Freakonomics Radio
Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner
Thick markets, thin markets, and the triumph of attributes over compatibility.
7,439 words · 12 speakers
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Hey, podcast listeners. You are about to hear an episode from our archives, number 154, which we originally put out in February 2014. Before we get to that, Freakonomics Radio, as you may or may not know, is produced by the public radio station WNYC, which means it is produced in part by you, our listeners. That's right. You send us money, and we turn your money into Freakonomics Radio. So please, go to Freakonomics.com and click on the Donate button.
Now, you may be thinking to yourself, wait a minute. Sure, I like this podcast, fine, but it doesn't really accomplish anything, does it? I could see throwing a few dollars their way if it accomplished something, but it doesn't, does it? Okay, I want to tell you a story about two people, Mandy Grzelik and Tim Barnhart.
Hello.
Hey. Mandy is a nursing student in Cincinnati. Tim's an engineer, also in Cincinnati. When the story begins, they don't know each other. Mandy, however, is a big fan of Freakonomics Radio.
I listen to the podcast on a Thursday morning on my way to work. And it was titled, What You Don't Know About Online Dating, or something along those lines.
This was around Valentine's Day.
And I had been single for a while and thought, hey, maybe I'll be able to date an NPR employee, because that's whose profiles they were looking at on the show.
The very day she hears this episode, Mandy Grzelik decides to sign up for online dating. The next day, she comes across Tim's online dating profile. They get in touch. The following Monday, they go on a date to a burger joint.
The first thing that I said when he pulled up and gave each other a hug, and I said, I hope you like beer shoes, because they have great stuff here. And he's like, oh, my gosh, I'm already falling for you.
That first date went well, really well, really, really, really well.
So, you know, we get the check and we walk out and get ready to walk her to her car. And I got in my 4Runner, she got in her car. So I started to drive off. And there was just this overwhelming urge to not pull out of the parking lot and instead pull up beside her car. Bottom line, she hadn't got in her car yet. And she just started walking towards me. I walked towards her and we both knew exactly what was getting ready to happen. It was smooch city. Couldn't control it, so.
It was a great first kiss. And that's actually the same location where he proposed.
Yep, exactly.
That's right. Tim proposed to Mandy. She said yes, and they got married, all because of Freakonomics Radio.
We have you to thank.
Yes, so thank you.
I feel like we are forever thankful, because really, I mean, I would have not gone online that night. I definitely wouldn't have chosen the site that I did without hearing the podcast. So it changed my life. And, you know, till death do us part, right, honey?
Yeah.
Mandy and Tim, you are welcome. Our best wishes to the happy couple. As for the rest of you, if their story doesn't make you want to go to Freakonomics.com and donate to our show, what will? Your money goes to WNYC, which, in addition to producing Freakonomics Radio, makes great radio shows and podcasts like Radiolab, Death, Sex and Money, On the Media, New Tech City, and many more. I will say this: the people who listen to Freakonomics Radio are famous around here for their very high rate of giving. So what are you waiting for? Join the crowd. Go to Freakonomics.com, click on Donate, and give us your money. Because without money, there's no Freakonomics Radio. And without Freakonomics Radio, there is no love.
Don't be anti-love. And now, as promised, episode number 154, the very episode that inspired Mandy to find Tim and fall in love. It's called "What You Don't Know About Online Dating."
I had been personally on OkCupid on and off for a few years.
That's Ally Reid.
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.
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.
Got a lot of messages of, "Hey, you seem nice." Like, just nothing to do with my profile. And so I wondered, does anyone care at all? Like, are they just looking at a picture?
Uh-huh.
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.
So this is when she got crafty. She wrote a fake OkCupid profile. Very, very fake.
So you set up a profile and your name is what?
Erin Carter Fan.
And are you in fact an Erin Carter fan?
No, but I figured the woman I was trying to create probably constitutes Erin Carter's basic fanbase.
Why?
Well, Erin Carter is the younger brother of a Backstreet Boy who had a brief and ill-advised rap career.
And there's just no substance there in his music at all, and that was what I was trying to reflect in Erin Carter Fan.
Talk about some of your favorite highlights or lowlights of your profile.
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.
LOL at the end of that.
LOL.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, yeah, she really enjoys it.
Right.
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.
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 Erin Carter, which I guess is seven things, but that's okay. What's keeping America American meant to signal?
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."
So you created a profile for a girl named Erin 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?
Erin Carter Fan did very well.
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.
So what do you attribute that success to?
Well, Erin Carter Fan's one redeeming quality is that she is very good-looking. I asked my friend Ray 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.
Uh-huh. And so tell me about following up with some of these replies.
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?"
And how many dates did you have then, out of Erin Carter Fan fishing?
Um, I actually, believe it or not, did not want to meet any of these men in real life.
Really?
So surprised, Ally.
Yeah, actually, I found that a deal-breaker for me was messaging Erin Carter Fan.
From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen 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.
When men are deciding who to contact on dating sites, looks matter a great deal.
That's Paul Oyer. He is a labor economist at Stanford.
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 turns out to be at least a little bit true.
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.
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.
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, okay?
Okay, what else?
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 8% 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
as a medium attractive person who is not overweight.
All right. And what about men's preferences versus women's preferences?
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.
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, but answer them for a real person who wants to improve his actual online dating situation?
Hey, Paul.
Hi, how are you?
Good. Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you, too.
That's PJ Vogt. 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.
Have you been told before that you look like Ryan from The Office?
No, I've been told I look like Andy from The Office, which I took as a dig.
Vogt and Oyer sat down with Susie Lechtenberg, a producer on our show.
PJ, do you feel like you want to read a few of the...
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 like 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.
So, give us an example.
Okay. 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?
I see.
Very transparent.
Give us another example.
Okay. 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.
Like, you feel like you're bragging about being a Vespa guy, whatever that, like, that's not a good thing.
Can I just ask the old guy question? What are torrents?
Oh, torrents are, they're ways that people download media illegally online, usually.
I was gonna ask the same thing, I was pretending to know, but I had no idea.
It could be that I was, like, really into torrential rain.
Long walks in the rain.
And what do you spend a lot of your time thinking about?
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.
And are you worried?
Yeah, I feel like, I'm not a person who feels a ton of shame, and I feel just rivers of shame right now.
Uh huh. What's your, your name on here?
Oh, this is the worst part. So, 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.
So, spell, spell the whole name out for us.
Oh, boy. B-A-R-T-H-E-S-S-I-M-P-S-O-N. This is so mortifying.
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.
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?
Yeah, option value, sounds like a good way to put it.
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.
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
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.
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 here? It's a slow, steady... Your patience level should slowly and steadily erode. Okay, that's happening. Right now, you should be very patient.
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.
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.
Can I ask you a question? Or I could save it if it's like a derailing question.
No, no, go ahead.
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. But like, oh, that sounds terrible. Apply to dating. But like, when it's like your heart's involved, it feels so bad.
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?
Just like the idea of that the search sucks, even if the search is like weighted in your favor, I guess.
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.
Huh.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, do you feel like the software does a good job of that?
Um, so.
That's how I feel.
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.
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.
And why online dating is a bigger deal than you think.
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.
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Which begs the question, why not apply it to other aspects of life? Like banking, for example? Well, PNC Bank did, since its inception, proving time and again that the best banking strategy isn't the exciting type, but the steady, reliable, definitely-not-yolo type. PNC Bank: brilliantly boring since 1865. Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association, Member FDIC. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Hotels.com. Hotels.com helps you find and book the right stay for work faster.
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From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen 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.
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.
Oh, man, I'm so worried about what this is going to be.
No, no, no, they're not big deal. But you said you space out, quote, "all the time."
Oh, yeah, that's true.
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.
Oh, yeah, that's a good point. That's a really good point.
Is that what you're looking for, though?
I mean, kind of, honestly. Like, I would, 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."
The other, you said you were, quote, "attracted to dangerous situations."
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, 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.
Such, such as?
Okay. 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.
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?
Do you want to read what you have under my details?
My details?
Yeah. Do you have that in front of you?
My details. Height is 5'10".
Your body type is jacked.
Jacked. I think that that is supposed to scan as a joke. I said I don't smoke. I say I drink socially, which is stretching it a little bit. I probably drink more than socially. And it says that I speak English. Okay.
I look at this and I think this guy is just looking for a good time. Like, he's not taking it seriously.
Because everything's a joke.
There you go. Exactly.
As an economist, I look at that and I want to suggest the following.
Okay.
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.
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.
Wait, so you think that I should have dressed up pictures?
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.
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.
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.
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?
Please do.
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 would 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 decisions. 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
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.
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.
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.
Okay, which one?
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.
Did you change photos?
Yes. He told me to put in a picture of myself, like, more presentable, so I took a picture from a wedding.
Can I see?
Oh, yeah. That's really good. Also, what's really cool about this picture is it's you in a suit, looking great, surrounded by four women.
Right. So there's sort of like an implicit, like, they'll stand next to me.
What's wrong with you? Yeah. And, um, okay, what was your, um, it was a solo shot before.
Solo shot?
And it was looking kind of a little, a little slackery.
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.
Sure.
And a bunch of old ladies. How's that?
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-
Brooklyn. Um, 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.
Yeah, exactly.
PJ also tweaked his profile a bit, as Paul Oyer suggested. He tried to highlight some of his best attributes.
Uh, public radio, um, like relatively fun, not depressed, uh, not-
You have good teeth.
Thank you. Um, I should actually put that in there.
Yeah. Well, no, no, I think that's, that's where you let the picture do the talking.
Right. Um, but the weird thing is, you'll sort of be like-
Yeah, because what, 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-
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.
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.
So how did it work out for PJ? In the year since we first released this episode, he met a girl on OkCupid. He also now hosts a podcast called Reply All, which you should listen to after you finish listening to this.
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.
For certain thin dating markets, I think it's revolutionized things.
Justin Wolfers is an economist at the University of Michigan.
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, J-date. 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 J-date. And I imagine this is true in other ethnic communities, and certainly it's enormously easier to match on very, very specific sexual preferences.
So whoever you are and whoever you're looking for, Wolfers says, the internet has turned dating 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. 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.
Hey, podcast listeners. On the next Freakonomics Radio, if I wanted to commit the perfect murder, not get punished at all, how would I do it? Yeah, it'd probably be a pretty good way to do it, I suppose, without getting caught. In some places, you can hit a pedestrian with your car and get away scot-free. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.
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