profile. OkCupid, in case you don't know, is a dating website. The profile that she wrote wasn't really working.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Got a lot of messages of, hey, you seem nice. Like, you know, just nothing, nothing to do with my profile. And so I wondered, does anyone care at all? Like, are they just looking at a picture?

• 3:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Uh huh.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  So I wanted to see if there was a lower limit to how awful a person could be before men would stop messaging her on an online dating site.

• 3:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  So this is when she got crafty. She wrote a fake OkCupid profile. Very, very fake.

• 3:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you set up a profile and your name is what?

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Aaron Carter fan.

• 3:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  And are you in fact an Aaron Carter fan?

• 3:56Speaker 01

  No, but I figured the woman I was trying to create probably constitutes Aaron Carter's basic fan base.

• 4:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Why?

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Well, Aaron Carter is the younger brother of a Backstreet Boy who had a brief and ill-advised rap career.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  And there's just no substance there in his music at all. And that was what I was trying to reflect in Aaron Carter fan.

• 4:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Talk about some of your favorite highlights or lowlights of your profile.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Well, one thing I wanted to make clear is that she's not just a bad person. She wants to ruin your life. So, under the section, "What I'm Really Good At," the only thing she lists is convincing people I'm pregnant.

• 4:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  LOL at the end.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  LOL.

• 4:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. She really enjoys it.

• 4:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Great.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  On a typical Friday night, she is knocking the cups out of homeless people's hands because she thinks it's so funny to watch them try to pick it all up.

• 4:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Talk to me a minute about the six things you could never do without. Money, my car, my phone, keeping America American, my family, and my friends, and Aaron Carter, which I guess is seven things, but that's OK. What's keeping America American meant to Signal?

• 5:10Speaker 01

  She, to me, the worst person in the world is definitely racist. And so, I needed that to be a part of her. I didn't want it to be so obvious. You know, I wanted her to be believably terrible. I didn't want it to be an obvious joke profile. And keeping America American, to me, is sort of code for, "I don't like people who don't look like me."

• 5:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, you created a profile for a girl named Aaron Carter's fan who likes to party and knock over homeless people, or at least their cups. And she's a racist, gold-digging, fake, pregnant-getting, 25-year-old, white girl. How'd you do?

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Aaron Carter fan did very well.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  In the first 24 hours, she got 150 messages. I had the profile up for two or three weeks, and she got close to 1,000 men message her. She got probably 10 times the number of messages that my real profile got.

• 6:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what do you attribute that success to?

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Well, Erin Carter Fan's one redeeming quality is that she is very good-looking. I asked my friend Rae Johnston, who is an Australian-based model and actress, if I could rate her Facebook photos, and she very kindly said yes. And so Erin Carter Fan is stunningly good-looking.

• 6:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  And so tell me about following up with some of these replies.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Well, after so many messages started rolling in, the optimist in me decided that these men had just seen the pretty photo and had not read her profile. So my goal at that point became to convince them that she is just awful, that she is the worst woman on earth. They asked what I was doing. I said I was pretending to be a 14-year-old on Facebook so I could bully my sister's friends. I would threaten to pull out their teeth. With a lot of guys, I could just, I wrote gibberish, just pounded on the keyboard for a minute and sent it, and the vast majority of them responded with, "That sounds great. What are you doing on Friday?"

• 7:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  And how many dates did you have, then, out of Erin Carter Fan fishing?

• 7:17Speaker 01

  I actually, believe it or not, did not want to meet any of these men in real life.

• 7:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Really?

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  So surprised, Ali.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Actually, I found that a deal-breaker for me was messaging Erin Carter Fan.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 8:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  We're talking today about online dating. Ally Reed wrote a fake OkCupid profile for a really good-looking 25-year-old woman who also happened to be a racist, gold-digging, fake, pregnant-getting nightmare. And she got almost 1,000 replies.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  When men are deciding who to contact on dating sites, looks matter a great deal.

• 8:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Paul Oyer. He is a labor economist at Stanford.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  Just to give you one statistic that comes from the OkCupid blog, and I'm quoting here, "A hot woman receives roughly four times the messages an average-looking woman gets, and 25 times as many as an ugly one." And then there's this interesting superstar effect, where the very hottest 5% of men get twice as many emails as men who are just below that, who are more like the 10th percentile, among the 10 percentile most attractive, but not among the very top 5%. Women are, in general, a little bit more attracted to lawyers, doctors, men in the military, and firefighters, which I'd always heard was a stereotype, but apparently it

• 9:18Speaker 03

  turns out to be at least a little bit true.

• 9:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Paul Oyer usually writes papers with sexy titles like "Fiscal Year Ends and Nonlinear Incentive Contracts: The Effect on Business Seasonality," and "Are There Sectoral Anomalies Too: An Illustration of the Pitfalls of Multiple Hypothesis Testing." But he recently published a book with a different angle. It's called "Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Economics I Learned from Online Dating." Now, why did Oyer suddenly turn his attention to online dating? Well, he recently re-entered the dating world himself after a 20-year absence. And when he signed up for some online dating sites, he found that the dating market very much resembled the labor markets he's used to studying.

• 10:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  And, more important, he realized, dating could be much improved if only everybody approached it like an economist would. Now, of course, he would say that. He's an economist. But whoever you are, when it comes to online dating, it helps to start with some facts.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  So for example, one study found that a man who makes $250,000 per year, holding everything else equal, gets contacted two and a half times as much as a man who makes more like $50,000 or less and looks the same.

• 10:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay. Okay. What else?

• 10:39Speaker 03

  Now, more education, it turns out, doesn't have much of a direct effect. So if you have more education on a dating site, you won't get more attention on average. However, you will indirectly. And the reason for that is, if you have more education, you're likely to make more money. A typical study will find that a person with one more year of education, holding everything else equal, makes eight to 10% more than someone with one fewer year of education. And so that's going to lead to more money, which would then make you more attractive on a website. The other thing is, looks matter a lot, but it turns out, weight doesn't matter that much, independent of looks. So, an overweight person who is otherwise medium attractive will do almost as well

• 11:23Speaker 03

  as a medium attractive person who is not overweight.

• 11:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right. And what about men's preferences versus women's preferences?

• 11:32Speaker 03

  Men, on the other hand, care a lot less about income. Women who make more don't get a lot of extra attention. And by the way, it's a very interesting recent study by two University of Chicago economists and another economist from another school. And they find that, once you get out of this world into real relationships, relationships tend to be less stable and happy if the woman makes more money than the man. So it makes sense that women should be more attracted to money than men, to begin with.

• 12:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay. So Paul Oyer knows a good bit about the rules of attraction in online dating, which, if you think about it, is just dating with a much bigger pool and a much better filter. So here's a question. Does all of Oyer's knowledge translate into actual wisdom? In other words, is he any good at giving actual online dating advice? For instance, how do you build the best profile ever? Is it better to choose a big site like Match.com or a niche site like GlutenFreeSingles.com, which is real? Should you lie? And if so, about what? Wouldn't it be nice if Paul Oyer could not only answer these questions,

• 12:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  but answer them for a real person who wants to improve his actual online dating situation?

• 12:55Speaker 04

  Hey, Paul.

• 12:56Speaker 03

  Hi, how are you?

• 12:57Speaker 04

  Good. Nice to meet you.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  Nice to meet you, too.

• 13:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's PJ Vogt. He lives in New York. He's a producer on the public radio show On the Media. He co-hosts a podcast called TLDR. And PJ is a brave, brave soul because he let us open up his OkCupid profile and pick it apart on the radio.

• 13:18Speaker 03

  Have you been told before that you look like Ryan from The Office?

• 13:22Speaker 04

  No, I've been told I look like Andy from The Office, which I took as a dig.

• 13:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Vogt and Oyer sat down with Susie Lechtenberg, a producer on our show.

• 13:30Speaker 05

  PJ, do you feel like you want to read a few of the...

• 13:32Speaker 04

  Oh, boy. So we're looking at my OkCupid profile, which I don't know why this is as embarrassing as it is, but it's got a few pictures of me, which I've tried to make pictures that are flattering, but not too flattering. And then it's a series of prompts. And basically, what I'm realizing now, looking at it, is that in every case, I've tried to brag and then quickly tell a joke so that it doesn't look like I'm bragging that much.

• 13:58Speaker 05

  So give us an example.

• 13:59Speaker 04

  OK. So it says, "What are you doing with your life?" And I say, "I'm a public radio producer, which means I edit and report stories, brag, and drink too much caffeine. Mild self-deprecating joke. Recently, I've been learning to not jam all my words together in a mush so that old people can hear me better on the radio." See what I'm trying to get away with there?

• 14:17Speaker 05

  I see.

• 14:18Speaker 04

  Very transparent.

• 14:19Speaker 05

  Give us another example.

• 14:23Speaker 04

  OK. So it says, "The six things I could never do without." And this is true, but it all ends up sounding like weird bragging. Coffee, whiskey, running shoes, paperbacks, torrents, and my geriatric Vespa.

• 14:36Speaker 04

  Like, you feel like you're bragging about being a Vespa guy, whatever that, like, that's not a good thing.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  Can I just ask the old guy question? What are torrents?

• 14:43Speaker 04

  Oh, torrents are, they're ways that people download media illegally online, usually.

• 14:49Speaker 05

  I was gonna ask the same thing, I was pretending to know, but I had no idea.

• 14:52Speaker 04

  It could be that I was, like, really into torrential rain.

• 14:54Speaker 05

  Long walks in the rain.

• 14:55Speaker 04

  Long walks in the rain.

• 14:56Speaker 05

  And what do you spend a lot of your time thinking about?

• 14:58Speaker 04

  One of the prompts is, I spend a lot of time thinking about, and I say that I spend a lot of time worrying about people I know seeing me on here, which is ironic, because we're on the radio right now.

• 15:08Speaker 05

  And are you worried?

• 15:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, I feel like, I'm not a person who feels a ton of shame, and I feel just rivers of shame right now.

• 15:15Speaker 05

  Uh huh. What's your, um, your name on here?

• 15:19Speaker 04

  Oh, this is the worst part. So, uh, it's Bart Simpson, but it's Bart, spelled like Roland Bart, like the theorist. It's like, the worst, it's like, really the worst, the worst thing.

• 15:33Speaker 05

  So, spell, spell the whole name out for us.

• 15:35Speaker 04

  Oh, boy. Uh, B-A-R-T-H-E-S-S-I-M-P-S-O-N. This is so mortifying.

• 15:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, as Paul Ouyer sees it, the most important first step in online dating is to know exactly what you are trying to get out of it.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  As an economist, I can't help but think we have to start with your objective function. What are we looking for here? Marriage? Someone to hang out with? Option value, so somebody to hang out with, and if it turns into more, that's good?

• 16:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, option value, sounds like a good way to put it.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  Okay. So, as I look at what you've got here, well, before we even look at it, we have to stop and think about, the first thing an economist is gonna do is think about supply and demand. So, I don't know if you realize this, but you're in a great position. New York City is, demographically, more female than male. I'm not entirely sure why that's true. Out here in San Francisco, it's the opposite. We have an oversupply of men relative to women, at least compared to other cities. New York City and Washington DC tend to swing much more towards more available women. So you're in a good position from a competitive point of view. You're providing a good, single, straight male, which is in relatively high demand.

• 16:59Speaker 03

  Now, the other thing to keep in mind here is, time is very much on your side. So you're in a good position for two other reasons, and that is, the male/female differential I just mentioned is going to swing much more in your favor over the next 10 years. So you're under no pressure to hook up for a long-term relationship right now. So that's one thing that's good. The other thing is, just more generally, aside from your gender, the fact that you're 28 years old, from an economist's point of view, means you should be very picky. So, you should be picky, you should be looking for a really good match. And the reason for that is, suppose you do find just the right person and get married

• 17:38Speaker 03

  and live happily ever after, well, you're in no rush to do that because you have, let's just say, 50 more years in which to enjoy the relationship you find, if it's a successful one. So when I was on the online dating market recently, you know, I'm much older than you are, and from a rational economic perspective, I should be less picky than you. So I should be searching a little less carefully. I should be settling. Settling is an important idea. It's a very important idea to economists because of what we call "search theory" suggests that at some point, you should realize that having what you have is better than expending more resources to try to do better.

• 18:21Speaker 03

  And that's more true when you're my age, I'm 50 now, than when you're your age, which is 28. So what's the year where that... When do you peak? What's my deadline year? It's a slow study. Your patience level should slowly and steadily erode. Okay, that's happening. Right now, you should be very patient.

• 18:46Speaker 04

  So Paul Oyer is telling PJ Vogt that PJ is in pretty good shape, dating-wise. One thing he's got going for him is that he's using a big dating website, OkCupid, in a big city, New York.

• 18:59Speaker 03

  I don't want to advertise for any given website, but especially in your demographic, kind of a younger demographic, OkCupid is what we call a thick market. It's a very big website. There are lots of men and women on it. So by putting yourself on this website, you're going to have lots of choice and a lot of people are going to have the opportunity to see you and consider you as an option. That's a very good thing.

• 19:22Speaker 04

  Can I ask you a question? Or I could save it if it's like a derailing question.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  No, no, go ahead.

• 19:27Speaker 04

  Okay, so my friends and I talk about this all the time. My female friends and my male friends all feel that this is true, like that men in New York and in cities where my friends live, everyone can actually feel these market forces and we talk about them. And I hate them. And I often imagine that I wish that I were from, I always think of the suburb that I'm from where most of the people are not like me, like in sort of cultural attitudes or whatever. And I think I'd be so much happier being there where I had almost no choice and where I would meet one person who seemed like I could be happy with them and then I wouldn't have to... I feel like the hardest part is the feeling of like, oh, there's all these people who seem pretty good. Like if I were shopping for a TV, it'd be fun if everybody was clamoring for my dollar.

• 20:12Speaker 04

  But like, oh, that sounds terrible applied to dating. But like, when it's like your heart's involved, it feels so bad.

• 20:19Speaker 05

  It's the idea is, do you want to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond?

• 20:24Speaker 04

  Just like the idea of that the search sucks, even if the search is like weighted in your favor, I guess.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  Okay, so a couple of things can help you out here. One is, if the technology is good enough on the dating site, you want a huge dating site that gives you just a very, very small fraction of the available people on the site.

• 20:43Speaker 04

  Huh.

• 20:44Speaker 03

  So think about this. Think about if we tried to put everybody on one dimension, which is of course the kind of oversimplification that economists get made fun of all the time for, and that's fair. But just think about a boardwalk. And at one end of the boardwalk is people who are completely incompatible for you for one reason. At the other end of the boardwalk is people who are completely incompatible for you for another reason. And you're right in the middle of this boardwalk.

• 21:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:11Speaker 03

  And then think of all the women who might... Be in your, potentially in your market as being evenly distributed along this boardwalk, where the ones who happen to be right next to you are perfect fits for you, or very good fits for you, and the ones at the extremes are not. Well, obviously, the more women on that boardwalk, the better you are. But if you don't know exactly where they are on the boardwalk, then the more women there are, the more problematic it is. So if the technology is good enough to show you, here are the 10 women who are really close to what you're looking for, that's way better than going to a city where the whole boardwalk has only 10 people.

• 21:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right.

• 21:50Speaker 03

  And it's easy to play the whole field of that boardwalk, but the chances that any of those women would be a good fit for you are not nearly as good. So this is what we call a thick market effect, and it does have the opposite problem, that thicker markets lead to more costs of screening all the potential candidates. And if the software can do that for you, you would, you'd be better off.

• 22:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  I mean, do you feel like the software does a good job of that?

• 22:18Speaker 03

  Um, so.

• 22:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's how I feel.

• 22:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  So whether you are a straight man in your 20s like PJ Vogt, or a straight woman like Ally Reed, who is pretending to be a very different kind of straight woman, or if you're gay, or if you're in your 50s like Paul Oyer, your hopes of meeting the right person are very much dependent upon a series of algorithms. Now, does that make you nervous? If so, we can help. Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, how to build the best online dating profile ever.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  As an economist, I look at that, and I want to suggest the following, that you fill in more detail, keeping in mind two ideas that are very important in economics.

• 23:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  And why online dating is a bigger deal than you think.

• 23:18Speaker 06

  The internet has turned matching upside down. It used to be that you would find compatibility first, and then learn more about someone else's attributes. And now you see all the attributes, and then you learn about compatibility later.

• 23:51Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 24:34Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 24:55Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 25:28Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 26:02Speaker 02

  From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 26:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  The dating site OkCupid has a section called "My Details" where you can fill in all kinds of facts about yourself, or I should say "facts" in quotation marks, since you can really write whatever you want. You fill in your ethnicity, body type, diet, religion, income, astrological sign, the pets you love or hate. The economist Paul Auer, the author of "Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Economics I Learned from Online Dating," told P.J. Vogt and Susie Lechtenberg that there's a science to filling in these details, and that sometimes, just sometimes, you might want to lie.

• 26:49Speaker 03

  As I discuss in the book, people lie all the time online, and I never would advocate lying. But these were two where I thought, if you want to signal to somebody, and I'm not saying you should, that you were serious and ready for a relationship longer term, you might want to either not answer them, or shade, exaggerate a little, or whatever term you want to use.

• 27:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, man, I'm so worried about what this is going to be.

• 27:12Speaker 03

  No, no, no, they're not big deal. But you said you space out, quote, "all the time."

• 27:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, yeah, that's true.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  Okay, so you might not want to reveal that. If you're looking for someone who's thinking about who's going to be the father of their children.

• 27:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, yeah, that's a good point. That's a really good point.

• 27:30Speaker 05

  Is that what you're looking for, though?

• 27:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  I mean, kind of, honestly. Like, I would, here's, here's the thing. I would want to date someone, even if it were casual, where, yeah, where they weren't like, "I would never want to make a human with this person."

• 27:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  The other, you said you were, quote, "attracted to dangerous situations."

• 27:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 27:50Speaker 03

  That may be true, but you don't, I'm not suggesting you go back and give a false answer. I'm just saying, you don't have to answer every, I, there were a few questions when I filled out the OkCupid questions, there were a few I just didn't fill out. And I'll be honest, there were a few where I checked a box that I don't think it was entirely truthful, what I checked.

• 28:12Speaker 05

  Such, such as?

• 28:17Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  In some of the questions it asks you how into deep conversations with your mate and cuddling and things like that you are, I may have made myself seem a bit more accessible in those dimensions than an honest person would say.

• 28:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Paul Oyer admits he fibbed a little bit, but that's because some of the signals in a dating profile can come across really strong. And if they send the wrong message, it might be better to tone them down a little bit. So what kind of signals was PJ Vogt sending out?

• 29:03Speaker 05

  Do you want to read what you have under my details?

• 29:05Speaker 04

  My details.

• 29:05Speaker 05

  Yeah. Do you have that in front of you?

• 29:07Speaker 04

  My details. Height is 5'10".

• 29:10Speaker 03

  Your body type is jacked.

• 29:11Speaker 04

  Jacked. I think that that is supposed to scan as a joke. I said I don't smoke. I said I drink socially, which is stretching a little bit. I probably drink more than socially. And it says that I speak English. Okay.

• 29:24Speaker 05

  I look at this and I think this guy's just looking for a good time. Like, he's not taking it seriously.

• 29:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 29:29Speaker 05

  Because everything's a joke.

• 29:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  Yep. There you go. Exactly.

• 29:34Speaker 04

  Huh.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  As an economist, I look at that and I want to suggest the following.

• 29:38Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  That you fill in more detail, keeping in mind two ideas that are very important in economics. And they're related. They are statistical discrimination and adverse selection. So when people look at things in your site, they're going to make assumptions about you based on them. Okay, statistical assumptions.

• 30:00Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 30:01Speaker 03

  A simple example, looking at your thing, is you have many sort of jokes slash statements about whiskey and other alcohol consumption. And maybe it's fine if you're just looking for the hangout market. But in the, in the, is this guy marriage material market? The drinking and then the fact that all your pictures are in extremely casual attire.

• 30:23Speaker 04

  Wait, so you think that I should have dressed up pictures?

• 30:26Speaker 03

  No, no. I think if you want to show that you're serious and you're ready to settle down, you should consider having one or two pictures that show that. Now, the other thing to keep in mind here is there are certain things women want, especially when it comes to settling down, when they're starting to look for spouse material. There are certain things women definitely want in a man. And you can't fake some of these, and that's okay. So one of them is, they like rich men.

• 30:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  And, you know, I don't know your family background, but you're, the public radio thing is probably not what, what they're looking for as far as rich goes. But that's okay. So you just have to accept that.

• 31:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think, I don't know, the alcohol thing gives me pause. But I think for the most part, I think I know, and it's actually one of the things I hate about dating, is I think I know what I'm selling. Like, I think I have a firm idea of like, the kind of person who is probably gonna like me. I know what, on a superficial level, what details they're gonna like about me.

• 31:31Speaker 03

  You have to keep in mind the distinction between somebody who's gonna like you once they get to know you, which is the most important thing you're looking for, and somebody who's going to be initially attracted to your profile. I'm gonna, can I throw a little economics jargon at you guys?

• 31:45Speaker 05

  Please do.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  What you want to remember in your profile is that you want to be very upfront and forthcoming in anything that is what an economist will call a coordination game. It's where our interests are aligned, and as long as we have the right information, we're going to make the right decision. So in my case, I was very upfront and forthcoming on my profile about the fact that I had a large and badly behaved golden retriever, and the fact that I had two teenage children. Because if somebody was against those things, then that was, those were deal breakers. And in your case... You want to be honest about the fact that you're a public radio producer because on the one hand, that's very attractive to some people, but it also indicates you're

• 32:31Speaker 03

  not going to be rich, at least in the short term. You don't want anybody who wants you just for your money, either because you don't like those type of people, or because even if you do, you're not going to get them once they have the information anyway. But the beauty of that is, you still have plenty of time to learn that. You have time to experiment, make some mistakes, and then you have, A, time for the reasons we talked about, and B, you have this very thick market of available women where you live. So if you make some mistakes early on, sure, your heart will get broken, you'll be crushed for a while. But then you can recover and learn from your mistakes, and it'll all work out happily.

• 33:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  So in case you're wondering, as I was wondering, whether all of Paul Oyer's dating advice is worth listening to, one thing you'd want to ask is, did it help him get the girl? Well, it did. He found his significant other on JDate. So naturally, we wanted to know if Oyer's advice worked for PJ Vote, too. A few weeks after they talked, I asked PJ how he changed his OkCupid profile.

• 33:45Speaker 04

  So generally, the sense I got from talking to him was that I came out off as like a flippant alcoholic. I was trying to diminish that. So I cut, I think, one reference to drinking.

• 33:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, which one?

• 34:00Speaker 04

  Uh, I think, no, I didn't. I left in both references. But what I did was I answered, he said that I should fill out sort of more of the questions, the basic questions about me.

• 34:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did you change photos?

• 34:13Speaker 04

  Yes. He told me to put in a picture of myself, like, more presentable, so I took a picture from a wedding.

• 34:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can I see?

• 34:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, yeah. That's really good. But also, what's really cool about this picture is it's you in a suit, looking great, surrounded by four women.

• 34:27Speaker 04

  Right. So there's sort of like an implicit, like, they'll stand next to me.

• 34:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  What's wrong with you? Yeah. And, um, okay, what was your, um, it was a solo shot before. And it was looking kind of a little, a little slackery.

• 34:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, I also, I don't know if this is, this was, uh, I put a picture with my dog, which felt like to the spirit of his advice. And a bunch of old ladies. How's that?

• 34:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so here we've, oh my god, you are canny. So this is actually a perfect, um, mirror in a way of the other picture of you at the wedding with four young, good-looking girls. Now here you are on a park bench in what looks like Brooklyn or, yeah, Brooklyn. You're on a park bench, holding a dog, not just in your lap, but in your arms, like you say, "I have so much love to give, I have to give it to the dog, because you're not here." And then there are four older women on the bench surrounding you, looking as though, "Oh, if only I were 40 years younger, this would be the man of my dreams." Or if he were 40 years older.

• 35:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 35:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  PJ also tweaked his profile a bit, as Paul Oyer suggested. He tried to highlight some of his best attributes.

• 35:48Speaker 04

  Uh, public radio, um, like relatively fun, not depressed, uh, not-

• 35:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  You have good teeth.

• 35:56Speaker 04

  Thank you. Um, I should actually put that in there.

• 35:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, well, no, no, I think that's, that's where you let the picture do the talking.

• 36:03Speaker 04

  Right. Um, but the weird thing is, you'll sort of be like-

• 36:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, because, I mean, look, it's hard for me to say, but I would think that if I were a woman and any guy who talked about, like, if he's listing his teeth as an attribute, A, it feels vain, and B, it's like, if that's what you're listing as an attribute-

• 36:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm afraid the list isn't going to be very long. But I'm just saying, as an aside, you do have good, you know.

• 36:26Speaker 04

  Thank you. Yeah, it'd be like an apartment being like, "We have a sink, we have like a working sink." Like, "You should have a sink."

• 36:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  So how did it work out for PJ? He did get a bunch more replies, but he thinks that's because a new photo on your profile can trigger more traffic. So no, there's no good news to report, yet.

• 36:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, it's easy to get lost in the details of online dating and fail to appreciate what it represents, which is a new and theoretically improved way for one person to take a look around at the 7 billion other people on the planet and try to pick the right one. Now, it comes with its own problems, that's for sure, but the strengths of online dating are very real, especially if you aren't a single, straight man living in a big, big city, a thick market with an overabundance of single, straight women.

• 37:34Speaker 06

  For certain thin dating markets, I think it's revolutionized things.

• 37:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Justin Wolfers is an economist at the University of Michigan.

• 37:40Speaker 06

  So I do think it's a really big deal for young gay and lesbian men and women in otherwise homophobic areas. There's also a very big deal in the Jewish community, JDate. You know, all my Jewish friends talk about being under pressure from mum to meet a good Jewish boy or girl, but they don't happen to be everywhere. But they're all over JDate. And I imagine this is true in other ethnic communities, and certainly it's enormously easier to match on very, very specific sexual preferences.

• 38:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  So whoever you are and whoever you're looking for, Wolfers says, the internet has turned dating upside down.

• 38:16Speaker 06

  It used to be that you would find compatibility first and then learn more about someone else's attributes. And now you see all the attributes and then you learn about compatibility later. For an economist, it's very seductive to believe that more information makes these things work better. And I guess, you know, I haven't seen careful studies of this yet, as to whether these high-information marriages are working out to be more stable.

• 39:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, this leads us very nicely to next week's episode. It's called Why Marry? You'll hear Justin Wolfers and many others talk about all the myths of modern marriage and whether any of them are actually true. So that's next week. Today, we'll leave you with an email from a listener named Katie Holzer. She writes, "Hey, Dubner and Levitt. My name is Katie, and I'm a 14-year-old listener from Rochester, Minnesota. One day, I'd love to start my own podcast, so I have some questions for you. What are your job responsibilities? What do you think is the best contribution your job makes to society? Also, my birthday is this Thursday, and I would love it if you would shout me out on the show. Thanks." Okay, Katie, job responsibilities on this podcast?

• 39:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Basically, Levitt does the numbers, I do the words. Best contribution we make to society? Are you kidding, Katie? If you ever listen to this podcast, we definitely don't contribute anything to society. And about your birthday? Happy birthday, Katie Holzer, and thank you for listening.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes David Herman, Greg Rosalsky, Greta Cohn, Borey Lamb, Susie Lechtenberg, and Chris Bannon. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more.

• 40:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by EverPure. Is the value of AI not living up to the promise? The problem is probably your data, not your AI models. When it's scattered across different systems, getting your data AI-ready is a challenge. You keep your AI waiting, and everything slows down. EverPure unifies your data, so you can see it, understand it, and control it all from one simple place and get it AI-ready fast. Unlock the true value of your AI at everpuredata.com.

• 41:19Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 42:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  So they are looking ahead and investing $80 billion in infrastructure upgrades and are committed to fueling growth in ways that benefit all customers so that reliable and affordable energy is accessible for generations to come. Go to southerncompany.com to learn more. Southern Company: building the future of energy.

• 42:27Speaker 07

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