Thoughts on Asian Outmarriage

This is well-known in the AA community as a hot-button issue. AA sites such as Goldsea and AsianFinest have had countless threads on this topic. It’s not surprising that, being a huge fan of social trends, I’ve been doing much reading on the matter and have interviewed individuals to hear anecdotal  experiences. 4 years of this amateur research has culminated in a fundamental realization: While wandering around Prague in the rain, the idea suddenly hit me that the discrepancy between marriage/dating between AM/WF and WM/AF is just due to economics.

It sounds deceptively simple (and really is nothing new from an economics point of view), but my reasoning is as follows: There is data out there that shows that Asian women are exceptional in that they are not biased towards their own race as all other women are. Instead, they are equally accepting of Asians and whites (but not of blacks, hispanics, etc.).

Disregard the males for now. They (like in most aspects of life) are irrelevant. You may assume for simplicity that there are the same percentages of a majority population (whites) that are open to dating a minority (asians). The exact numbers may be different, but that’s irrelevant to this argument.

Because of the asymmetricity in female preference versus male preference, you get the following:

Any Asian woman wandering the streets would act as a magnet and draw the attention of the white men who are open to dating Asians. They know that their odds of success are pretty good (even with an Asian male). For Asian males, even before we consider any cultural influences that may have made them gun-shy about approaching women, the numbers simply do not favour them. One cannot distinguish between white women who are open to Asian males and those who aren’t. Therefore, it is simply not worthwhile approaching a generic white woman because of the low expected return. Assume that the utility of acquiring an interracial mate is the same for white males and Asian males. To enjoy this utility, the Asian male has to expend more effort and approach many more women. There is a corresponding effort (time, money) involved in the pursuit of women. These contribute negative utils. For an Asian male, the net util from pursuing white women is probably negative. This is where opportunity costs come into play; the rational Asian male will most likely pursue other activities that have a higher net util (pursuing Asian women, working overtime, going on vacation).

If we disregard female initiation and pursuit, we get a model in which the gender/race imbalance is due to the high net utility of an Asian woman for a white male. If we want to rectify the imbalance, the only socially realistic method is to increase the proportion of white women who are open to dating Asians. As long as this key number stays low, one cannot expect rational Asian males to approach white women.

Applying microeconomic arguments to this issue is not novel either. I tip my hat to Awkward Utopia.