Malcolm and Simone discuss a recent piece written by Arctotherium on the decline of monogamy in Western societies, and how it can be explained by the Game Theory of Gender Dynamics, a game theory that attempts to explain why monogamy is not the only local optimum.
00:00:00.220Hello, 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.
00:00:25.180And we're going to be exploring this through a piece that I said 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.
00:00:43.960Yeah, the title doesn't suggest that things are moving in a great direction for marriage.
00:00:49.360Well, no, they're not, but I think solving the marriage problem is a big segment of the way to solving the population problem, and I think he lays this out with data in a way that is clearer than I have seen other people lay it out,
00:01:05.780and 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.
00:01:17.180So let's dive into it. Simone, get started here with this graph I'll put on screen.
00:01:21.720The 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.
00:01:31.120Which compares humans and chimpanzees in terms of the net productivity of humans and the net productivity of chimps over their lifetime.
00:03:33.200By default, this leads to two idealized strategies that maximize the benefits for each sex.
00:03:38.000In humans, the idealized male strategy is to have as many wives slash exclusive sex partners as he can afford,
00:03:44.840plus opportunistic extra pair couplings, consensual or otherwise.
00:03:49.100The 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,
00:03:57.600plus opportunistic hidden extra pair couplings with attractive men.
00:04:57.700A defect slash 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.
00:05:12.420In these societies, women are effectively property.
00:05:16.840Meiji Japan had the highest divorce rate of any country with records in the world.
00:05:20.840And devastating to women who lose their children, economic status, virginity, and youth.
00:05:26.740So if you look at this chart here, which I find really interesting, it shows that in late 19th century Japan, they had divorce rates several times higher than those of Northwestern Europe or the Anglosphere.
00:05:39.440The divorce rates of Japan of this period are higher than what America's was in like the 1950s, which is absolutely wild.
00:05:50.300Most countries did not reach this until you get around, let's say, 1950s, 1960s.
00:05:56.380And what this means is they can be like, okay, what does he mean that this is an ideal situation in both Saudi Arabia and Japan if Japan was a monogamous society during this period?
00:06:06.100What he's saying is these men functionally have multiple wives.
00:06:10.120So because in Saudi Arabia, they just literally have a harem of wives that they're breeding with simultaneously.
00:06:16.080In Meiji Japan, what you may have is you are a rich man.
00:06:19.940You marry or just upper society man, given how frequent divorces were here.
00:06:24.860You marry, you know, one girl when you're, you know, 18 and you stay married to her until she's 30 or 35 and not producing kids as easily.
00:06:48.260However, a simple comparison of divorce rates between different marriage regimes is misleading.
00:06:53.760Since divorce is at the whim of the husband in defect slash cooperate societies, men are free to invest in their family and children, which is not true in societies where men can lose their families against their will.
00:07:05.360Furthermore, paternal certainty in defect slash cooperate societies is guaranteed, which means such societies can be highly functional, especially when they have monogamy, to reduce male intrasexual competition.
00:07:18.900Meiji Japan was phenomenally successful economically, demographically, and territorially until destroyed by an overwhelming outside force.
00:07:26.440So this is really interesting what he's pointing out here.
00:07:29.520So when you have a prisoner's dilemma, there are two strategies, right, which is to say sort of three potential outcomes.
00:07:44.020Or one side defects, whichever one it is.
00:07:46.380Here what he's showing is a side in which societally everyone basically agrees that males are defecting.
00:07:53.120That is what is happening in polygynous cultures, where they are hurting the women's outcome in, like, say, Saudi Arabia, where they take on tons of different wives, or in Meiji Japan, where they dispose of a wife the moment she's no longer a reproductive age.
00:08:07.740But when men socially make this choice, which is deleterious for women, those societies stay competitive on a geopolitical scene, which is really fascinating.
00:08:22.100Well, men might be the disposable gender even within these societies, because more men in Saudi Arabia and in Meiji and Japan are actually disposable.
00:08:30.760Like, the lower category of men that's not breeding at all is larger in the societies where male defection – these are not better societies for men.
00:08:38.860These are better societies for the very best men.
00:08:41.320Yeah, which is a very, very small number.
00:08:43.040It's, like, maybe 20% of men or less are getting all the benefit.
00:08:47.520So, basically, most men are worse off, and most women are worse off, if we're being clear.
00:08:51.940Most men are worse off, and most women are worse off, but they appear to function.
00:08:57.520That is not true of the men defect, women defect condition, or the women defect condition.
00:09:03.560This is something that always gets me when men laud men who go into these men defect women cooperate relationships, like, say, Andrew Tate, where they'll have, like, five or six different women that are supposedly producing their children.
00:09:17.440In that these scenarios actively hurt average and below average men, the very men who are often looking up to these individuals, who are betraying them as much as they are betraying the women that they are in a relationship with.
00:09:35.640To laud this behavior is to cuck yourself, because ultimately this behavior, when normalized, cucks a large percentage of males in a society.
00:09:45.480Let's go into men defect, women defect.
00:10:48.620During your entire reproductive life cycle, you are for around 75% of people sleeping with other partners.
00:10:55.000Well, and you're not incentivized to invest in the future, to think long term.
00:10:59.720As Arctotherium writes, without paternal certainty, men have no investment in the future and spend their time fighting, dancing, or resting rather than working.
00:11:08.480Economically, these societies are desperately poor and largely incapable of collective action.
00:11:13.280In war, they shatter like glass when faced with an enemy that expect chastity and fidelity from women.
00:11:18.840He shows a graph of ethnicities and historic plow use, noting that defect-defect societies tend to be ones without a history of plow use pre-1500.
00:11:30.040Plow agriculture requires male labor to sustain a family, which meant that groups that didn't enforce paternity certainly could not survive.
00:11:38.780Defect-defect societies are reliably the poorest, most technologically backwards, and most violent.
00:12:14.240And so, what you saw in these communist countries is that people's houses would fall apart.
00:12:19.900They would even like partially strip them of valuable materials themselves.
00:12:23.640They became like dust piles really quickly.
00:12:26.740Where, in countries where they gave people houses to own and then potentially sell in the future, what people did to those houses was work to improve them because that improved their value.
00:12:37.440If you own property in the U.S., like even if you inherit it, even if you get it for free, you have a value in one maintaining and to improving that property.
00:12:44.720This is what we're seeing at the level of a family.
00:12:49.880If your family is like a net cost to you, like I know I'm going to be with my wife in 20 years or 30 years, I have a reason to work to both improve my relationship with her,
00:13:02.480if we're having some level of discord, and to improve her as a human being, as a mother, as an employable asset in our society, etc.
00:13:11.960And you have a motivation to do that for me as well.
00:13:16.980In these other societies, there is no motivation.
00:13:19.820I really want to double click on this point.
00:13:21.800When there's no reason to invest in the core thing that a human owns, their family, then it makes sense to spend your life optimizing for in-the-moment recreation.
00:13:34.480And what are the forms of recreation that you can access with no accumulated resources?
00:13:41.960And that's why you see that so much in these societies.
00:13:45.680And it's something we're beginning to see more within our own society as people become more sexually promiscuous and less stable in their relationships.
00:13:57.700However, in our society, because the resources needed to access different forms of recreation are lower, this can appear like playing lots of video games.
00:14:09.120I'd also note that this tendency to invest in a family or, you know, a woman that you own or kids that you own is likely why there's a big boost to earnings, both when a man is married and again when they have children.
00:14:26.860Because men in those scenarios just have less motivation to rest and more motivation to invest.
00:14:32.160Even in the cooperate effect where men would leave women, those wives probably had very little incentive to invest in their husbands and help to build up their careers, probably knowing their husbands would drop them.
00:15:07.980Just technologically and economically if they went to war.
00:15:11.760But if that other society is captured by the woke mind virus or something like that, it's irrelevant because they are just not going to, like, the bureaucracies are going to suffocate them.
00:15:23.220So this is really interesting of how bad you get as a society when you hit a boast defect condition.
00:16:08.180Polygamy is a natural attractor state for humans since it satisfies the desires of powerful men to have multiple wives and the desires of women to have elite husbands.
00:16:17.080Monogamy requires both elite men and many women to sacrifice their desires.
00:16:23.040In exchange, it provides strong checks on negative sum intrasexual competition.
00:16:28.160Powerful married men are not constantly on the lookout for another wife and can devote their efforts to other pursuits, while less powerful men who would be shut out of marriage in a polygamous society have fewer evolutionary incentives to stab their compatriots in the back.
00:16:42.300The result is a much more cohesive and powerful society, but it's not just male coordination that benefits from monogamy.
00:16:49.060As Joseph Heinrich in 2020 notes, quote, because of how monogamous marriage influences social dynamics and cultural evolution, inhibiting female choice by prohibiting women from freely choosing to marry men who are already married results in both women and children doing better in the long run.
00:17:07.600This occurs because of how the social dynamics unleashed by polygyny influence household formation, men's psychology, and husbands' willingness to invest in their wives and children, end quote.
00:17:20.240Rather than invest in additional wives, men in monogamous societies invest in their original wife and children, with the result that almost everyone is better off.
00:17:28.400So this is what I was saying earlier, and it's just a really important point.
00:17:31.740When you, quote, unquote, own your wife, you know, women are like, own your wife, there is value to owning your wife.
00:17:41.400Or your wife owning you, when it's a mutual state of ownership, which is what true monogamy is.
00:17:48.400Oh, I'm sorry, this is so, there was this song that was sent to us by one of our fans, and it is like the worst, it's just a woman complaining, and they got like big fans, everyone in the crowd.
00:17:57.560All day, every day, therapist, mother-made, nymph, then a virgin, curse, then a servant, just an appendage, lift to attendance.
00:18:05.960By 24-7, baby machine, you make me do too much labor.
00:18:12.160It's like, you cannot have a happy relationship if you don't want to do labor for your husband, because clearly you're describing a scenario where the husband is doing labor for you, like going out, working, everything like that.
00:18:23.900But you are completely unappreciative of this, when we are both appreciative if whatever relationship you decided works for you.
00:18:32.360And that's the thing that I think people miss when they try to go like trad was relationships and everything like that, is they focus on the wrong parts of trad.
00:18:39.900They focus on husband does all the work in the factory, or just whatever, to bring home the money, and the wife stays at home, raises the kids.
00:18:48.320You don't really need to do things that way.
00:18:50.220There are other ways that things can be done.
00:18:52.220Lots of other historic ways that things have been done, as we mentioned, sword and shield relationships, like the Vikings, where the wife manages the farm and does the stable source of income, and the husband does it.
00:19:01.000I think it's, again, it's more of a fantasy, this idea that the wife isn't doing work aside from just cooking meals and raising the children.
00:19:12.660Like managing a household is so much more than that, and also assisting a husband in his career is a big part of what I think many, like people who are seen as housewives are doing.
00:19:22.280Well, and that's what they said, you know, we did an episode on what people used to tell people to look for in Hawaii.
00:19:27.580So if you go to like the early Puritan period or something like that, they're always like, make sure your house can manage the household well and manage the servants well.
00:19:33.820And people hear that, and they think that means like cook and clean.
00:19:37.100It's like, no, like if you look at what's, you know, Sam Adams' wife is doing.
00:19:49.140It means you are running the asset that is producing income for the family.
00:19:54.620That is what it means when they say be able to run the household well.
00:19:58.220That means while the husband is out in Washington doing his politics stuff, the wife is running the farm, bringing in the income, selling the goods.
00:20:05.720This is not a woman who isn't productive.
00:20:08.740The point I'm making here is when you think about traditionalism, monogamy, or meaningful phonogamy, and we'll talk about what that means.
00:20:19.140That is the actual part of traditionalism that works here, which means the husband and the wife persistently own each other.
00:20:30.920And I don't even think that this needs to be like not that sexual or whatever.
00:20:34.300There are some couples I know where the husband and wife are totally committed to others, the other, and they have outside sexual relations sometimes.
00:20:43.180And people can be like, how is that not breaking this?
00:20:46.420And it's like it literally doesn't break any of this because what this is about is probability that the kids are the husbands or the wives.
00:20:53.780And is one partner going to leave the other partner?
00:20:57.920And in these scenarios I'm thinking of, that is not a risk at all.
00:21:02.080And so I think that people can misunderstand what the meaningful part of a traditional relationship is, which is owning your wife.
00:21:09.700And I want that to be clipped out of context because what it really is is the wife owning the husband as well.
00:21:15.860It is a permanent stake that creates a motivation for investment.
00:21:20.920Well, then let's bring this back to reasonableness by pointing out his second pillar, marriage by mutual consent.
00:21:27.800He writes, this comes from Catholic doctrine, quote, what therefore God hath joined together, let not man put a sender, unquote.
00:21:36.920And particularly benefits women who cannot be forcibly married against their will.
00:21:41.640Okay, but this guy has a huge bias here.
00:21:44.420There was another piece that we did where it was looking at, you can check it out, is Asian low fertility genesis.
00:21:50.920And we point out that if you look at Anglo-Saxon courts going into the pre-Christian period, there was a strong belief that you should stay married to whoever you choose to marry.
00:22:03.960So the idea of who you choose to marry existed in these territories pre-Catholicism.
00:22:12.160And a lot of Catholic areas actually had arranged marriages, as we know from anyone who has studied royal history of that time period.
00:22:20.620So I don't understand what they're going for.
00:22:23.200My understanding is that the Protestant areas actually had less arranged marriage or less pressured marriage than the Catholic areas.
00:22:30.300And remember the podcast we did looking at Scott Alexander's review on the book on the early rise of Christianity talked about how basically like empowering to women Christianity was.
00:22:39.980You know, it was like, be nice to your wife.
00:22:46.400I see it as pretty Catholic to give women consent and a voice.
00:22:51.360Well, no, but we're talking here about do arranged marriages trump what the family would prefer?
00:22:57.040And if you're talking about noble families.
00:22:58.200Most arranged marriages involve consent from women.
00:23:00.920I don't know why people think arranged marriages mean I'm going to force you to marry this person.
00:23:04.420What he's talking about here is not that.
00:23:06.380This line that he read from the Bible, because I know how this applies.
00:23:10.460What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder, is not saying a woman can turn down a guy who her family has chosen for her.
00:23:19.040It's saying if a woman eloped without the family's knowledge, then she gets to marry that guy.
00:23:34.240So it did mean that basically you could within even Catholic countries, my understanding, largely speaking, if you wanted to get out of like an arranged marriage or what your family wanted to do, if you eloped with someone that still counted as marriage.
00:23:44.420Well, OK, leaning back into the more traditional leanings of his five pillars, high standards of premarital chastity, especially for women and fidelity.
00:23:55.380First and most importantly, it ensures paternal certainty and minimizes sexual jealousy.
00:24:00.900Second, it makes marriage the gateway to sex, which strongly encourages young people to get themselves into the long term pair bond.
00:24:06.940That is the ideal environment to have and raise children.
00:24:10.780Actually, you and I have been talking about this a lot recently, this this argument that uncontrolled sex drive is not actually the major driver of birth rates and prenatalism.
00:24:21.340But we have talked about the fact that, like, there are plenty of religions.
00:24:25.580I think the LDS church is a really good example of this presently that use marriage as the gateway to sex, forcing people to marry younger, which does help with fertility.
00:24:37.500It causes people to make catastrophically bad decisions about who they marry because they are marrying to gain access to sex.
00:24:45.700And I think that just people need to be much like this.
00:24:48.200This is one I actually pretty strongly disagree with.
00:24:50.740I'm not saying that women should sleep around a lot before marriage.
00:24:54.520I don't know, because sleeping around before marriage also is a it's it's it's distracting procrastination.
00:25:01.840Yeah, you should be focused on getting married.
00:25:05.280But I think that that's a very different motivation than what he's talking about here, which is the way that some traditional systems used it.
00:25:11.440I mean, I think he's looking at it more from a male perspective, but also throughout the history of like Catholicism and Christianity.
00:25:17.560It was just well known that men would sleep around a ton and then get married like it didn't really count for men.
00:25:39.240Yeah, I do not think for the game theory as he has laid out, I'm not saying it's a good thing, but for the game theory as he has laid out to maintain steady.
00:25:49.300So long as you have security around paternity, I do not see this as that much of breaking the entire contract.
00:26:02.500The marriage contract can be created by mutual consent, but cannot be unilaterally dissolved.
00:26:07.840This allows for greater specialization of labor within the household and greater investment in, quote, relationship capital, end quote, including children.
00:26:16.040It also shifts the balance of power within the relationship to the more committed partner.
00:26:25.360So this one gets really interesting because he goes into it a bit more, and I had never thought of it this way, is making divorce easy shifts the balance in the relationship to the less committed partner.
00:26:54.380I think what he's thinking of here is he's more focused on his later argument about giving power to the less committed partner when divorce is easier.
00:27:01.320And the reality is you can just quiet quit in this situation.
00:27:04.140It doesn't give more power to the more committed partner.
00:27:06.040Like if you wanted to leave me, but you couldn't, you'd just be like, well, I'm just going to be a dick to you, and I'm not going to help out with anything, and I could do the same, right?
00:27:14.200It does at least not make the situation harder.
00:27:18.160And I will note to the previous comment when I was like fidelity in women before marriage, and I was like, I don't know if that's really necessary to maintain the bargain.
00:27:26.900Somebody might take that to mean like, oh, he's just justifying his wife slipping around.
00:27:30.200Actually, Simone had only ever kissed one person other than me when we first met.