That statement was based on the various accounts of expat life in Asia that I'd read online, such as:
But as I often reminded myself, I hadn’t come to Asia for a boyfriend. I’d come because I wanted to master Japanese and explore a culture drastically different from my own. But I just hadn’t expected that moving my life to Japan would mean leaving my love life at home. As much as I’d enjoyed my life in Tokyo, it just didn’t seem like a fair trade. Not that the female dating situation in Japan wasn’t without the occasional success story. I knew of a few women who’d come to Japan and left with husbands or fiancées in tow. But they were the minority. Most western women came to Japan single and stayed that way.
http://www.vagabondish.com/female-foreign-japan/
When I’m in China, I tend to turn a lot of heads, especially in the countryside — and that’s not just because I’m a foreigner. It’s because I’m often seen holding hands with my Chinese husband. It’s true — the sight of a foreign woman and Chinese boyfriend or Chinese husband is much rarer than its counterpart, the foreign man and Chinese woman.
Between the tables of men sits a gweilo (Caucasian) woman, She is alone, reading the local expat English-medium magazine. She is wearing glasses and a shapely gray dress. She’s the kind of girl I would have set up with my brother when he was single. None of the men around her have glanced her way or made eye contact.
http://blog.expatsisterhood.com/2011/11/09/single-women-in-hong-kong-stream-of-consciousness/
Expat women face an unfortunate predicament in China and, from what I hear, throughout Asia. Their problem is that the expatriate men who come to China come for the local Chinese girls – and the local Chinese guys are too intimidated to go for expat women, or are too focused on finding a local wife, and in any event really aren’t all that attractive in their own right. What that means, of course, is that there are a lot of lonely expat girls in China.[...] It's something you can tell right away. When I first moved to Beijing, I saw three Russian women on the subway, one of them strikingly beautiful, and the other two not half bad. The instant I started talking to them, you could see their faces melt, and they just about started staring at me like a fat kid looks at a hamburger. I'm starting to think of this as the "expat girl stare" and I get it everywhere I go that there are expat girls. Even the most drop dead beautiful women here blow open to the lamest openers you can imagine, because they're so thrilled to meet a man who's actually interested and is the kind of guy they could get together with. Women of a caliber of looks I used to have to sometimes take a little while to crack open in California, or who might at times be downright cold to me on my approach, open easily here.
http://www.girlschase.com/content/dating-china#ixzz2AcNEouhM
"The majority of men come here because they have issues back home ... or they just can't get a woman back home for a number of reasons," she said. "They come here because they become a big fish in a little pond; they become very important and sought after."[..] For these reasons, these women see the pool of single, dateable foreign men more as a small puddle. And they don't consider dating locals a viable option.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2006-11/11/content_730390.htm
Hm. I was hoping for additional statistics for my hafu essay, but I guess some anecdotes are good too.
Diego Caleiro writes:
I don't think a sequence is the quite the right approach to this. The economy is huge, complicated, and heterogeneous, and it's changing constantly. (Think of how complicated people are, then imagine how complicated their economy is.) It's hard for a single person to have a thorough understanding of everything, and even if someone did, their understanding would start becoming obsolete immediately.
And making money intelligently is very closely related to knowing what's going on in the economy. If you're training for a job, you want to develop skills that are in high demand. If you're starting a business, you want to sell stuff for a profit. You can only go so far identifying these opportunities by thinking things through from first principles.
I don't think most useful knowledge Less Wrong can share about what's going on in the economy is going to approach the certainty of carefully derived math or settled science. Instead, it'll be more like gossip. Since no one understands the entire economy, we won't get much firsthand knowledge. Lots of information will consist of hearsay and speculation that's subject to change at any time. (Incidentally, gathering such info and trying lots of stuff out may be a good preparatory activity for starting a business.)
Anyway, here's some gossip from me; feel free to post yours in the comments.
Employment
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics maintains an Occupational Outlook Handbook with information on salary, education requirements, and job growth for a wide variety of jobs. Here are a few random interesting ones:
Payscale.com looks pretty nice for salary info: college education return on investment data, top paying majors. See also: 5 ways to be mislead by salary rankings, GlassDoor.com
UC Berkeley alumni surveys: What can I do with a major in...
This guy claims you can make $45-60 an hour playing poker after a year's practice and $5000 lost. Some blackjack card counting guru I emailed years ago claimed you could learn to count cards in 100 hours and make 6 figures for years if you were diligent (cover play, travelling for new opportunities, etc.) I'm not sure how workable these ideas are if you don't already have a large bankroll. (See Kelly criterion.)
If you're interested in getting paid to practice rejection therapy and you're in the SF Bay Area, PM me and I can put you in touch with someone in California's ballot signature collection industry. The job consists of standing somewhere where lots of people walk by and asking them to sign your petitions. You get paid per signature, and if you find a good spot (and keep it secret from other signature gatherers), it's possible to make a lot of money. A friend averaged $300 a day; I wasn't sufficiently dedicated/psychologically resilient to get anything like those results. The business is seasonal; if I recall correctly, February is an especially good month.
It looks as though high-end, college-educated call girls can make $300/hour.
Tutoring websites: UniversityTutor, TutorSpree, Care.com, Craigslist, Wyzant. One thing to keep in mind with tutoring: Since you generally work so few hours per gig, transportation-time overhead per hour worked is higher.
80,000 hours offers one-on-one career advising, if you're in to effective altruism.
Salary Negotiation
"In a study conducted at Carnegie Mellon University's business school, Professor Linda Babcock discovered that [those MBA students who negotiated their starting salary instead of just accepting their initial offer] received an average of $4,053 more than those who did not." (Bargaining for Advantage, p. 16.) Women seem much more reluctant to ask for more money, which may go a ways towards explaining gender pay gaps. The book recommends thorough preparation prior to any negotiation.
Business Gossip
Why rely on just one guru when you can draw inferences from the experiences of many? But beware sampling effects: you'll likely hear less from people who didn't end up accomplishing anything worth writing about.
As business gurus go, Paul Graham is highly rational, has an unmatchable resume, and all his stuff is free.
Previously on Less Wrong