Game Theory #1: The Dating Game

• This is the first lecture in a semester-long course on game theory as a framework for understanding human behavior, societal dynamics, and the rise and fall of civilizations. The instructor argues that game theory—analyzing players, rules, and incentives—is superior to other explanatory frameworks like religion, biology, economics, or liberalism, and promises students three benefits: becoming a better person, understanding current events, and gaining predictive power over how the world evolves.

Competing Theories of Human Behavior

• The instructor surveys five existing theories before introducing game theory:
  • Religion: Humans are caught in a moral battle between good and evil; religion guides us toward goodness.
  • Biology / Evolutionary psychology: The drive is to pass on genes. Males benefit from mating with many females; females must be selective due to the enormous investment of pregnancy and child-rearing.
  • Race and culture: History is a struggle between races and cultures for dominance, each with stereotypical traits.
  • Economics: Humans are driven by self-interest and the desire to accumulate money.
  • Liberalism / Enlightenment: History inevitably progresses toward rationality, truth, and justice—a kind of secular paradise.

What Is Game Theory?

• A game has three components:
  • Players – the participants
  • Rules / constraints – the boundary conditions that limit what players can do
  • Incentives – how you win, what you get
• If you understand all three, you can predict how the game will play out.
• The instructor’s core claim: game theory is the best tool for understanding how individuals, societies, and nations behave.

The Dating Game: A Worked Example

• Setup: Five men and five women, ranked 1–5 by attractiveness based on three criteria—genes (looks, health), wealth, and status (power, connections, social standing).
• The biological prediction: Everyone should want to mate with rank 5. But this is socially suicidal—if all women pursue one man, the other men are eliminated and society collapses.
• The Nash equilibrium: The rational outcome is for 5 to pair with 5, 4 with 4, 3 with 3, and so on. This is the state where no player can improve their outcome by unilaterally changing strategy. Everyone is matched, and society is stable.
• The problem: In real life, nobody follows the Nash equilibrium.

Why People Don’t Behave Rationally (According to Nash)

• The instructor ran an exercise with students: at age 30, under parental pressure to marry, what is the minimum requirement to agree to marriage?
  • Boys: “As long as she likes me and I can have sex with her”—very low thresholds.
  • Girls: “If I don’t love him and am not attracted to him, I need about a million dollars a month”—very high thresholds.
• In reality, everyone competes for the top-ranked individuals (the “5s” and “4s”), leaving lower-ranked people marginalized.
• Those left behind—disproportionately men—become incels (involuntary celibates): they give up, consume entertainment, and disengage from life.
• This is collectively suicidal for society, yet it persists.

The Real Incentive: Status, Not Sex

• The key insight: people are not actually playing a game of procreation—they are playing a game of status.
• The goal is not to have children; it is to be seen with an attractive partner, to post on Instagram, to be envied at the mall.
• Women (in the instructor’s framing) will only make the sacrifice of childbirth if the man is exceptionally attractive or wealthy—otherwise, why bother?
• People are rational, but you must correctly identify what game they are actually playing to understand their behavior.

Superstructure: How Society Shapes the Game

• The superstructure—demographics, economics, technology, culture, politics, religion—determines what game is being played at any given time.

• The instructor defines three historical superstructures:

  • Low population, poor, low tech, low competition (e.g., a village of 200–300):

    • Women may have a husband but sleep with multiple men to disguise paternity, ensuring all men feel protective of the child.
    • No dating; sex serves social and political cohesion.

  • Growing population, moderate wealth, moderate tech, high competition (e.g., 10,000–20,000 people, competing societies):

    • Arranged marriages dominate. Who you marry doesn’t matter; what matters is having as many children as possible to sustain the society against rivals.
    • No dating; reproduction is a social duty.

  • Overpopulation, high wealth, high tech, equilibrium (the modern world):

    • Low childbirth mortality, high technology, relative peace.
    • The dating game emerges: since survival is no longer at stake, people use marriage to improve their status by “marrying up.”
    • This leads to declining fertility rates, because the competition for status is zero-sum and many people opt out of having children entirely.

The Life Cycle of Civilizations

• These three superstructures map onto a civilization life cycle: birth (low population), maturation (growing population), and collapse (overpopulation with declining fertility).
• The strongest indicator that a society is about to collapse: wealthy, well-educated women refuse to have children.
• This pattern has preceded the fall of Rome and many empires, and is now visible across the modern world—America, Britain, Europe, and especially East Asia.

Global Fertility Data and Its Implications

• Fertility rates by region (data cited from 2024):

  • Africa: Dark red on the map, fertility rates of 6–7+. Societies are growing, poor, with high child mortality—families must have many children to survive.
  • North America and Europe: Below replacement (~1.5–1.8), but partially offset by immigration.
  • East Asia: In crisis. China is at ~1.0 (replacement is 2.1). Five years ago it was 1.7—the trend is sharply negative.
  • South Korea: The worst in the world at 0.6–0.8. Signs outside restaurants read “No dogs and no kids.” The society is described as a looming “zombie society” dominated by retirees with no working population.

• South Korea’s demographic projection:

  • By 2040: a massive dependency ratio with very few children and a huge elderly population.
  • By 2060: the working-age population drops by roughly 50%.
  • The instructor predicts South Korea may not survive as a nation-state past 2040–2080, especially since it cannot field a military.
  • The root cause: an extremely materialistic, competitive society where middle-class families pour all resources into one child to get into a good university and a job at Samsung—the only major employer.

Israel as an Outlier

• When plotting GDP per capita against fertility rate, Israel is the only wealthy, high-tech, Western society with an above-replacement fertility rate (~3.0).
• The instructor acknowledges objections (Israel has only 9 million people, is in a desert, faces global hostility) but argues that by the logic of game theory, Israel has a major long-term advantage.
• Why Israel is different: External threats create internal unity. Having many children is an act of patriotism and religious duty. Fertility itself is a form of status.
• The West and China, by contrast, have embraced materialism—status is measured in money, Instagram followers, and YouTube subscribers, not in family or national loyalty.

Saudi Arabia: A Counterexample Addressed

• A student notes that Saudi Arabia also has relatively high fertility (~4 children per woman) and decent GDP per capita, yet doesn’t face the same level of hostility as Israel.
• The instructor’s response:
  • Saudi Arabia is an outlier propped up by oil revenues funding a welfare state (free schooling, healthcare, housing, guaranteed jobs)—essentially socialism funded by natural resources.
  • It also has a religious imperative to have children.
  • However, Saudi Arabia lacks the human capital, innovation, openness, democracy, and technology that Israel has.
  • If oil runs out or war disrupts the region, Saudi Arabia is vulnerable.
• Game theory does not give definitive answers—it provides a framework for asking the right questions and doing further research.

The Core Lesson

• By studying players, rules, and incentives, you can identify the superstructure of a civilization, understand where it came from, and predict where it is heading.
• The dating game is just one example; the semester will apply game theory to many other domains—war, geopolitics, economics, and social behavior.
• The ultimate promise: if you learn to think in terms of game theory, you gain sovereignty over your own destiny and the ability to see through the stupidity of the world.