Those claims are about ancestral environments, not ones with modern contraception, wealth, and education.
With respect to men and women having children, recall that men have shorter lifespans with much early death from high-risk strategies (industrial accidents from more dangerous jobs, death by violence, etc, etc). Old men are those who were not killed off by those strategies, and tend to be relatively high-status (high status is associated with longer life, not to mention that married men live longer).
People often talk as if these rules were universal. In fact we have very little evidence for their universality. We don’t even have convincing evidence that they held more often than not in ancestral environment, even though it sounds plausible.
In particular is the second paragraph of your comment referring to the modern world, or a typical ancestral environment, or both, or do you claim it’s universal?
Right now, male and female lifespans don’t differ that much until long after fertility, so different life expectancies don’t matter (and historically either of them could be longer, for example female infants might be getting less care than male infants—hard evidence is needed to claim typicality).
Calling industrial accidents and violence high risk strategies sounds very weird. It’s like saying living in poor part of the city, or being black is a “high risk strategy”—it’s not strategy, it’s society abusing some of its members, and them not being able to do much about it.
And as for the association between high status and length of fertile life—that’s exactly my point, it’s one of those things that are commonly claimed as if they were widely proven, but there’s very little evidence for them, except maybe for extremely low status people.
“In particular is the second paragraph of your comment referring to the modern world, or a typical ancestral environment, or both, or do you claim it’s universal?”
Modern America.
Calling industrial accidents and violence high risk strategies sounds very weird. It’s like saying living in poor part of the city, or being black is a “high risk strategy”—it’s not strategy, it’s society abusing some of its members, and them not being able to do much about it.
American men systematically tend to adopt jobs with higher risk of death and higher pay, and in general to trade off many other factors for pay to a greater extent than women do. Men also are much more likely to participate in violent crime.
There’s an obvious problem with this argument as the risky jobs are not the high paying ones. Correlation between risk and payoff seems to be negative, not positive. And neither does violent crime pay much.
As an particularly extreme example of both, drug dealing in States is extremely risky (death far more likely than in military in Iraq, then risk of less than lethal violence, and imprisonment) and extremely unprofitable (wages far lower than minimum wage) behaviour. [ famously described in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freakonomics ]
There is a real risk premium for jobs. Yes, high income jobs are less physically risky, but that isn’t the relevant comparison. The relevant comparison is to other low skill jobs. So, for example, lumberjacks get paid more than doormen.
I think Freakonomics supports the opposite view about risk and why low level drug dealers take it. It’s the small chance of a huge payoff that motivates them, even though most of them end up living with their mothers.
Those claims are about ancestral environments, not ones with modern contraception, wealth, and education.
With respect to men and women having children, recall that men have shorter lifespans with much early death from high-risk strategies (industrial accidents from more dangerous jobs, death by violence, etc, etc). Old men are those who were not killed off by those strategies, and tend to be relatively high-status (high status is associated with longer life, not to mention that married men live longer).
People often talk as if these rules were universal. In fact we have very little evidence for their universality. We don’t even have convincing evidence that they held more often than not in ancestral environment, even though it sounds plausible.
In particular is the second paragraph of your comment referring to the modern world, or a typical ancestral environment, or both, or do you claim it’s universal?
Right now, male and female lifespans don’t differ that much until long after fertility, so different life expectancies don’t matter (and historically either of them could be longer, for example female infants might be getting less care than male infants—hard evidence is needed to claim typicality).
Calling industrial accidents and violence high risk strategies sounds very weird. It’s like saying living in poor part of the city, or being black is a “high risk strategy”—it’s not strategy, it’s society abusing some of its members, and them not being able to do much about it.
And as for the association between high status and length of fertile life—that’s exactly my point, it’s one of those things that are commonly claimed as if they were widely proven, but there’s very little evidence for them, except maybe for extremely low status people.
Modern America.
American men systematically tend to adopt jobs with higher risk of death and higher pay, and in general to trade off many other factors for pay to a greater extent than women do. Men also are much more likely to participate in violent crime.
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Men-Earn-More-Startling/dp/0814472109
There’s an obvious problem with this argument as the risky jobs are not the high paying ones. Correlation between risk and payoff seems to be negative, not positive. And neither does violent crime pay much.
As an particularly extreme example of both, drug dealing in States is extremely risky (death far more likely than in military in Iraq, then risk of less than lethal violence, and imprisonment) and extremely unprofitable (wages far lower than minimum wage) behaviour. [ famously described in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freakonomics ]
There is a real risk premium for jobs. Yes, high income jobs are less physically risky, but that isn’t the relevant comparison. The relevant comparison is to other low skill jobs. So, for example, lumberjacks get paid more than doormen.
I think Freakonomics supports the opposite view about risk and why low level drug dealers take it. It’s the small chance of a huge payoff that motivates them, even though most of them end up living with their mothers.