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

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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 cling mode to mom because it's not going up and down. And then after that, at the age.

of a little under 15. They start producing for the tribe. My guess is this is just when they reach sexual maturity and start caring for children of their own.

Simone Collins: He continues, this makes human reproduction analogous to a prisoner's dilemma. Both father and mother can choose to fully commit or pursue other [00:03:00] options.

In this context, marriage provides a framework for encouraging, legitimizing, and stabilizing commitment. Defection. If human reproduction is analogous to a prisoner's dilemma, what does defection look like? A natural consequence of sexual reproduction is adversarial reproductive strategies. Females must expend significant biological resources, but can be certain of maternity, which allows maternal investment to pay off as soon as a child is born.

Males don't need to spend much biologically, but can't be certain of paternity. Making parental investment inherently risky by default. This leads to two idealized strategies that maximize the benefits for each sex in humans. The idealized male strategy is to have as many wives slash exclusive sex partners as he can afford plus opportunistic extra pair couplings consensual or otherwise the idealized female strategy.

Is to secure investment from a man while retaining the option to trade up for a more attractive man at any time plus opportunistic hidden extra pair couplings [00:04:00] with attractive men,

Malcolm Collins: both of these strategies, I assume most of our audience will understand what he means by that and see that as obviously true.

This is just like, obviously the genetically favorable thing for both parties. It is a

Simone Collins: truth universally acknowledged. Both of these strategies greatly damage the interests of the opposite sex. Cuckoldry is equivalent to death for a man from a Darwinian perspective. And in evolutionary environments requiring paternal investment, abandonment is equivalent to death for a woman.

Losing decades of youth and all of the resources invested in a pairing is devastating for both.

Malcolm Collins: So all of this, I think, is just laying out what we all know is true, like the obvious prisoner's dilemma that all couples are facing. Now he goes into the different strategies that people have chosen to deal with this in a historic context.

Simone Collins: Men defect, slash, women cooperate. A defect slash [00:05:00] cooperate society in which men act to secure the collective interests of their sex without regard to those of women looks like Meiji Japan, which was monogamous, or early 20th century Arabia, which was polygamous. In these societies, women are effectively property.

Divorce is common, Meiji Japan had the highest divorce rate of any country with records in the world, and devastating to women, who lose their children, economic status, virginity, and youth.

Malcolm Collins: So if you look at this chart here, which I find really interesting, it shows that in late 19th century Japan, they divorce rates several times higher than those of Northwestern Europe or the Anglosphere.

And these are really high. The divorce rates of Japan of this period are higher than what America's was in like the 1950s. Which is absolutely wild. Most countries did not reach this until you get around, let's say, 1950s, 1960s. And what this means is they can be like, okay, what does he mean that this [00:06:00] is an ideal situation in both Saudi Arabia and Japan if Japan was a monogamous society during this period?

What he's saying is these men functionally have multiple wives. So Because in Saudi Arabia, they just literally have a harem of wives that they're breeding with simultaneously in Meiji, Japan, which you may have is you are a rich man, you marry or