Gendernomics- Building Value Read online

  Tangible and Intangible Asset Values

  The distinction between tangible and intangible assets in accounting tends to be that a tangible asset is an asset that has a physical form, whereas intangible assets is synonymous with nonphysical assets. Examples of the former would be land, machinery and inventory, whereas examples of the latter would be among others brand recognition, patents and copyrights. Most companies tend to have a mixture of both to varying degrees, where software companies often have few tangible assets and much of their value is tied up in intangible assets, large manufacturing corporations tend to have many tangible assets and less tangible assets as a percentage of assets relatively speaking.

  As with a company, most people are a mixture of tangible and intangible assets, a person's physique and health would be the primary tangible assets that a person has, while their personality and traits are their intangible assets. A person's ambition, drive, self-discipline and intellect, would be some examples of these intangible assets. Perhaps the major distinction between the two is that one could potentially design an objective measuring system for tangible assets, to some extent this already exists in the form of medical records. This is perhaps why it's given a relatively low amount of attention within the sphere and the various articles on "vetting a wife".

  These articles tend to largely focus on the intangible assets of a potential partner, both in isolation, but also in interaction with the intangible assets of others. The essays on this blog pertaining to damaged women are examples of how to identify women who embody certain clusters of intangible assets that will tend to cause substantial amounts of havoc. For instance, when the "vet your potential wife" articles recommend looking at her relationship history, this is a two-part approach, where on one hand, the fewer relationships she has had, the less baggage she will have but on the other the nature of her relationships also allow glimpses into her actions within them.

  When these articles advice conducting reconnaissance on the mother, they are advocating a mixture of viewing the inevitable decline of her tangible assets, but also her intangible assets. The mother is a woman's first and major role-model when it comes to feminine and relationship behaviors, thus the behaviors she learned from her mother are going to be those most firmly imprinted on her mind.

  Internal and External Value Multipliers

  I've written about value multipliers previously, where I define a multiplier as:

  "A multiplier is a very simple concept, it's an added variable that either serves to increase or decrease a given value. "

  One of the things I think I neglected to adequately cover in that essay is the fact that a multiplier can be both positive and negative, and how it is regarded may be context dependent.

  It's quite common to make the distinction between internal factors in a company that contribute to its performance, and external factors that affect its performance. The idea of "core competencies" is perhaps the clearest formulation of how a company's unique configuration of competencies, qualities and traits can become a source of competitive advantage. Examples would be 3M's focus on innovation and new products, WalMart's focus on high volume logistics, or Apples focus on high quality design work.

  When applying the core competencies principle to a person the internal multipliers would be those things that alter the behavior of a given variable or set of variables based on a person's internal characteristics. Men who write "How to vet a wife" articles often draw on such variables as a woman's history of self-control, loyalty or self-discipline, not due to these factors in and of themselves, but because the combination of these variables build a barrier towards external negative multipliers.

  A woman who has a combination of love for family, traditional values and self-discipline as a core competency is according to these men a better prospect for marriage because they act as barriers for promiscuity, divorce and impulsive behavior, all of which are encouraged externally in our present social order.

  External multipliers are those a person has little control over and which exist outside of that person. For instance, most are familiar with the example of going out with a wing who is shorter than you, so that you look taller by comparison. Likewise, a woman may be a 10 in a small town, but a 6 in Los Angeles or Miami where beautiful women tend to congregate.

  In my day job I've frequently utilized examples such as industry legal issues, or multi-national legal issues as an example of external negative multipliers, as these have a negative effect on the revenues of each company within an industry yet are unrelated to the aspects of performance that a company has control over.

  Choice Criteria and Value

  The baseline variables of a human valuation judgment can be referred to as "Choice Criteria" and reflect those characteristics of a product or service that the person making the valuation deem important. For instance, if one does not care about what color phone one uses, then a particular model having many colors to select from adds little value, if the color of a phone is important on the other hand, having a wide-variety of colors adds value to the consumer as they have a higher chance of finding a phone that is the color they desire.

  The clearly identified traits that women tend to value in a prospective mate as identified by the red pill and upon which there is near universal agreement within the community include physical fitness, confidence, high social status, social competence, success and maintaining frame control. There are many other variables that have been discussed at length, such as style, sense of humor and wealth, that may or may not have an effect, or where the effect is to a lesser or higher degree context dependent. For instance, a woman seeking out "alpha fucks" will prioritize appearance higher than wealth as a choice criteria, whereas a woman seeking "beta bucks" will prioritize wealth over appearance.

  An interesting observation within the realm of sexual market value is that each sex tends to project their own choice criteria as the baseline decision making model of the opposite sex. Men tend to assume women select their partners judged by the same criteria as they would themselves and vice versa. This leads down a path where men attribute an over-average weight to their own appearance in every context, and women attribute an over-average weight to their accomplishments in certain contexts. The best example of this type of erroneous valuation occurs in women ages 35 and up, who having hit the wall and seeing their sexual market value decline, elect to reason that their value is now calculated based on the male value model rather than their own.

  This is done through applying the characteristics and choice criteria that they utilize to conduct a valuation of the man, to a man's valuation of a woman. This is not an uncommon trait among humans, our only reference for thinking is how our own mind works, and therefore we tend to project the same patterns onto other humans. However, in the case of men, the blue pill narratives that they are raised under, serve to influence their valuation in the wrong direction, away from their natural valuation and towards one more beneficial to women.

  From an economics perspective, such attempts to influence choice criteria and thereby valuation are common in marketing, as this is part of product differentiation. If all consumers utilized identical choice criteria and models for valuation, then every market would be a monopoly for the company that successfully made the best product. This would be a case of objective value, as if every consumer prefer the same choice criteria and place the same weight on them, it follows that their subjective valuations would not differ from an objective valuation in any meaningful regard. A company that realizes that it lacks the ability to compete on a given product feature may seek to influence the market towards another product feature where they have an advantage.

  However, as choices and thus choice-criteria appear to be context dependent at least to some degree, there are still clear patterns such as women as a group being drawn to only the top 20% or so of men and men generally preferring younger women. This is reflected in the female valuation of male attractiveness on OKcupid where a majority of men were va
lued as below

  average attractiveness.

  In the graph, roughly 60% of the male population were rated between 1 and 3 on a 1 - 10 attractiveness scale, therefore, to the average woman, the average man is very unattractive. If one compares this to the male valuations on the same site, the majority of women were rated on a normal distribution. A flippant formulation of this would be that for men, the average woman is of average attractiveness.

  Perhaps the most important observation to be made from this is the supply and demand implications this will have. As men view an average woman as averagely attractive, this has the effect of increasing female supply, thus decreasing the competition for partners. Whereas as your average woman views the average man as below average attractiveness, this has the effect of decreasing male supply and therefore increasing the competition for partners.

  A potential explanation for this would be if female choice criteria were more uniform, but discriminating and male choice criteria less uniform but also less discriminating. The female distribution in the image, takes a form quite similar to an exponential distribution, which is a statistical distribution that has the key property of being memoryless. The difference between a memoryless and a non-memoryless property is as follows. In a process with memory, the observer gains information about them over time. For instance if X is a random variable expressed in terms of "Operating hours until a machine breaks down, intuitively if a machine has operated continuously for 100.000 hours we will view it as closer to breaking down than a machine that has only operated for 1000 hours. In a memoryless situation, events are unrelated to success, each new event has no memory of previous events.

  If one assumes that female rating of male attractiveness is a memoryless, non-relative scenario, meaning that she does not rate the attractiveness of men based on her previous ratings, but each man in isolation. Furthermore that the man when rating female attractiveness views his rating of a woman in context and with memory of the other women. This could potentially be interpreted as male ratings of women being more objective and aligned with reality, where female ratings are likely to be heavily influenced by the present subjective state of the woman.

  Value Judgements and Judgements of Value

  One of the first things an old economics professor of mine ever told me was that an economist does not make value judgments, but judgments of value. The distinction here is quite simple, a value judgment is one where one distinguishes between "good" and "bad", where a judgement of value is a quantitative measure of economic effects. The former type of judgment is very common in the philosophical field of ethics, and many economists make such mistakes as well, where they seek to merge the quantitative judgment with a distinction of good versus bad. The challenge of such conflation is that it undermines the objectivity of the person making the judgment by layering subjectivity on top of observable fact or adding additional moral criteria to a judgment.

  This is not uncommon in the corporate realm either, where a company will justify neglecting their main purpose, which is to manage the resources of the shareholders in the most efficient and profitable manner, in favor of corporate social responsibility initiatives. Within the red pill sphere, one can observe the same factors at play, where men will try to rationalize away their own lack of success, or conversely the success of others through adding a moral factor. "He cannot possibly be alpha, he's not living up to his responsibilities as a man" is a distillation of some who hold this position, where the core principle is that in order to be alpha one must manifest virtues (as they elect to define them), in other parts of life.

  Such a change in the definition of "success" has profound effect on the judgments that follow, as it adds additional criteria above and beyond "market success". In effect, it waters down the raison d'etre for the market engagement. Many corporations have clauses about wanting to be ethical, take care of the environment, to "not be evil" and various others. The fundamental argument being that by having such measures in addition to the profit motive, it creates brand value, additional value or consumer loyalty that warrants the split of corporate motives. In the same manner, one could easily argue that adding additional milestones or criteria to the concepts of "alpha", "beta" and others, creates a more holistic self-development pathway for men.

  However, in doing so one also waters down the most efficient route from point A to point B, as it not only becomes longer, but also more difficult to navigate. After all, with value judgments come additional subjectivity on top of an already subjective valuation of sexual market value. These have their own intrinsic resource demands, and may even be mutually exclusive. If one takes the Sexual Market Value graph from Rollo Tomassi, male sexual market value has the highest potential to peak in a man's mid to late thirties. This is due to a number of factors, but primarily it comes from the fact that the man will have had 15 - 20 years to build value, socially, physically and economically. If one on the other hand considers that some advocate that a man should vet a wife, get married and have children around age 25, then this means that most of the resources that would go towards building sexual market value will be diverted to maintaining a marriage and raising children.

  An analysis of such a situation is often conducted by an analysis of opportunity costs, wherein one compares the expected outcome of one investment with the best alternative investment. In the case of the position "Build sexual market value until you reach your mid-to-late thirties, then elect to get married and have children" against the position "Vet a wife and get married in your mid twenties and have children" I've tended to view the latter as the worse alternative due to differing risk profiles. In the former the major risk is the lack of availability of potential partners when one reaches mid-to-late thirties, whereas in the latter the major risk is that of divorce, and up to multiple decades of lost investment time.

  The two are mutually exclusive options. Which one is the right one depends on which criteria one uses to judge the decisions.

  Valuation of Self and Others

  The valuation of self is closely tied to self-awareness. One could argue that there are two extreme cases that illustrate the spectrum on which humans exist. The neurotic on one hand has an extremely depressed view of his own value, as a result of being very critical of self, whereas the narcissist has an extremely optimistic view of their own value as a result of poor self-awareness. In both cases, the person is inaccurate in their self-valuation, and suffers consequences due to this factor.

  Neurotics minimize their strengths and magnify their weaknesses in their own internal perception of self. This can lead to two broad spheres of results, on one hand one has the neurotic person who achieves great success as a result of constantly improving self and seeking better results. On the other hand one has those neurotics that view their weaknesses as too great to overcome and as a result do not work to improve themselves. In the first of these situations, the neurotic can often become a high achiever, whereas in the latter they often fail to achieve at all. The former type of neurotic often has a large gap between their perceived value and their objective value, while the inverse is true of the latter.

  Narcissists maximize their strengths and are to varying degrees ignorant of their weaknesses. This can also lead to two broad spheres of results. The narcissist that is also a high achiever and as a result of this has a smaller gap between their self-perceived value and their objective value. On the other hand the narcissist that is a non-achiever, and has a large gap between their self-perceived value and their objective value.

  A common observation in the valuation of self is to what one is comparing. A person in isolation can be valued differently, than a person who is valued in contrast to another. This is similar in part to how a company has a stand-alone valuation, and a benchmark valuation, the latter being when the company's metrics are compared with that of other comparable companies. The latter is also vulnerable to the contrast effect, where a person is viewed as more or as less due to the stature of another person or anot
her group.

  When valuing others the factors that affect valuations are much the same, except that one is working from much less information. One can compare this to "insider buys" in a stock market, where someone in an advantageous position within a company, such as a member of the executive team, or the board buys shares in the open market. This is often viewed as a positive signal to the market as it means someone with a greater degree of knowledge of the company views this time as a good time to buy. When we value ourselves, we have access to every single piece of data, when we value others we have much less.

  The psychological system 1 and system 2 factors outlined by Daniel Kahneman, where one can often make rapid valuations based on available visual characteristics, that have a greater margin of error than the same valuation conducted through system 2. A ready observation of pedestalization for instance, is that such valuations have been conducted in a system 1 fashion, with little attention being paid to identify the underlying axioms and premises of such a valuation.

  The characteristic of system 1 is that it trades speed for accuracy, much in the same manner that shooting from the hip does for firearms. When conducting such a valuation or superficial analysis, one must always be mindful that the probability of error increases at every level of the judgment. Not only do we have access to limited data, we will tend to value what little data we have very highly, but we lack enough to identify a pattern within the observations, our sample size is very small, and we are prone to make rapid decisions. Thus, it follows that our snap-valuations of others will be heavily biased by these factors. When the context factor is added, for instance by the person being put in a position of power, in an environment with a high volume of social proof, or other situation our valuations will increase, if the converse contexts take place, our judgment of their value will be less.