If I pose the question “What is Roger’s type?,” everyone who
claims to know me will leap out of your chairs and shout the same one-word
answer.
Don’t deny it, I heard your shouting from here. No doubt
Facebook’s servers just recorded a huge spike as well. So let’s all just say
the word out loud together:
“Young.”
I’ve given up arguing with you people. Instead, I’d love to
hear from strangers who know me only from my writing. (1) What was your answer to the question “What is Roger’s type?”; (2) What did you
guess all my so-called friends would shout?; and (3) Will you be my friend,
because I need some new ones?
I’ll admit my rotten friends are not alone in their smug,
inaccurate stereotyping. Whenever the kids aren’t around to provide structure and
meaning to my life, I forget to eat. My parents regularly invite me across town
so they can inspect me for signs of scurvy. Last week when the kids were with my
ex, I enjoyed a lovely evening chilling at my parents’ house. My dad grilled steaks, while my mom grilled
me about my recent progress. I shared some psychobabble insight I’d recently
read about how codependent people have a tendency to get trapped in toxic
relationships with narcissists. I told my parents I’d want them to do an
intervention if I started dating a malignant narcissist.
University of Chicago Professor Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize in Economics this week.
Economics is the asterisked Nobel prize. First awarded seventy-three
years after the “real” prizes for Peace and Literature and Stuff, it’s is
actually called the “Swedish National Bank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory
of Alfred Nobel.” No dynamite was involved in the prize’s creation.
Thaler is an asterisked economist. He’s one of the founders
of “behavioral economics,” which examines how people make decisions in
real-world situations. This summer I read Thaler’s memoir, Misbehaving, which is a charmingly self-deprecating history of academic economics over the last forty years. Thaler starts by describing his best
quality as laziness, then belittles his intellect. Every chapter includes a shout out to at
least one of Thaler’s smart economist
friends, all with Nobels on their shelves already.
When Thaler began his career, economic giants from John Maynard Keynes’
generation still walked the earth. They offered beautifully logical Theories – the efficient
market hypothesis, supply and demand equilibrium, Lasser curves. Most Theories
had to be taken on faith without waiting for evidentiary proof, because back
then an IBM mainframe computer had less processing power than my son’s
hand-me-down iPhone 5S.
Data has exploded since the 1970s. Even ancient data has exploded – someone (a sleep-deprived grad student?
a Malaysian child? a robot?) has digitized decades’ worth of Dow Jones minutia.
Meanwhile, Thaler kept a running list of situations where he’d observed people
consistently doing something economists consider irrational. Working with
psychologists, Thaler and his colleagues designed experiments and gathered data
identifying and quantifying these patterns of “misbehaving.” It turns
out humans lack respect for economists’ beautiful Theories. Instead, real
people are short sighted, inaccurately calculate risk, resist needed change,
and lack self control.
In addition to being a hot gay nerd
– the subspecies Jack on Will & Grace once referred to as "the rarest of the gays" – Nate
Silver is an effective promotor of both rationalism and empiricism.
Silver moves from politics to sports and back, but he’s most known for his work
analyzing polling data. Formerly hosted by The
New York Times, Silver’s 538 website currently is part of ESPN.
Like Thaler, Silver has made a career out of identifying quirky
weaknesses in accepted prediction models. His background is in statistics and
big data, but he’s also skilled at translating numbers into words. In contrast,
I’m an English major – I gush about the abstract beauty of mathematics, but I wouldn’t
want to touch any actual numbers myself. Which is another reason we’d make such
a good power couple, because I’d get to be the right brain for once.
Two things about that list should jump out at you.
First, which one of these traits is different from the other
five? Answer: Duh. Anyone can learn to be smart, kind, and
responsible. Add a little substance abuse, and even an introvert can also be
funny and talkative. In contrast, staying lean over the long haul generally takes
good genes and/or hard work. [Ed. note:
or you could limit yourself to other messed-up guys with mild eating
disorders.]
All you “Young!” shouters were fooled by multiple
logical fallacies, including (1) hasty generalization and (2) mistaking
correlation for causation. Yes, over the years you may have seen me at the theatre with the
odd floppy-haired bohemian 20something – but have you ever seen
me holding a Playbill next to a pudgy guy? Even one with great hair?
Statistically, younger guys are most likely to be lean. That’s even true with the gays, although the correlation is more obvious with straight
guys as they age. (I hate to perpetuate cruel stereotypes, but I’ve been to
college and law school reunions.)
Despite the distracting youthful noise, the lean underlying signal should have been obvious. You’ve heard me
refer to my boyfriend in Chicago as “Skinny Pharmacist.” Nowadays
he has a dad bod, which is appropriate because now he’s a dad. But so do I/so am I. (Apparently we’re all
the rage these days.) Meanwhile, I’ve
never dated “Beefy Architect,” "Bear-ish Barista," or "Rotund Philosophy Professor."
More demographic data: A slim majority of my serious relationships, including Skinny Pharmacist
as well as my kids’ other dad, involved guys who are ten years younger than me. The next largest
group are guys around my age. Only then
do you reach the smaller, more embarrassing cohort of flakey millennials. Nevertheless, they’ve
managed to convince the rest of you it’s all about them. Millennials are even
more obnoxiously self-absorbed than my true nemesis, Baby Boomers. (Notice which
demographic group has yet to make the cut).
In addition to my Boomer boycott, I’ve gotten more picky about many other things over the years,
including requiring potential beaux to score higher on both “kind” and “responsible.” Still, there’s
been some liberalization with the trait we currently refer to as “lean.” Recently, after watching a lanky young man order the breakfast of supermodels – a small order of french fries and a goblet of red wine – I muttered to the Duchess of Windsor that it may be possible to be too thin after all. Over the decades, the threshold has been set in turn at “skinny," "thin," "slim," and now "lean." At this rate, we might might liberalize this prerequisite all the way to “average” before I give up and get a dog.
The second obvious pattern you should have recognized
from the list: my type can be characterized as someone sorta like me, only nicer and
thinner. If only Nate Silver would lose a little of that business-travel pudge.
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