Gendernomics- Building Value Read online

  On Value

  This chapter is a partial reprint of an essay I posted some time ago where my goal was to lay out the many conceptualizations of value that exist in order to bring additional clarity to the concept of “Sexual Market value”, there is much confusion about this concept and as it is a central one to this book, I find that clarity is of utmost importance.

  Men are naturally highly competitive, and as a result we tend to always want to position ourselves at the top of a hierarchy. This can often lead to us neglecting future results in order to feel good in the moment, such as the teenager who loads up 415 on the bench press, does a quarter-rep with 2 of his friends spotting, and claims to have a 415 bench, instead of just lifting an amount of weight that he can do 5 – 12 reps with for 3 – 5 sets, consistently over time and thus make progress.

  There are two ways to define high mate value in men, one is trait based, which is the classic way of doing alpha and beta, we have a series of traits that go intro a construct called “Alpha”, such as dominance, disagreeableness, lack of neuroticism, confidence, and so on. We also have a series of traits that go into a construct called “Beta”, such as submissiveness, agreeableness, neuroticism, lack of confidence and so on. Then we measure each man relatively on each trait and come out with a conclusion. This method works very well for theoretical discussions.

  The second is outcome based, and I think this is the better one of the two for empirical observation and to serve as a baseline for your own value. The outcome-based definition is simply how easy is it for you to sleep with women to whom you are attracted. If I air-dropped you into a new city where you have never been before, you have the same lifestyle you currently have, how long would it take you to find a mate? I prefer this to the “notch count” or “adventure sex” measurement, because that biases the results against men who are alpha, yet prefer serial monogamy, or have more conservative sexual preferences.

  The reason why I prefer the second one as a starting point is that it leaves less room for self-delusion than the trait-based definition of Alpha. After all, it’s very easy to quality oneself, and disqualify other men from the construct by adding in aspects of community, morality, and religion which are valuable traits and does contribute to a man’s overall value, but have little influence on his sexual market value.

  Genghis Kahn for instance was an alpha male by virtually any measure, a leader of men, a warlord who created one of the biggest empires in the history of man, had hundreds if not thousands of children throughout his life, and wealth that is virtually unrivaled in history. However, considering he did so by waging war, raping and pillaging across two continents, I doubt we could argue that he was a moral paragon.

  The reason for the reprint, and this introduction is that in order for you to get any useful progress from the methodology outlined in later chapters, it’s important to know where you are starting out. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the middle of a 24 month slump, or if you kicked a girl out of your house to continue reading this book, what matters is being honest with yourself about your current situation.

  Defining Value

  In order for the remainder of this essay to make sense, a definition of value is required as there are quite a few different definitions of value depending on in which context it is used. Merriam-Webster dictionary has a full 7 different definitions, out of which 5 are both relevant and utilized throughout this essay.

  1: the monetary worth of something: market price

  This is the primary definition, which I will use throughout this essay, especially when speaking about the interactions between values within a market place. One should keep in mind that monetary worth is not a unit of measure that can be easily applied in the sexual market place outside of prostitution. Instead it refers to the rough mean of a person's sexual market value.

  2: a fair return or equivalent in goods, services, or money for something exchanged

  This is the primary definition used under choice criteria, and when talking about trades and interactions. In essence, in order for an exchange to take place, each party must view themselves as getting a fair exchange otherwise they will not be willing to make a trade.

  3: relative worth, utility, or importance; a good value at the price

  The definition above is in many ways related to definition 2, in that they both deal with exchanges, however 3, offers an additional variable, which is satisfaction at making what one perceives as getting more than a fair deal.

  4: something (such as a principle or quality) intrinsically valuable or desirable

  Definition number four can represent those variables of which value is created, such as quality, or other factors that are the totality of the choice criteria.

  5: a numerical quantity that is assigned or is determined by calculation or measurement

  This definition gets to the heart of the simple 1 - 10 sexual market valuation scale that is almost universally utilized among men. While this is a subjective scale to an extent, the law of large numbers should mean that as the number of observations goes up, the value trends towards the mean.

  Subjective Vs. Objective Value

  One of the chapters in Gendernomics is dedicated to subjective and objective value theory. The major distinction between the two is that from the perspective of objective value theory, one can for every good and service establish a value, which is mind-independent. For instance, if one makes sprockets for a living, the combination of fixed costs (rent, electricity, equipment) and variable costs (labor, materials) is your total product cost. As your production volume goes up, the fixed cost allocation to each sprocket goes down, something which is referred to as economies of scale. When you then bring your product to market, you run into subjective value theory, which is often unrelated to objective product value, the market can value your product at less than your cost of production, more than cost of production, and equal to your cost of production.

  The deterministic men want sexual market value to be an objective criteria, as this offers security and concrete milestones for them to work towards. The 437 bullet point lists that are often presented as "What women want in a man" are examples of such criteria that are perceived as objective by men who are of a deterministic mindset. Likewise, they seek objective ways to value a woman, in the form of various "How to vet a wife" articles or similar guides that offer what they perceive as mind-independent frameworks for how to judge a woman's present and potential value.

  From the perspective of objective value theory this makes sense, as according to this theory everything has an objective value that one must seek to know in order to proceed with the trade. From the perspective of subjective value theory, this makes much less sense, as one's valuation of the same thing may differ across time and context. If you are presently dying of thirst, you would value a bottle of water much more highly than if you were sitting next to a stream of clear and crisp mountain water.

  The customer generally does not care what your margin is, or how much it costs you to produce a good or service, they care how much you want to charge them for it, and how much they think its worth to them.

  The perspective of subjective value theory always views value as being in flux and depending upon a range of other variables. A woman who appears to be of high value at present may be low value in a different context, just as a man who is of high value now, may decrease or increase in value depending on his actions across time. A man who gets married at 25, gains 100 lbs, and loses all his money in a divorce at 35, have reduced his value in those 10 years, a man who never got married, never put on weight and still has all his financial resources will have increased in value.

  However, this does not mean that every woman will rate him in an identical manner as a romantic prospect, this depends on her own internal valuation mechanism, as I explain in my first book Gendernomics:

  Every SMV valuation is subjective, yet tends to conform within a range, meaning that a woman who is 10 to eight men will also be in the t
op percentiles of SMV for other men. A man, who is SMV 10 to eight women, will most likely be in the top percentiles for other women as well. This is no reason to reject beauty standards, or standards of behavior based on a snowflake fallacy, but rather to accept that while you can never fully predict the thoughts and actions of a human, in aggregate they form patterns that confirm a near objective SMV valuation across the global market.

  As I outlined in the paragraph above, every individual valuation of the sexual market value of another will be subjective, however when one aggregates those valuations, they form market patterns of value. This is a consequence of as the number of valuations increase, their distribution will tend towards the mean. The mean I refer to hear is the mean of the aggregate sum of valuations, not the mean of sexual market value. For instance, if 10 women rate a man as a 3, and 10 women rate him as a 5, the mean of his valuation is 4. However, the mean of every valuation of every person, will tend to cluster around SMV 5, which is the mean of the 1 - 10 scale.

  Perhaps the most interesting aspect of contrasting subjective and objective value theory is that in order for a trade to take place only subjective value theory "works". This is due to the fact that for a trade to take place, one party must view what the other person has as more valuable than what they have, and vice versa.

  Contextual Value

  In various forms of business, one will often experience conflicting valuations in some form or another. In finance, it's quite clear from the outline in an upcoming section of this post that there can be many different valuations for a company. Likewise, within marketing one can have differing valuations for a new product or a market depending on the underlying premises one utilizes when conducting an analysis. A common method to establish the potential market size for a brick-and-mortar business is to determine how many people live in the area where the business will operate, then how many of those are potential customers and how frequently they will need the services offered by the company. In this simple mathematical problem, the definitions of "operating area", "potential customers" and "frequency of service", will greatly affect the valuation of the project.

  The idea of contextual value is that things outside of an item influence the value placed upon that item by rational actors. The simplest example is how an item for which there is high demand tends to be viewed as more valuable than an item for which there is little if any demand. Some prefer to look at demand as an indicator of value, meaning that high value products will also have a correspondingly high demand, however this is a conflation of a products' capability for satisfying a need, with the product's popularity. While one can easily argue that there are correlations between product quality and product popularity, the correlation between the variables are varied.

  It is entirely possible to have a low-quality product, for which there is high demand, or a high quality product for which there is low demand. Within the dating sphere this often takes the form of "social proof", which as a variable influences the value of the product either up or down. However, social proof is transitory, as it is composed of variables that communicate and signal high value within a social group. Thus, many of the factors that lead to high social proof, are in and of themselves a part of the product, they are in fact the joint subjective perceptions of the product communicated externally.

  Fiat currency (currency not backed by tangible assets) is an example of something which derives almost the entirety of its value from perception, in that it has value because everyone in a group agrees that it has value. It used to be that every note of a currency was the equivalent of a deposit slip for a given amount of precious metal. For instance, the British Pound Sterling supposedly got its name from coins minted from silver in the Saxon isles, and where large payments would be denoted in "pounds of sterling". If people were to calculate the production value of modern bank notes, the inputs to production would be much less in value than the face value and thus currency is in many ways an abstract idea.

  The need for more stable forms of currency arose from the simple fact that barter is not only time consuming, but also from the need to have more permanent stores of wealth. An apple farmer a few hundred or thousands of years ago held his wealth in the form of perishable fruit, that ripened with the season, and as a result he would be very wealthy in apples during the apple harvest. However, at this time supply of apples would be high, thus he would obtain less in exchange for his apples than he would a few months later.

  On the other hand, not being able to barter all his apples meant that he would be unable to acquire the goods he and his family would need, as the apples would spoil. Thus, there was a need for a more permanent store of wealth, which is why currency was invented. The downside of currency being that it gains part of its value from the fact that it is a medium of trade. Even with silver and gold, they were only truly valuable as mediums of trade, it is quite recent that these metals have found value in electronics.

  Many people who prepare for the impeding downfall of society, for this reason elect to store wealth in a mixture of precious metals and in various goods they assume people will require after society collapses. This can be foodstuffs with long shelf-lives, medicines, ammunition, and various others. Thus, some items gain their value because they are perceived as having value, rather than some innate, non-negotiable aspect of their being.

  How we view value depends on a mixture of the objective and subjective as mentioned earlier in this essay. Certain characteristics of an object are directly of that object independent of our subjective valuation, while other characteristics are less tangible. For instance, an iphone as a product has a certain objective value based on the needs it satisfies and the need of a person to sate that need. However, their preference to satisfy this need through either an Iphone or an Android based product depends on the person's subjective valuation. Likewise, the value difference between two phones with the exact same objective characteristics, may differ based on subjective perceptions. For instance, those who value "coolness" may prefer an Iphone due to the brand image of Apple. A person may prefer coke to pepsi due to nostalgia or habit.

  The box the Iphone comes in does not add significant value to the product itself, but it affects our perceptions of the product. Such effects on value can be either positive or negative, for instance one would tend to value a meal at a sit-down restaurant higher than one from a drive through, regardless of product characteristics because of the context. Likewise, the context in which we view the Iphone will affect our valuations of its objective characteristics, the low battery life compared to other products is important for those who are unable to charge their phones for longer periods of time, likewise the ease with which the screen can be broken or the sensitivity to humidity, may affect the valuation of it compared to alternatives.

  Volatility and Sticky Values

  Anyone who makes a habit out of following various indexes on stock markets, individual shares, or even consumer goods, will be aware of volatility to some extent. In essence, the volatility of an asset is a measure of how much it tends to fluctuate in price over time. A highly volatile asset will see higher and more frequent fluctuations than a less volatile asset. The blue-chip stocks mentioned earlier in the essay are examples of a less volatile asset when compared to smaller, growth-based companies. I've previously compared female sexual market value to that of a growth company, in that it rises and falls very quickly. Whereas male sexual market value is more similar to a blue chip in that it takes a long time to rise but tends to be more sustainable over time.

  The concept of sticky values comes from the observation that the wages of employed workers tends to have a slow response to decline in company performance. As unemployment increases (thus increasing labor supply), while company performances decline (thus decreasing demand for labor), wages do not respond as rapidly as expected to the change. This can often be observed in the sexual market as well, a common observation being that women regard their value just as high, if not higher as they age.
Furthermore, that men who had a very high sexual market value early in life, often view their present value as being similar, even though it has declined. In the case of a woman's declining sexual market value, demand is decreasing, where supply is theoretically increasing, but it takes time for her valuation to respond to the market. In the case of the man, demand has greatly declined, while supply of substitute products have decreased.

  Such effects carry into the valuation of self- and others, as it shifts the mean. This effect can be observed in the ever-increasing "average size" of a man or woman since the 1950s. For instance, the average weight of an American man has increased from 166 lbs in 1962 to 191 lbs in 2002, so the average man is presently comparing his own waistline with the waistline of other men of an ever-inflating girth. Thus, the image of a man who is "in shape" will have changed drastically, because of comparative factors. Compared to men who are at 30% body fat, a man who is 20% body fat looks slim, despite the fact that the recommended amount is between 10 and 15% body fat. Likewise women calling themselves "average size" when they are a size 16 is accurate, but it's leaving out that an average was a size 6 not to long ago.

  When people's success in the sexual market place declines as a result of natural supply and demand factors, it is not uncommon for their self-valuation, and therefore their valuation of others as well to lag behind the market developments. Heartiste observed that a woman in her mid-to-late thirties is often more difficult to sleep with than her 23 year old self, despite the fact that her sexual market value has declined precipitously in a decade.