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The Government Destroyed Marriage: The Game Theory of Gender Dynamics
In this episode, Malcolm Collins delves into the game theory of gender dynamics and explores how different societies have handled gender roles, using historical context and data-driven analysis. He discusses the primary problem marriage solves—the prolonged dependency of human offspring—and compares human and chimpanzee productivity graphs. Malcolm reviews a piece by Arctotherium titled 'Human Reproduction as a Prisoner's Dilemma: The Decline of Marriage in the West,' offering insights into adversarial reproductive strategies and varying historical gender cooperation models. He highlights the consequences of modern shifts in societal norms, including unilateral divorce and welfare state implications on marriage and gender dynamics. The episode concludes with a conversation on the reasons behind declining marriage rates and the broader societal impacts. Tags: #GenderDynamics #GameTheory #MarriageDecline #SocialNorms #HistoricalContext #ReproductiveStrategies #WelfareState #DivorceRates
[00:00:00]
Malcolm Collins: This is Malcolm Collins. Today we are going to be exploring the game theory of gender dynamics. How different societies have dealt with the game theory of gender dynamics. Multiple local optimums. So we're not just going to argue that pure Monogamy is the only local optimum and we're going to be using lots and lots of data to do this.
And we're going to be exploring this through a piece that I thought was very well done by Aporia, one of the best magazines out there. They've gotten in trouble a lot with Hope Not Hate, which is how you know they're good. This piece is written by Arctotherium. And it's titled, Human Reproduction as a Prisoner's Dilemma, The Decline of Marriage in the West.
Simone Collins: Yeah, the title doesn't suggest that things are moving in a great direction for
Malcolm Collins: marriage. Well, no, they're not, but I think solving the marriage problem is a big segment of the way to solving the population problem.
Simone Collins: And
Malcolm Collins: I think [00:01:00] he lays this out with data in a way that is clearer than I had thought.
other people lay it out and brings up a few of the less obvious problems. If you're only looking at this from a modern context of what's wrong with the dating markets, instead of looking at a historic context. So let's dive into it. Simone get started here with this graph. I'll put on screen.
Simone Collins: The core problem marriage exists to solve is that it takes almost 20 years and an enormous amount of work and resources to raise children. And he shows this graph.
Malcolm Collins: Which it compares humans and chimpanzees in terms of the net productivity of humans and the net productivity of chimps over their lifetime.
Simone Collins: . The caption reads, In hunter gatherer societies, it takes almost 20 years for the average person to become a net producer of food. Until then, they are dependent on others, mostly their parents, who have a direct genetic stake in their survival. The numbers are similar for agrarian societies.
Malcolm Collins: Is, is this Up and [00:02:00] down line here is the amount of food that an individual is producing over their lifetime, or their net productivity.
So you see in humans, if you're looking at hunter gatherers, they don't end up net producers of food until they're around the age of 19. And then they shoot way up and they're like huge producers of food compared to chimps. Whereas chimps actually become food neutral at around the age of five and they go up almost immediately.
It appears that this period where chimps are lower because it immediately snaps to like, I'm a net producer of food at the age of five. But I don't contribute to the tribe yet is the period of which they are just like cl
Published on 10 months, 1 week ago