population catastrophe
the mating dance, politics, and technology that lies beneath it
the red-blue politics that angers americans, who should actually be happier than a medieval king, is the unfortunate outcome of linguistics: language is always tainted. what we read, including this one and the bible, is ever so slightly tainted by what the author thinks is right. humans, the intransigent egomaniacs, then revolt in ire or appeal. the information age made every individual, not just the academic elites, revolutionaries for causes that they don’t fully understand.
blue america argues “if you can be anything be nice”, posited by an increasingly nurturing, feminine crowd. red america argues “if you can be anything be just”, posited by an increasingly tribal, hierarchical, masculine crowd. both genders live in a post-scarcity society competing for professional success. we don’t hunt. we don’t cultivate. we have contrived email jobs that solve our first-world comfort-crisis.
and no one has children anymore!
population decline - the crisis of all crises
every developed country on earth now has fewer young people that work, consume, or create, all of which would generate taxes. in contrast, there are more older people that take pensions and healthcare that the taxes pay for. these welfare systems were created in a burgeoning post-war economy but now we don’t have children to pay taxes.
we’re yet to figure out a good policy initiative, if there’s one. direct economic incentives work but hasn’t reversed the decline (eg. hungary1). indirect economic incentives like free childcare doesn’t seem to show any progress either (eg. quebec2, germany). mass immigration isn’t sustainable - it’s mired in fraud and dilutes the very culture that makes immigration attractive in the first place (eg. canada, uk3). japan, a developed country with a highly homogenous population, wouldn’t exist in 2100s4.
american fertility rate, although shrinking, is better than that of italy, japan, or canada currently, but what keeps average american from mating is not just related to economic incentives or hedonism.
the way we form relationships have changed.
hypergamy - the cruel game of evolution
for 3 million years, we hunted, lived under constant tribal warfare and bloodshed, our women got stolen or raped, children barely lived past childhood in the absence of vaccines, and even after inventing agriculture 14,000 years ago we never had enough food. average lifespan up until early 1900s was 40. the industrial revolution upended humanity and made us demigods!
we now have food stocked up in the fridge or delivered to our door. we choose our situationship from an air-conditioned bathroom. this must be what god feels like! so why would more opportunities to find a partner make it more difficult?
hypergamy is why.
women choose the most competent, dominant man they can find using cultural proxies (athleticism, wealth, power, humor etc.). men choose the most sexually healthy, feminine woman using facial beauty, hair, waist-to-hip ratio (which is academic euphemism for body fat), hygiene etc. the crux of human mating comes down to two fundamental principles of courtship:
women are far more hypergamous than men due to evolutionary gender roles and physiological differences. this is what drives mating.
humans have the most challenging child rearing across all of animal kingdom and women have the highest investment in it. consequently, women act as gatekeepers of sex against men that are looking to spread their seed.
that’s the premise, but both genders want the same thing - xerox their genes for continuity.
the internet put hypergamy on steroids
ignore traditions like arranged marriages. what happens when people freely choose romantic partners from an online, near-infinite pool of profiles? turns out, people set (very) high expectations on their hypergamous selection process.
data from match group that owns most dating apps in the market (bumble being a popular exception) indicates that between 65 - 75% of app users are men. that sounds like 35 - 25% of users that are women have a lot of options to choose from. but 85 - 95% of men on apps are simply ignored5. so women do not get what they want6 because those 5 - 15% of men have all the attention they can handle.
hypergamy isn’t new. only 40% of men ever lived have reproduced (with 80% of women ever lived). desirable men have always had concubines and access to younger women throughout history, and today. this selection bias likely evolved due to females selecting for the best genes. but as we progress into egalitarian societies that no longer have to hunt or protect, hypergamy creates an army of romantically indignant men.
this is the battle of sexes7.
traditions help with social order
in the past religion mitigated this mating disparity despite all the atrocities they have come to unleash. christianity established monogamous relationships bound to a contract. vedic culture had a dating practice called gandharva vivah but hinduism which came after it practiced a more egalitarian version that we now call arranged marriage. even islam known for harems reduced the number of concubines a man was allowed to have.
another deterrent to polygyny in the past was lack of birth control. women spent a lot of time birthing children, so sex was accompanied with commitment. one theory in anthropology suggests that PMS evolved as a mechanism to deter infertile men. if the man was fertile there was no time to be menstruating or PMSing.
anecdotally, a young girl at the peak of her fertility (ages 16 to 22) no longer has the fortuitous yet inevitable experience of holding a random family member’s newborn baby. if you’re old enough, you’ve probably witnessed it at a family event - the girl swoons upon grabbing the tender bundle of life as her maternal instincts kick in. it’s as if tradition’s sleight of hand furtively plants the seed of motherhood.
we’re ditching tradition and bringing ai
we live in a post-scarcity secular society influenced by third-wave feminism. traditions are whatever catches our eye while doomscrolling. we not only have birth control, but also vibrators for mathematical precision of climaxing. so we fuck when we want to, splurge on insta-worthy eurotrips, and anthropomorphize dogs instead of coddling babies.
as a technologist, i’m not sold on the silicon valley utopianism that ai will solve inequality and human suffering. sexual selection via hypergamy will ensure that women will continue to select for the winners or the competent losers. men will continue to engineer status games to play in the selection process. inequality is the foundation of how we choose to reproduce, not something that accidentally or diabolically happens.
we need a plan that doesn’t depend on natural selection to reverse population crisis. a serious policy intervention. something like darpa, but for baby making. please, it can’t be elon musk going around america.
hungarian government spends 5% of its gdp on policies that increase birth rates (yes, 5%!!) which result in direct economic incentives. eg. mothers who birth a certain number of children pays no income tax for life. birth rates does show an increase as a result but it’s not replacement-level increase - ie, hungarian population is still declining.
quebec is an interesting case study in population decline. one of the most successful french colonies (albeit being propped up today by alberta’s equalization payments), it can attribute its success to the 800 french women, known as filles du roi, sent from the french kingdom in 1600s for the sole purpose of repopulating new france, aka quebec - and it worked!
canada’s carney administration published an immigration audit report in 2026. out of the 400,000 approved immigrants in the country that they audited, 150,000 were fraudulent in the original application for entry or in the subsequent application for permanent residency. more than 7% of legal immigrants with expired permits are unaccounted for. the audit numbers just came out, but the fraud was evident to the previous trudeau administration that they had almost entirely cut back on immigration even before carney’s arrival.
uk’s female undercover cops were recently in the news for pretending to run in parks due to increased sexual assault on female runners from new comers who haven’t seen women without a hijab outfit. cultural assimilation is hard, and almost impossible!
japan has consolidated or closed down about 9000 public schools in the last 20 years due to declining birth rates. unlike other developed countries in the west immigration is not part of japan’s success story. it’s also not part of their birthrate mitigation story, at least not just yet.
the gini coefficient of attention inequality for men on hinge is a whopping 0.73. gini coefficient is a statistical measure ranging from 0 to 1 used to determine income inequality. in the case of dating apps it explains how a very few men get all the attention. if likes, texts, and matches were currency, intrepid men venturing into hinge fare worse off than income inequality in south africa which has very high poverty, a shrunken middle class, and wealth disproportionately held by a few.
bear in mind the briffault’s law: the female, not the male, determines all the conditions of the animal family. if the female derives no benefit from association with the male, no such association takes place.
a study published in 2024 by scandinavian journal of psychology concludes that highly attractive men and highly unattractive men show the most hostility towards women. men that receive overwhelming attention have no incentive to calibrate to women’s preferences. men that are entirely ignored have every incentive to act against women’s preferences. what about the majority that’s neither too attractive nor too unattractive? well..
