Evolutionary Biology and Russian Gold Diggers

Let us imagine for a second that you are not you but instead you are Marie, a beautiful peasant girl living in the countryside of 17th century, pre-industrial France.

You have just turned twenty and you have a choice to make. 

You can either marry Pierre who is young and handsome and absolutely devoted to you, but also a peasant. 

Or you can be the 9th concubine of Louis the 14th. Louis is old and fat and mean but also a king.

What would you choose?  

Every romantic novelist would tell you that you go with your true love Pierre.

However, that is not what an evolutionary biologist would say.

They would say choose Louis.

The reason why you choose Louise has to do with one word in the description above that is key and that is – “pre-industrial.”

Why does that word matter? 

You see up until the Watts invented the steam engine and kick started the industrial revolution, Europe suffered frequently from peacetime famines (after the industrial revolution famines rarely occurred except during war or if purposefully engineered by the state like the British in Ireland or the Russians in the Ukraine). 

So to go back to our original question. 

Let’s say you throw your lot in with Pierre. You get married and you have children. But every year, you are faced with a very real probability of starving to death.

In the year 1693, there was a famine that killed 1.3mm people in France – or roughly 7% of the population - and that was just one of many.  

Choosing Pierre meant facing starvation odds every year.

Now, if you choose Louis. You are spared ever going without food. Regardless of what happens with the crops in a particular year, the King and his people always eat. Going with Louis, even if it as his 9th side piece, is guaranteed survival for you and your kids. 

An evolutionary biologists would say go with the sure thing. 

Now, let’s fast forward to the present day.

You are still Marie, but you are now an attractive girl living in an outer suburb of Paris. 

You have just turned twenty-six and you have a choice to make. 

You can either marry Pierre who is a young handsome man who works as a waiter and is also from the outer suburbs like you.

Or you can have an affair with Louis, an older married father - obese and obnoxious but the heir to a fortune. 

Now the evolutionary biologist would say that there is a right choice here as well – except this time he agrees with the romantic novelist.

Because we are deep in peaceful post-industrial prosperity, being relatively poor does not mean the same thing that it did in the past – there is no potential death by starvation outcome. 

If you marry Pierre, you are not going to go out to nice restaurants or fly private, but he is devoted to you. He will have kids with you and he’ll be devoted to them too and most importantly, they will in all likelihood face a roughly equal chance of survival as Louis’ children. 

Pierre’s devotion (which is a product of you being his only spouse) outweighs Louis resources. 

However, if things change and we head to war, then that decision making could change again (remember the industrial world has never seen peacetime famines but we have had wartime famines). 

Varying scarcity levels changes the selectivity function. 

So if you for instance grew up in the Ukraine, where resources are both scarce and unevenly divided and there is recent cultural memory of things like famine (see The Holodomors of History), you are much more likely to go with the Louis type.

If you grew up in Norway, where resources are plentiful and more evenly divided and you bypassed WWII entirely, you are more likely to go with the Pierre type. 

The fact that girls from Eastern European countries can have a gold digger reputation is not because they are neccesarily more materialistic. It is a because they come from places where the scarcity function is more present given the history and current socioeconomic construct. Relative wealth differences retain survival implications for a girl from a poor country with massive wealth disparities that are different for a girl from a wealthy developed country.

If Taylor Swift wasn’t born a rich millennial American but instead had to live out her life as a young singer-song writer during the siege of Leningrad, she would have written very different ballads. Instead of praising the cute guy at Starbucks with hazel eyes, she would have extolled the glorious socialist virtues of the fat Red Army generals.

Going for the starving artist Pierre instead of the Red Army general Louis was the difference between surviving the war or starving to death in a cold apartment because you ran out of rats to eat.

At the end of the day, there is nothing less romantic than starving to death.