While it seems wrong, here is an interesting piece at Atlantic Cities on the impact of sex ratios on consumer debt. While sex ratio would be expected to have an impact on spending patterns (i.e. men spend more money when women are in limited supply), this study cited by The Atlantic doesn’t seem to properly analyze the issue:
The cities of Macon and Columbus, in Georgia, have a lot in common. They’re located within a hundred miles of one another and have similar histories and economies. So at a glance it’s hard to explain why the people of Columbus have, on average, consumer debt that’s roughly $3,500 more per capita than the people of Macon.
A group of psychologists thinks the disparities may have something to do with the fact that these two cities have widely diverging sex ratios. Macon has considerably fewer men than women (.78 to 1) and Columbus has considerably more (1.18 to 1). The research group, led by Vladas Griskevicius of the University of Minnesota, suggests that when men outnumber women in a population, they spend more and save less.
This leads researchers to believe that sex ratio imbalances are responsible for not only the higher per capita debt of Columbus residents but also the fact that men in Columbus spend more money on engagement rings, dinner, and other amenities.
The researchers analyzed 120 cities for causal links. If Columbus/Macon, Georgia is their strongest example, I worry that the research is fatally flawed. Just based upon the OP I don’t think that the researchers controlled for all appropriate variables. The Atlantic piece begins by arguing that Macon and Columbus “have a lot in common.” Geographically? Yes. But demographically and economically? No.
Here are the stats (Macon and Columbus): Macon is 68% black and 29% white; Columbus is 46% white and 46% black; median household income in Macon is ~ $28,000; median household income in Columbus is ~ $41,000; per capita income in Macon is ~ $17,000; Columbus per capita income is ~ $22,000.
I didn’t read the entire study, but did search the text for words like “income”, “black”, and “African-American”. “Income” was mentioned three times in the entire paper while race seems not to have been discussed at all.
People with higher incomes would also tend to have more household debt. Blacks also have, on average, less credit card debt than whites. Demos shows that black households average $5,800 in credit card debt compared to $7,300 for whites. Whites/wealthy have greater access to credit (and attendant debt) than do blacks/poor. And when those with lower incomes do have access to credit they are offered it at very low levels.
So perhaps debt is a poor way to look at the issue. If this theory of sex ratio impact on spending habits is strong, wouldn’t we expect higher incomes where men outnumber women? Again, I don’t doubt that there is a connection, but I do question the notion that these two particular cities are the best examples.
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Columbus is a military town (army) known for an abundance of payday loan places, pawn shops and title loan joints, and that has a lot to do with the household debt, I would guess.
Race may not have that much to do with it. Both have metro areas of about 300,000 and I would guess that their overall metro areas have about the same percentage of blacks – maybe 40 or 45%. (like Atlanta) The difference is that Macon proper is much smaller and no white folks want to live inside the city limits there.
Low IQ military people are also famously known for getting lots of very ill-advised car loans, home loans and consumer loans (furniture/electronics) and local lenders are all too willing to extend credit since they know that these military folks won’t be losing their job anytime soon.
Yes, but many have incomes well above the posted medians. I doubt that Macon has the number of 100K earners that Fort Benning has in it’s ranks.
whenever a new sociological study comes out, the first thing i ask myself is “was it controlled for race?”
not surprisingly, asking this question invalidates about half the dreck gurgling out of academia.
Few in the establishment want to confront the fact that the US is divided into functionally separate ethnic enclaves, all intermingled but more or less segregated physically and culturally. There are, first of all, two nations – one black and one white; they cross over but huge sections of both function as essentially separate societies. Hispanic immigrants recently have refused to integrate into any existing social group, as well. A tiny group – Jewish Americans – also live more or less dstinct and separate lives. Add in divivions along class, background and income, and it’s clear: Not controlling for the basic divisions, among which race is a primary one in America, renders most academic studies and almost all sociology useless.
It’s possible, for example, to directly compare white people in the US to white people in Australia, the UK, Canada or NZ. Such comparisons go over very well and are meaningful, and tend to highlight different approaches to solving problems. When the black and hispanic populations are conflated in with white Americans, it’s only then that the comparisons seem less relevant.
Education is a major example. White Americans seem to score as well as white people throughout the Western world, with differenced accounted for by spending, educational systems and etc.; Asian Americans seem to do about as well (if not slightly better) than other Asians. It’s only when hispanic and black results are included in the test results that the US seems to be an education catastrophe.
And that said, even then, black Americans seem to do far better than African-origin populations in other parts of the world.
Any study that doesn’t control for race is more or less meaningless.
Macon and Columbus have nearly nothing in common. Columbus has Fort Benning, while Macon’s closest military presence is all the way up in Warner Robins. The recent increase in the number of soldiers assigned to Benning because of BRAC has also meant an influx of families moving into the metro area, since all married soldiers must live off-post because of inadequate housing on the installation. Columbus’ metro area also includes two Alabama counties, Russell (Phenix City) and Lee (Smiths Station only, since Auburn and Opelika are too far away to be tied to Columbus.) Macon has — not much of anything. They’re comparing apples and oranges.
Skewed sex ratio communities in the U.S. are rare. The main causes are:
More women than men:
- It’s a black slum where the men are in prison or dead.
- It’s a retirement community with more widows than widowers.
More men than women:
- Lots of illegal immigrant construction workers
- Military
- Gay Boystown
- Boomtown, like the oil patch in North Dakota right now
- Frontier (parts of Alaska)
- Norwegian bachelor farmer rural areas where the men are devoted to farming and the women want to move to the city
None of these add up to a large chunk of the American population.