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Trivers–Willard Hypothesis
- corporateslave5 7y agoQuick fact for everyone: Billionaires have more sons, which is somewhat proof of this for humans
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoMen with higher testosterone have more sons, maybe billionaires have more testosterone.
- moopling 7y agoI'd be interested in a citation, first thought which springs to mind is sample size and size of the bias.
- YPCrumble 7y agoPresumably it’s this study: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Elissa_Cameron/publication/23785727_A_Trivers-Willard_Effect_in_Contemporary_Humans_Male-Biased_Sex_Ratios_among_Billionaires/links/0c96051ae6431a79d0000000/A-Trivers-Willard-Effect-in-Contemporary-Humans-Male-Biased-Sex-Ratios-among-Billionaires.pdf?origin=publication_detail https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Elissa_Cameron/publicat... It cited 60% male to female billionaire ratio on n of 350. But, the methodology was to use google and Wikipedia for research so a more honest claim might be “male offspring of billionaires show up in search results more often.” I suppose that factoid wouldn’t have been paid for by the publisher though.
- YPCrumble 7y agoThinking more about my own comment, perhaps researchers expecting to find more male offspring while googling find male offspring more often!
- ZeroGravitas 7y agoWorth bearing in mind that the birth ratio is generally tilted towards boys, about 52.5%
- tsimionescu 7y agoEven if that is true, given how easy it is for a billionaire to have an abortion if they don't want a daughter, and to make sure no one knows about it, I don't think it's proof of anything directly.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- toasterlovin 7y agoI don’t think people are preferentially aborting females to any appreciable degree in the west. Received wisdom is that boys are a pain in the ass to rear. And, anecdotally, most parents are interested in having one of each, not in having one particular sex over the other.
- gliese1337 7y agoI suspect that received wisdom is highly culturally dependent. The received wisdom in my social circle (western US) is that girls are far more trouble than boys.
- tsimionescu 7y agoWhat is common in the public at large is not necessarily what is common in the subculture of old money families. Still, I am not necessarily claiming that this is happening, but it certainly seems more plausible than having some psycho-somatic path where wealthier women would give birth to more male offspring. Another even more plausible explanation is that the effect simply does not exist, that the data was not properly collected.
- ZeroGravitas 7y agoI think a more likely factor would be stopping after the first child if it's what you wanted, and trying for more if you really wanted the other. But there's so many other confounding factors (e.g. do billionaire men have more testosterone, as either a cause or an effect of their success, do they have children when they are older but the mothers are younger and so on) that it offers no evidence on its own.
- pasquinelli 7y agoThere aren't that many billionaires. How many more sons do they have, exactly?
- gargarplex 7y agoI've also read a study that human couples with more symmetrical faces produce more daughters than sons.
- derekbreden 7y agoAnecdotally, my parents had a son while under the financial support of both sets of my grandparents. Then 4 daughters while only supported by a single not quite middle class income. Then a 10 year gap and under the support of two middle class incomes had their second son.
- aj7 7y agoToday, in the AMERICAN system, female children have EVEN MORE extra value than that attributed to male children in classical Asian society.
- stazz1 7y agoThis strongly suggests that in times of repose, women are pregnant with males, and in times of uncertainty and stress with females. Is this true in your experience? Thinking of it like a forest, women are the trees that create further forest and more life. The tendency for the forest to wish to cover the landscape with greenery and trees is normal, and once the forest is flourishing the focus changes to romping and playing. Tragically and ironically, the 1 child policy in China was likely quite destructive because it caused so much stress and anxiety, uncertainty, and therefore mammalian ladies were likely creating mainly females, which were discarded in favor of males -- seen as the more important choice in times of scarcity -- in clear cross-facing against the grain of nature as she appears to play it in such times, according to the suppositions and supports of the hypothesis.