On May 29, 1832, the French mathematician Évariste Galois, a young genius and political rebel who spent time in jail for allegedly threatening the king’s life, stayed up all night furiously scribbling his ideas onto paper. These scribblings constitute much of what work of Galois’ survived for posterity. The next day, he was killed in a duel. While the origins of the duel remain obscure to history, the most popular story has it that Galois was involved in an affair and that the woman’s fiancée was the one to strike him dead. At the time of his death, Galois was just 20 years old — yet his work laid the foundation for a major branch of abstract algebra.
The story may have grown a bit fanciful in its retelling down through the years, yet its essence — the combination of youth and lust and genius — gets at something essential about what drives humans to heights of creativity and productivity. Valentine’s Day, coming up Sunday, may be a multibillion-dollar industry. But the larger driver of economic progress is the sex drive itself.
What drives us to create and produce? What drives us to consume? Why are love and money so intimately intertwined?
Now, creative genius is its own animal, and we’ll return to it momentarily. But first, let’s look at how sex drives people’s spending. There are obvious ways sex gets people to spend more money (flowers, presents, dates… not to mention the direct, usually illegal, purchase of sex), but a tremendous amount of economic activity also goes into what’s called “signaling” — buying things to communicate one’s status, and thus one’s desirability as a mate.
Economists such as Ori Heffetz and Robert Frank at Cornell have worked to create a measure of “visibility” to determine how much of people’s consumption is intended to signal status to others. The answer is: quite a bit. The visibility of products like cars, clothing, furniture, jewelry and dinners out can explain at least 12% of the variability in how people spend an extra dollar as their incomes rise — that number jumps to 20% for the upper half of earners.
Even more revealing, however, is how men and women respond in an economic experiment when “romantically primed” — that is, when they are shown pictures of attractive people of the opposite sex and then asked to make various consumption decisions. Romantically primed men, in a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2007, proved much more willing to splurge on things like flashy watches and expensive cars (while they showed no difference in their spending on boring, non-flashy things like tissues and headache medicine). Women, meanwhile, didn’t adjust their consumption at all when romantically primed. Instead, romantically primed women indicated that they were more willing to spend time volunteering (such as at a children’s hospital or a homeless shelter).
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The fire of progress appears to be fueled by the kindling of human desire. http://bit.ly/8YZLxE
*runs after DDB, spins her around and gives her a hug* No worries, I still love you (:
Sorry *runs away crying*
*gasps* DDB!! That's not good enough! *shakes head*
I caught myself..Decode..Crushcrushcrush..that's it:)
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