Women don’t think 80 percent of men are below average, and the share of children with a secret dad is far below 10 percent

Juicy stories are often false

Welcome to The Update. Today, I’m covering research across the social and natural sciences, along with new releases from Works in Progress and Asterisk.

• Women don’t think 80 percent of men are below average

• The share of children with a secret dad is far below 10 percent

• Why so few bootmakers lost their jobs during the Industrial Revolution

• Europeans spend more time on household chores than Americans

• Why Britain stopped building nuclear power

• In brief: the history of wargaming, how to fix drug development, and more

Women don’t think 80 percent of men are below average

You might have seen this chart by Christian Rudder, founder of the dating site OkCupid.

While men’s ratings of women roughly follow a normal distribution, women’s ratings of men are decidedly skewed. More than 80 percent of men are rated below average.

This chart tends to go viral whenever someone shares it on social media. It fits a stereotype many people find both funny and true.

But let’s look at other studies. In the social science literature, men do tend to rate women higher than women rate men, but the difference is usually much smaller than the OkCupid chart suggests. Take this 2003 study of American participants, where women’s ratings of men sit almost exactly at the midpoint:

The US General Social Survey doesn’t distinguish by rater sex, but the overall ratings rule out women finding 80 percent of men unattractive.

So do the ratings in an equivalent German study of 20–30-year-olds:

It’s not clear why the OkCupid chart looks so different, but the overall body of evidence shows that it hugely exaggerates sex differences in attractiveness ratings.

The share of children with a secret dad is far below 10 percent

Since people enjoy juicy stories, they often spread far beyond what the evidence supports. Another example is the widely believed claim that one in ten children has a different father than they think. This case is slightly different because some scientific studies have actually reported such numbers, or even higher. But many of those studies were based on biased samples, such as people who already had doubts about paternity. In rich countries, more representative studies find much lower rates of misattributed paternity. And they have likely fallen over time, partly thanks to better contraception. A Swedish study of nearly two million families based on blood group data found that the rate of misattributed paternity fell from around three percent in the 1930s to about one percent by 2010.

Why so few bootmakers lost their jobs during the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution increased productivity, reducing the need for many types of workers. But in a paper on the British bootmaking industry, Hillary Vipond shows that this didn’t necessarily result in many individuals losing their jobs. While much artisanal bootmaking disappeared, the decline was slow enough that most existing bootmakers could continue working in their trade. Instead, the main driver of the shift was young people going into other jobs.

Some think this is how AI will play out, but I think we should be careful with this analogy. One issue is the speed of AI progress: if an industry automates quickly enough, existing workers are bound to be affected. Another is that there might not be other jobs to move into. There’s no reason AI couldn’t eventually do all the jobs humans can do.

Europeans spend more time on household chores than Americans

A common explanation for why Americans are so much richer than Europeans is that they simply work more. But it depends on how you count. If you consider household labor, the gap in total working time is only two percent, according to a Dallas Fed paper. Higher taxes and transfers incentivize Europeans to do less paid work and more unpaid work at home.

Why Britain stopped building nuclear power

Britain was an early adopter of nuclear power, building reactors faster than countries like the US and France. But construction slowed sharply in the 1970s, and no new reactor has been completed since 1995. In Works in Progress, Alex Chalmers explains what happened. Contrary to what I’d thought, it wasn’t primarily disasters like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl that brought British nuclear to a halt. While they did contribute at the margin, the main cause was a series of dubious decisions in Britain itself: dumping nuclear waste at sea, awarding contracts to failing firms, and hiding the true costs of nuclear power. These mistakes produced political resistance and onerous regulations that made further nuclear construction prohibitively expensive.

In brief

• In Asterisk, Clara Collier and Angela Chen interview historian Jon Peterson about the history of wargaming and how it gave rise to role-playing games

• On the Works in Progress podcast, Ben Southwood and Saloni Dattani talk to Ruxandra Teslo about why drug development keeps getting more expensive and how to fix it

• Since 1979, American postdoc positions have quadrupled while graduate student enrollment has only doubled

• Danish paper finds that top CEOs’ handling of trade shocks generates value worth over a hundred times their pay

• Soldiers below the previous IQ cutoff mostly performed adequately in the Vietnam War, though not on par with their peers

• Study finds that paying participants real money in standard economic experiments like the prisoner’s dilemma usually doesn’t change their behavior

• Paper argues that estimates of the economic costs of climate change are far more fragile than commonly acknowledged

• AI systems match or exceed human economists at a standard causal inference task

• California’s $20 fast food minimum wage raised prices in the restaurant sector as a whole by 3.5 percent

• American study finds that a ten percent higher minimum wage increases robot adoption by eight percent

• Paper argues that crabs’ sideways walk evolved only once

• Scientists use airborne DNA to monitor biodiversity and invasive species