The Game Theory of Dating?

It's very nice to take advantage of nice weather in DC! After golf Saturday morning, Arthur and I went to finish the American History Museum while Mike and Dee were at TedTalks. To our great surprise, the museum had just opened a new section on American enterprise. The fantastic exhibit went through the origin of money, the impact and process of globalization, and entrepreneurship. As an economics major, it was certainly interesting to see how the museum portrayed such information. We then finished the exhibit on the American wars. While I did not learn much from this exhibit, which takes one through the major wars in American history, it was very interesting and Arthur seemed to have learned more than he can comprehend. Sunday, I finally got to go to the zoo! I had greatly anticipated going to the zoo in the fall as the trees have changed colors and the animals are supposed

A little Texas feel in the DC Zoo!

to be out in full force. Unfortunately, we arrived at 3:00 only to find that the zoo closed at 4:00 because of a Halloween special that evening. In addition, the panda exhibit was closed! (Dang it! If there are no pandas, does the rest really matter?) We do plan to go finish the zoo before the fall colors disappear!

            Cato this week was slightly different than prior weeks. I did do research to prepare my scholar, Michael Tanner, to live-tweet the Republican debate Wednesday, such as readying his articles to be quickly linked through his Twitter. In addition, I talked to Columbia economists about their forthcoming study examining the wage gap, which was pretty darn cool. However, in a change of pace, I spent a majority of my week looking through criticisms of capitalism and how some believe it to cause poverty. While this sounds counterintuitive to the mission of Cato, it was actually very important to my intense poverty study. By reading criticisms by people such as Marx, my scholar and I are better able to understand the entire scope of responses to the poverty problem. Through this understanding, I have a better comprehension of all sides of poverty and, thus, have the potential to adequately respond when challenged with such an argument. Finally, one of our lectures this week was by Jeff Miron on economic policy. While the talk itself was very interesting, hearing from Dr. Miron, who is the director of economic studies at Cato, an esteemed Harvard economist, and the director for undergraduate studies at Harvard, was the highlight.

Story of the Week: Tuesday evening, we had an event at Cato called “The Economics of Dating: How Game Theory and Demographics Explain Dating in D.C.” for which I bartended. First off, the title alone attracted enormous attention (we had 770 RSVP on Facebook, and over 300 attend). Because I was bartending, I did not get to attend the discussion; however, I do know that the gist of the event was that college-educated women who seek college-educated men are likely to be disappointed because of a gender gap in education: many more women gain or are on track for college degrees than men. While the women left the event feeling slightly depressed and the men left with their heads held high, having gained a newfound confidence on dating, I was the true winner. Indeed, much of my research into gender inequality had to do with the inequality of educational attainment between men and women, and the potential effects it could have going forward. As it turns out, all the dating advice one needs can be found in an intern’s poverty research!