Life is Less Fair Than You Think: Berkson’s Paradox

In video games, balance is everything. You can’t be super smart and strong; your car can’t have great handling and acceleration. These tradeoffs feel fair intuitively, and they make for more interesting game play—and that’s exactly why we like them.

But is real life like this? Not so much.

In this episode of Econ Nerds, we explore why life sometimes feels like a carefully balanced game, even though the traits we care about—intelligence, attractiveness, athleticism—are often completely uncorrelated. The culprit? A weird statistical illusion called Berkson’s Paradox.

You’ll learn why the dating market feels like it’s full of hot jerks, why college sometimes seems like a battle between try-hards and lazy geniuses, and why fairness in real life is at best a comforting illusion.

Watch to the end to learn how real-world success often comes not from balance, but from the Matthew Effect—where small early advantages and incremental improvement can compound into major power-ups over time.

Check out our blog post (https://econnerds.substack.com/p/the-...) for more details, or read some of the original papers:

Feingold, Alan. "Good-looking people are not what we think." Psychological bulletin 111.2 (1992): 304.

Kleisner, Karel, Veronika Chvátalová, and Jaroslav Flegr. "Perceived intelligence is associated with measured intelligence in men but not women." PloS one 9.3 (2014): e81237.

Mitchem, Dorian G., et al. "No relationship between intelligence and facial attractiveness in a large, genetically informative sample." Evolution and Human Behavior 36.3 (2015): 240-247.

Åberg, Maria AI, et al. "Cardiovascular fitness is associated with cognition in young adulthood." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106.49 (2009): 20906-20911.

Credé, Marcus, Michael C. Tynan, and Peter D. Harms. "Much ado about grit: A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113.3 (2017): 492.

Merton, Robert K. "The Matthew effect in science: The reward and communication systems of science are considered." Science 159.3810 (1968): 56-63.