Book Review - "Female Behavioral Economics: How Female Swarm Intelligence Sorts and Filters Men"

From none other than J Steven Svoboda. Download the full review here. Excerpt:

'German lawyer and economist Florian Willet has published a remarkable book. Female Behavioral Economics: How Female Swarm Intelligence Sorts and Filters Men turns out to be outstanding in mostly desirable ways though a bit of “personality” comes through in the end. Warning: this review contains a lot of quotes from the book but I can’t help myself as it’s so well written and engaging.

I had the great pleasure of meeting the author at a conference last year. He is relatively young, (for what it’s worth) completed at least one New York City Marathon in the upper 1% of participants, and is brilliant. Willet explains many aspects of women’s behavior in a way that mostly leans towards insightful objectivity. Why, for example, do women appear to get so incensed “when men behave completely according to their nature?” They have learned through evolution that reliance on each other’s judgments of men (the “swarm intelligence” of the title) leverages the value of their own evaluations and provides a form of insurance against idiosyncratic misjudgments, be they false positives or false negatives.

Willet nails the existential differences between (straight) men and (straight) women. “Only men who stand out in the most entertaining and exceptional way will gain the most privileged access to women. Women, meanwhile, always have sexual access to men whether these women are kindergarten teachers or executives. To avoid being overlooked, men have to paint a picture of themselves as different from other men. Women are not overlooked because they can catch the eye at any time by simply appearing in a low-cut blouse.” Or more succinctly, “There are no ‘masculine wiles’.” And “there is no male version of the Cinderella tale.”

If you are a woman of average attractiveness, you have no problem finding a man, but a man in the middle may have to engage in huge risk-taking to have a chance to find a woman. “Men have to embrace risks that women are spared. This is their duty to themselves as men.” Another way of formulating the same point comes later when the author writes, “In their partner selection, women have molded men into all-or-nothing players.” “The many male corpses on the field of history were the price which had to be paid to determine the winners. And winners have always been necessary so that women could identify the most attractive sexual partners.”'