> That is: if men cared about looks more than women, then they would trade off status for looks: faced with a choice between an average-looking woman of the same class, or a beautiful woman of a slightly-lower class, they would choose the beautiful-but-poor woman. But this would mean men would marry lower-class women more often than women married lower-class men, which would imply a less-than-perfect status correlation between husbands and wives. But the data show a pretty perfect status correlation between husbands and wives. Therefore, men can’t care about looks.
The fallacy here is in the last sentence. This assumes the only possible cause for having perfect correlation, would be men not caring about looks. But there are more possible reasons: for instance men could prefer looks over class, and women prefer some other quality over class as well; the result is that both genders equally often marry below class.
The data in the article seems to confirm that, because women prefer marrying up wrt income.
So it might be like in the song; daddy's rich and mom is good looking.
In theory, another cause overriding class completely could be true. But the other suggested selection factors from you- class, education, looks, income - are exactly those that were controlled for.
Sure, it could be that people marry by IP address, or ZIP code, or name first and foremost (over looks, class, income and education!), but it seems highly unlikely.
> That is: if men cared about looks more than women, then they would trade off status for looks: faced with a choice between an average-looking woman of the same class, or a beautiful woman of a slightly-lower class, they would choose the beautiful-but-poor woman. But this would mean men would marry lower-class women more often than women married lower-class men, which would imply a less-than-perfect status correlation between husbands and wives. But the data show a pretty perfect status correlation between husbands and wives. Therefore, men can’t care about looks.
The fallacy here is in the last sentence. This assumes the only possible cause for having perfect correlation, would be men not caring about looks. But there are more possible reasons: for instance men could prefer looks over class, and women prefer some other quality over class as well; the result is that both genders equally often marry below class. The data in the article seems to confirm that, because women prefer marrying up wrt income. So it might be like in the song; daddy's rich and mom is good looking.