Game Theory of Dating: What Professor Jiang Gets Wrong
In this video, I respond to Professor Jiang’s “Game Theory #1: The Dating Game” from the YouTube channel Predictive History and argue that his model misidentifies the incentives driving modern dating and marriage behavior.
00:00 Professor Jiang’s Dating Framework
02:39 Parenting in Hunter-Gatherer Societies
07:14 Parenting in Patriarchal Societies
09:20 Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
11:34 The Modern Incentive Structure
14:21 Why “Status Seeking” Can Be Risk Management
15:31 How Parenting Privatization Pits Men and Women Against Each Other
17:03 Incentive Structures and Societal Superstructures
18:22 Modern Dating Dynamics
21:49 Research on Subjective Experiences in Modern Dating
23:48 Why You Can’t Just Pay Women to Have Kids
25:03 Why Israel’s Fertility Is Higher
33:05 The Saudi Arabia Case
34:29 Three Drivers of High Fertility in Post-Neolithic Societies
35:55 Outro
I break down:
Why “men optimize sex / women optimize status” is too simplistic
How Maslow’s hierarchy of needs helps explain real decision-making
Why marriage and parenthood now feel like economic and legal risk for both men and women
How online dating amplifies bad-actor dynamics
Why fertility decline is better explained by structural incentives than moral decline
What Israel and Saudi Arabia actually show about pronatalism, policy, and social structure
Main thesis: people are not irrationally “anti-family.” They are responding rationally to a system where the costs and risks of parenting are heavily privatized.
Sources:
Human trafficking of domestic workers in Israel:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/modern-...
https://artsci.washu.edu/ampersand/ho...
https://www.972mag.com/family-life-fo...
https://people.socsci.tau.ac.il/mu/ad...
https://www.jns.org/jewish-womens-fer...
Human trafficking of domestic workers in Saudi Arabia:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/new...
https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/vie...
Pew Research Report on dating:
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-tr...
West Elm Caleb:
https://nypost.com/2022/01/21/who-is-...
USA military aid to Israel:
https://www.cfr.org/articles/us-aid-i...
The Original Affluent Society:
https://www.uvm.edu/~jdericks/EE/Sahl...
More info about hunter gatherers:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36882...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/h...
Ultra orthodox Jewish kids lack of access to science and math education:
https://www.science.org/content/artic...
https://en.idi.org.il/haredi/2023/?ch...
Increased risk of child abuse when a step parent is in the home:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19657...
https://pure.hud.ac.uk/ws/files/20139...
https://www.humanium.org/en/tackling-...