Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution, of whom one can usually expect better, says

Sebastian Flyte, an unusual commentator, wrote:

“A man’s mate value is tied to status – if he emigrates he throws away whatever mate value he built up in his life. A girl’s is tied to youth and beauty. These are carried with her luggage.”

He has a point.  Female migrants should on average be prettier, ceteris paribus, than those who stay in the old country.

He said it here.

Sebastian Flyte, for the record, is some sort of Pick-up Artist. That doesn’t make him wrong. The content of his assertion does. But what do you expect — he also thinks “Girls are pretty boring creatures.” Because, he says, “The amount of time I’ve spent on the internet in my life has given me a depth of knowledge far greater than the average girl I meet. I simply know WAY more about how the world works. Girls spent their teenage years socialising. I was on the internet and reading books. This knowledge-divergence can be both a blessing and a curse.” Because, I say, he thinks women are creatures (mmm, heterosexuality as bestiality!) Because for all his living on the internet he hasn’t yet figured out that single, unattached women, being human beings and therefore having libidos, are rather keen on sex and therefore don’t have to be tricked or confused into it. But I digress…

I’m more surprised by Cowen’s assertion that everything else being equal female migrants should be prettier than those who don’t migrate. (Later in his post he at least leaves open the equally silly but less gender-binding possibility that men who migrate could also be more attractive.)

I think it’s beyond silly. If looks and youth were such strong determinants you’d expect (using the economics version of Mazlow’s hammer) that younger, more attractive women would be more appealing, and thus of higher “value” to establishment men in the location of origin and so ceteris paribus they should also have less reason to migrate than their older or less attractive peers.

Actually, obviously, I’m pretty sure ambition on the one hand and how stagnant or stifling the place of origin is compared to the destination on the other have way more to do with decisions to migrate than either looks, transferrable skills, or other “mate value.”

Another factor would tend to be local connections for the would-be migrant — either opportunities (parents or parents friends fast tracking employment or business prospects, for instance) or obligations (“we need you to run…” or “but who will take care of…?) And so to the extent that women are the traditional parental caregivers, and since younger women tend to have younger parents, one would expect that, again ceteris paribus, younger women (whether attractive or not) would have fewer obligations and therefore fewer binding connections than somewhat older women, even unmarried ones.

And yeah, yeah, you can ride ceteris paribus to the rescue (but “all other things being equal” could mean compared to women who’s parents are all the same age and who’s parents are able to invoke the same obligations on them) but if you ride it too far you’re left with inconclusively small sample sizes.

And for the record Cowen plays (also uncharacteristically) a xenophobia card when he says “From a public choice point of view, the women in the country receiving the immigrants should be more suspicious of liberal immigration policies than should be the men in the receiving country.” All them immigrant dames being statistically prettier and younger and (oh heck, why not play that card too?) exotic and pliant and therefore more desirable to destination-local men than the flinty local women they’d otherwise have to choose from.

(And I bring up this criticism despite Matt Yglesias’s sensible and useful Emerson Hall maxim about jumping on experts for seeming elementary mistakes, articulated here. For one thing Cowen is an expert economist, not an expert on migration. For another, he’s citing someone who, in addition to being a pickup artist, is even less of an expert on migration.