aaight

I am from here, so I can't give you relevant experiences, but your question leaves a lot out. What is dating like where you came from before, and what was your success rate there, and what aspects of a relationship do you consider to be "success"? Is your goal a short term relationship or a long term one? Are you measuring your disappointment against what you are used to or what you imagined it would be like here or what you see? Specifically what I'm thinking is, when western women travel to Arab countries or to India (or many other places) where the sexual mores are more conservative, their behavior might be considered "promiscuous" by local standards. Are you judging women here on a basis that they seem to be available and they are not interested?

Or, are you dark skinned but come from places in Europe where you feel more integrated socially and you feel less integrated here? You could have moved from a more liberal place to a more conservative one. Are there other people here from your country here that you could ask how they are doing, or are you simply looking for the magic formula here because it looks to you like the people around you are dating and you want in on it too? We have many skin colors here, with many cultures represented, have you tried socializing with enough different groups here?

I'm not judging, I just wouldn't know where to begin answering your question if I had the relevant information. I'll tell you this, women here who care about "top companies" probably also care about other social status signs, and they might not consider most foreigners to have the social status they would be seeking, so you may be trying to appeal to the wrong groups in the wrong way. I'm not judging them either.

I've studied econ at the graduate level at MIT after having taken it as an undergrad as well, and I have a degree in Finance, so I didn't mean to imply that I don't know what I'm talking about. But I know a lot of other topics as well and I've always objected to terms of art in one field being easily confused with terms from other areas, and hell if I can remember what an inferior good is 20 yrs later. My point was not that you didn't know what you were talking about; I joined in because between the two of you I replied to, I didn't think your discussion was benefiting the rest of HN as much as it could because many of those people have not taken any econ at all. I was trying to Econ 100 the discussion, without losing the flavor of what is interesting about Giffen goods; and I think that if researchers are going to "prove" that Giffen goods don't exist in aggregate (<-- not Macro term of art), they need to also address the obvious short term circumstances (as I tried to describe) where it's clear that the underlying principle is actually operating, whether it has an effect on market clearing or not, because people can go one extra week without meat, just can't do it forever.

Not trying to argue, just trying to clarify what I came upon. Econ theory I think is sound but requires many simplifying assumptions to teach and learn, and then when we talk about whether Giffen good actually exist or not it's easy to lose track of simplifying assumptions like "long term" or "substitution".

cheers.

so that's what I mean, that term-of-art definition is intertwined with dependent variables of the definition of Giffen goods, so it would be no wonder if the ideas get tied together even if the concepts are not facially.

Terms of art annoy me (the legal profession and philosophy are full of them, overloaded (OOP definition) on preexisting words) because IANALinguist but I could play one on TV without rehearsing, so my point is, if you want to have a narrow morphology for a word, don't recycle a word that has broad meanings, invent a new word that is precise, like econ-inferior. Then at least when a person doesn't understand what you say, they will think to themselves "maybe I should look up the definition" as opposed to actually believing you said something different than you did.

Nobody can live on potatoes alone, you'd die. Nor can anybody live on steak alone. Neither good can be said to be precisely econ-inferior to another, only econ-inferior over some delta range of prices and/or time (and assuming demand, etc). But the whole question of Giffen goods is also valid only over some delta, so as long as they are different deltas, the definitions would not be in conflict (and vice versa all the variations of that).

IANAEconomist (but I could play one on TV)

It is simply not true that that a good must be "inferior" to be a Giffen good (unless you adopt a special meaning of inferior, which since it's not necessary to do, I won't agree to). The classic example (thought experiment, without regard to whether it actually happened) is potatoes in poverty stricken Ireland: a poor person's diet would be mostly potatoes (inexensive Econ-Utility (compared to steak): calories, fills the belly) with some meat a few meals a week (expensive Econ-Utility: protein, iron, B vities, tasty, "not potato", even a touch Vebleny)

So, arbitrary budget example, let's say $20 at the grocery gets you $15 potatoes every day and $5 of steak 1 days a week. If the price of potatoes goes up, you need to reduce something, but you need to eat every day so you can't reduce potatoes, so you reduce your steak consumption, but now you have some extra money which you spend on even more potatoes. Price of potatoes went up, consumption of potatoes went up. <-- there is already a theoretical problem there, you could reduce steak just enough to keep potatoes equal, so let's just say you can buy a steak or not buy a steak, no half steaks, OK? just trying to make the point "what is a Giffen good", and not trying to prove whether Giffen goods exist or not.

So, potatoes are not "inferior" to steaks, both are requirements for a balanced diet; I supposed a technical econ-definition of inferior could be designed to mean something along the lines of "inferior is defined to rule out your example, aaight"

In any case, while Giffen goods probably can't exist in a market for any length of time, the concept is completely understandable as a short-term reasonable thing that occurs: I go to the store with cash intending to buy an "assemble your own" burrito with guac, the price of beans went up, I don't have the cash at hand now to get the guac, but it's not a burrito at all without the beans, so I leave out the guac... but turns out by leaving out the guac, I can get a larger size burrito: consumption of beans just went up at the same time as the price. This effect happens for sure... does it happen enough to counteract the people who would leave out the beans and keep the guac? Can the "substition of beans for guac" function always be seen seen to be continuous and differentiable? <-- perhaps not, burrito shops like to have overly expensive add-ons for 2nd order price discrimination, so the price of guac might very well be "quantized" at an absurdly high level, and does that make beans not a Giffen good? ...

my point is, the way you guys are arguing this is leaving too much out, can't be answered and wikipedia at this level of analysis is too unreliable.