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In a world where women can support themselves, being rich is just one factor of being attractive to women. There are plenty of guys who are very successful with

In a world where women can support themselves, being rich is just one factor of being attractive to women. There are plenty of guys who are very successful with women despite not being rich, because it is not a requirement that they be able to support them. So in theory, if you removed wealth inequality, certain individuals would just dominate romantic life for other reasons. However, your argument is flawed in other ways. There isn't a strict limit after which women will marry a guy for money (what you call a bridgeable margin - it doesn't exist). Obviously this is gradual and different for each woman. So the probability that a randomly selected woman would marry a guy for his money grows with his income. In this situation, the order of magnitude of inequality becomes irrelevant because the two orders of magnitude richer than average guy will be an order of magnitude rarer than the one order of magnitude richer than average guy (in the worst possible case, in reality they will be even rarer). So even though the extremely rich guy can do "more damage" to the rest of society by hogging something, there are less of them, so in total they hog the same amount. So this order of magnitude doesn't actually make a difference.

marchenko 10y ago
These are great points, and I regret that I used an example that inadvertently framed the discussion around "women marrying for money"- In fact I believe that women have a surprisingly catholic breadth of mate choice criteria, and the data available on reproductive variability in modern societies seem to bear this out. As the preceding comments note, the existence of a Zipf-distributed hyper-elite is not necessarily a big problem for certain categories of goods. I am actually more interested in the effects of the collapse of alternative status hierarchies and how this affects different status 'tournaments'. Global competitions seem to converge on a single figure of merit, and I wonder whether jagged multimodal distributions on a single variable produce different 'competitions' than normal distributions or multivariate distributions. I would also note that an individual or group can affect a resource competition without directly consuming the resource itself.

marchenko 10y ago

These are great points, and I regret that I used an example that inadvertently framed the discussion around "women marrying for money"- In fact I believe that women have a surprisingly catholic breadth of mate choice criteria, and the data available on reproductive variability in modern societies seem to bear this out. As the preceding comments note, the existence of a Zipf-distributed hyper-elite is not necessarily a big problem for certain categories of goods. I am actually more interested in the effects of the collapse of alternative status hierarchies and how this affects different status 'tournaments'. Global competitions seem to converge on a single figure of merit, and I wonder whether jagged multimodal distributions on a single variable produce different 'competitions' than normal distributions or multivariate distributions. I would also note that an individual or group can affect a resource competition without directly consuming the resource itself.