A research team from Priapanal Wealth Management and Upland Downs University has created a financial model that predicts the ideal time for a wealthy older male to discard his initial wife and remarry with a younger female.
“This is a complex theoretical question,” said Professor Henry Gausee. “Not only do you have questions of financial returns and value growth, and complex actuarial questions around lifespan and relative functional ability, you have to account for so-called ‘soft factors,’ such as the attractiveness of a mate at different points in the life cycle, the male’s ability to engage in or enjoy sexual activity, the availability of Viagra, even the illusory excitement of love and its well-documented trajectory of rises and declines over time. To my knowledge, this is the first model to include finance and romance.”
The model showed some surprising results. Men with a net worth over $15 million may reach the point at which a change of spouse makes sense as early as age 42, depending on how many children they have and how often the initial spouse exercises. “This was earlier than any of us expected,” said Gausee. The consequences of dropping the first mate too late can be severe; the model shows the dollar value of foregone sexual enjoyment for men with assets above $100 million can be as much as $10 million per year with a first wife who rates lower than 3 out of 10 for attractiveness. But dropping a spouse too early can also have a price, as a man may not be able to find a suitable new mate with the ideal gap between their ages. “The ideal difference is 22.8 years,” explained Gausee. “With that difference, you maximize your odds that the second spouse will be able to care for you in senescence, without incurring the extreme social censure that comes with a much larger gap.”
Michael Heller is the director of research at Priapanal Wealth Management. He was a co-author of the study and also published it as a white paper. “I know it will benefit a great number of our high-net-worth clients,” he said. “People have been stabbing in the dark on this issue for millennia. They’ve done the best they can without an empirical foundation; I don’t want to be criticizing. But we hope this study will bring a new level of rigor to decisions that can greatly impact one’s well-being.”
The paper predicts that wide adoption of the proposed decision-making model could boost overall economic growth by as much as 1% – 2% annually by reducing “friction, angst, wasted deliberation and cognitive expenditure amongst the job-creating class.” The economic benefits would spread far beyond the corporate titans and scions who are Priapanal’s client base, with especially concentrated growth in the personal grooming, luxury car, and high-end jewelry industries.
Reaction to the paper has been mixed. No one denies its formal accomplishment in blending several highly variable sources of data and quantifying ephemeral emotional states, but feminist scholars have argued it perpetuates the notion that women are only valuable in as far as they meet male sexual needs.
But not all feminists see this as a problem. Amanda Tallu, the head of Empowering Women with Cash, said, “I think this work is great. We’re using their models to create our own materials. Women will be able to look at these charts and predict their likelihood of getting dumped, which gives them the time to prepare by putting assets in their own name, establishing residence in friendly states, et cetera. Let’s all be rational.”
Professor Gausee responded, “That’s just grand. People say that economists shouldn’t concern themselves with the practical outcomes of their work—that ours is a purely positive science. But, I have to say, it gives me a warm feeling inside to think how this model will improve so many lives.”
