X, Y, and Other Genetic Stuff Revisited

On 17 January, I wrote a blog that basically said that the hotness index of Russia women and men was so far apart that it was reasonable to assume that Russian men and women came from different gene pools.

Google agrees.  The first page of image results for a query on "Russian Beauty" returns these two images:

 Should Be In Pictures

Should Only Take Pictures

Presumably, he is taking a picture of her.  Power to him.  But, there is a more serious side to this blog; namely, why is there a vast difference between the appearance of the sexes in Russia?

Tim Hartford, Financial Times columnist, has written a curious book called The Logic of Life:  The Rational Economics of an Irrational World.  It is hard to describe what the book is about because there is no central theme other than the demonstration that economic analysis will explain the rationality of seemingly irrational behavior patterns.  The disparity of African-American male and female population distributions is one of his topics, as well as exploring various pathologies of city dwelling.  Here are a few interesting quotes drawn from the book:

You might think that a slight scarcity of men would cause the women some modest inconvenience, but in fact even this tiny imbalance ends up being very bad news for the women and very good news for the remaining men.  Scarcity is power, and more power than you might have thought...

The dramatic increase in the bargaining power of men doesn't merely harm the women who don't get to marry but also those who do.  Their potential partners have too many options to allow a fair bargain ... [so women may resort to] plastic surgery or workout in the gym.  In short, there are all sort of ways you can make yourself a more attractive catch ... This is indeed how rational women tend to respond to a shortage of men ...

Per Wikipedia, there are about 1.05 boys for every 1 girl in Russia up to the age of 15.  Between ages 15 and 64, the age range for most procreative types, there are 0.92 men for every woman*.  Looking at Tim Hartfort's analysis, for behavior patterns of African-American women in the US who are responding to similar dynamics (because there are a large number of African-American men locked up in US prisons), we have an explanation for the "Russian Beauty" pictured above.

For whatever reason, there are more women in Russia today than there are men.  This creates competition amongst women, thereby explaining the high numbers of slim, fit, and attractive women on Moscow's streets.  The men, in the meanwhile, basically have to wait until one of those attractive ladies approaches him for courtship.  Russia is not a bad place after all ... for men.

I should add that my observation is mainly of Moscow.  Recently, I spent sometime in Moscow's countryside and I discovered the situation to be very different.  There, women and men distributions seemed more "normal;" but Tim Hartfort even has an explanation for that.  When discussing city behavior pattern dynamics, he writes:

As [costs of living in a city] rise, it will be the unskilled men who give up and move to the country before the unskilled women do - or who never bother to move to the cities in the first place.

This behavior pattern exasperates the male-female population disparity in cities (while increasing the man to woman ratio in the countryside).  As such, Muscovite men have a double advantage:  They live in one of the most expensive cities in the world - hence depopulating unskilled men - in a country that has a shortage of men to begin with.  From firsthand empirical evidence, with with my sincere appreciation to the ladies, I attest that Muscovite men have it good.
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* This population disparity is further exaggerated after the age of 65 where there are only 0.46 men for every woman.  Too bad for grandpa because, at this age, grandma has no interest any more.