💘 Is Modern Dating a Broken Game? Status, Desire, and Civilizational Decline
Details
Jiang's "The Dating Game"
Philosophy + Social Theory Night - watch/read beforehand)
(Only sign up if your willing to do the homework for this topic. I have put together a reading/video package. (Link at bottom of page)
We live in a culture that pretends desire is personal.
Your type. Your standards. Your chemistry. Your choice.
But look a little closer and it starts to feel less private than that. Taste gets socialized. Attraction gets ranked. Profiles become brands. People talk like they're "just following what they want" while quietly responding to status, scarcity, image, and comparison.
In the first class of his Game Theory course, Jiang makes a blunt argument: modern dating is not mainly about romance. It's a game of players, rules, and incentives. And once status becomes the main incentive, the system stops rewarding cooperation and starts rewarding display. His claim doesn't stop at dating apps or hookup culture. He pushes it all the way to falling birth rates, demographic aging, and civilizational decline.
That's the argument we're going to test.
What we're actually fighting about
- Is attraction mostly personal, or is it shaped far more by status, imitation, and social comparison than people want to admit?
- When Jiang turns dating into a game-theory model, is he clarifying something real, or flattening love into economics with better branding?
- If birth rates are collapsing across wealthy societies, what's actually driving it: status competition, housing costs, job insecurity, changing values, women having more freedom, or some ugly mix of all of it?
- Can money, family policy, and social support move fertility at all, or is Jiang right that the problem is deeper than economics?
- When people say "civilizational decline," what are they actually talking about: fewer babies, weaker institutions, loss of meaning, national power, or just the end of a social order they liked?
How the night will run
We start with one question: "Where do you feel status most strongly in modern romantic life?"
Then I'll give a short framing of Jiang's argument and the strongest pushbacks to it.
After that we stay close to the actual claims: dating as a matching market, status as incentive, fertility as consequence, collapse as prediction. First reactions, strongest agreements, strongest objections, then the real argument underneath all of it.
Not dating advice night. Not gender-war night. Not "everyone agree modernity is broken" night. A real disagreement.
Watch / Read
Minimum: Jiang — Game Theory #1: The Dating Game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE4l9WyLF3U
Alvin Roth: How matching markets work
Robert Axelrod on Why Being Nice, Forgiving, and Provokable are the Best Strategies for Life
The economy of love. Interview with Eva Illouz
And more links/papers in the packet.
Read the Companion packet:
I'll post the full reading / viewing guide here (This packet summarizes the essays, so its faster to read):
It includes short pieces and clips from economics, demography, feminism, and philosophy so we're not trapped inside one worldview. If you want the stronger version of the discussion, do the companion material too.
Total prep time: about 3–5 hours if you do the full packet.
When and where
🗓️ Date: Sunday, May 3rd
🕒 Time: 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM
📍 Location: Waves coffee on howe
Cap 10 + waitlist Small room on purpose. This gets worse fast if it turns into a panel.