Slate is publishing two excerpts from “The Logic of Life“. Here’s the first one:
Ever since John von Neumann’s game theory promised to help us understand love and marriage, economists have been interested in how people choose their partners and how relationships work.
It takes two to tango, and it also takes two to get married. Marriage therefore requires you to go out and find someone you want to marry, and persuade them to marry you. It’s a matching problem, and it is not unique to marriage. Getting a job is emotionally a different proposition to finding a wife or husband, but in some ways it’s similar: you need to consider a range of jobs, work out which ones you prefer, and persuade the employer that he likes the match as much as you do. And just as in the job market, who matches up with whom, and on what terms, will depend on what the competition is offering…
Read the whole thing.
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