243B. Dating OS: Replacing Datings Apps With Trust Apps (Part 2)

As this is an extremely complicated series, on a topic that baffles people with PhD’s in economics, I’m expecting you to have read Part 1 before starting here.

The more I ponder what is going on with birth rates collapsing, the more I realize that this is just an extension of the prediction I made in 2017 that the gaming industry would collapse. Back then I described what I called a “Data Implosion” caused by using data to raise prices for products that stayed the same in quality or even deteriorated in value. Anyone can raise prices, you don’t need an education for that. I can grab a 5 year old and ask them to change the price for a loaf of bread from $5 to $6 on a shelf. That’s what the gaming industry did and they were clearly not understanding the consequences of that choice then, or now.

But that wasn’t just happening in the gaming sector. The people running the economies of almost every country were doing the same thing globally. The goal: maximum profits. Not maximum sustainable profits. The former doesn’t require an education, just a 5 year old changing the price on a shelf. So healthcare costs skyrocketed. Education costs skyrocketed. All utilities skyrocketed. What didn’t skyrocket? Wages. They went down relative to inflation.

You didn’t need a PhD to figure out how that would turn out. You just had to pick up the manual for modern economies, The Wealth of Nations , written by Adam Smith in 1776. Most of it was written decades earlier, that book is a compilation similar to my substack. There in Book 1 Chapter 8 Smith gives an instruction that is so deceptively simple that I’ve never heard it repeated anywhere else, ever. The few modern economists who actually bothered to read the manual probably flew right over it without giving it any thought:

“Mr. Cantillon seems, upon this account, to suppose that the lowest species of common labourers must everywhere earn at least double their own maintenance, in order that one with another they may be enabled to bring up two children; the labour of the wife, on account of her necessary attendance on the children, being supposed no more than sufficient to provide for herself. But one half the children born, it is computed, die before the age of manhood. [I discussed this in the previous paper] The poorest labourers, therefore, according to this account, must, one with another, attempt to rear at least four children, in order that two may have an equal chance of living to that age. But the necessary maintenance of four children, it is supposed, may be nearly equal to that of one man. The labour of an able-bodied slave, the same author adds, is computed to be worth double his maintenance; and that of the meanest labourer, he thinks, cannot be worth less than that of an ablebodied slave.”

Smith clearly says that a slave is worth twice their maintenance (survival wage), and that “laborers” (that’s you and me) are worth at least as much as a slave. Elsewhere Smith makes it clear that the only distinction between a laborer and a slave is that if you lose a slave you lose an asset. This doesn’t apply to laborers since you don’t own them. Thus he feels that slaves are overpriced.

I said all that to make it clear that people today are not being adequately funded to have children. We’ve known how much that costs for 250 years. Our masters are intentionally not providing that. While Smith uses terms like “master” and “laborer”, I try to put a face on responsible parties whenever possible. I know various billionaires really appreciate it when I give them the attention they deserve. But before I do, let me set up the scenario we are trying to solve.

If there is not enough wages for people (and here I especially mean women since we could lose 90% of the men and still have no problem making babies, as happened in Belarus after WW2 when the Germans killed 90% of the men aged 10 and above during their occupation) then I see two theoretical ways to solve this:

1. Increase wages to the absolute minimum described by Smith 250 years ago when he created the system of economics we use today,

2. Reduce the cost of making and raising children.

I’m going to tackle option 1 here in this paper, and save option 2 for the next paper. As I’m about to explain, option 1 is likely impossible, and option 2 has to my knowledge never been given serious academic thought. Academics and governments tend to focus on macro and micro interventions involving subsidies that are really still under option 1. I seek to identify the hidden and opportunity costs involved in child birth that institutions don’t discuss.

Why We Can’t Afford Children Anymore

Life in 1776 was simpler. The needs of a person back then were barely more than food and simple shelter. While modern people are clearly more expensive to support, they are also much more productive than they used to be. While having and supporting children is clearly much more expensive than it was in 1776, because infant mortality rates are now almost zero we only need 2.1 children for replacement, not 4. On the other hand, children back then were expected to go to work by the time they were 8, if not sooner. So when I talk about “non-productive children”, I mean children that don’t work. Today that might be children under the age of 18 or even 25, but back then children were able to contribute to their survival budget.

So is that 2 to 1 ratio that Smith described still valid? Has productivity kept even with wages? Actually, they kept pretty close to each other, despite the advances in technology, up until about 1979. From there productivity increased at about 7 times the rate of wages. If the fruits of that productivity were passed onto workers, they would have plenty of resources for having children, as they did prior to 1979.

So what changed? Is this really a problem that was less than 50 years in the making? In short, yes. When the master class went to war against labor they all but killed off unions and other forms of worker representation. Money flowed up, but not back down. This is also seen in massive increases to what we call “wealth disparity”. In 1979 the top 1% of households held about 13% of the USA’s assets. Today they have over 30%.

Of course labor (the other 99% of us) can express dissatisfaction over this power grab. The masters (that 1%) are well aware of this. That’s why governments with very high wealth disparities have raised huge police forces and become increasingly autocratic over time. Maintaining huge wealth disparities is expensive, and this also shows up in national debts. This isn’t just happening in a few countries, this is happening all over the world.

So am I advocating for some sort of socialist revolution to redistribute wealth? Well, in theory that might work, but that was tried in 1918 during the Bolshevik Revolution where my noble ancestors had to flee for their lives towards Iran to avoid execution. Today there are only two nations with higher wealth disparities than the USA: Russia and South Africa. So that didn’t really work, did it? I’m not saying it couldn’t work, but I just don’t have that much confidence in the wisdom of humanity. As Tolkien taught us, The Ring is damn hard to resist once it’s on your finger.

There is another factor that is more important in affecting the economics here than wealth disparity, and one that is seldom discussed: population. In 1776 the total global population was about 800M. In 1979 it was 4.3B. That’s an increase of 3.5B in 200 years (about 17M per year). From 1979 it went up another 4B to 8.3B. That’s 4B in 47 years, or 85M per year. That comes out cleanly to 5 times the increase rate in the earlier 200 year period.

The Earth hasn’t gotten any bigger since 1776. In terms of natural resources, the world has actually gotten a lot smaller as it is depleted. Water and air becomes fouled, species go extinct, and male fertility rates have dropped by 50% since 1979. Saying that the Earth has half the resources left that it did in 1776 would be optimistic. If we have 10 times as many people eating half as much planet, that means we have only 5% of the wealth per person that we had in 1776. Technologies that increase productivity typically do that at the expense of planetary well being, providing only short term benefits and long term losses.

So why am I not advocating for wealth redistribution? In 2009 I solved the “gold farmer” problem in a paper I submitted to USC called “Sustainable Virtual Economies and Business Models”. In that paper I explained that self-cannibalism would solve the problem I had just solved, even if my technologies were not deployed. The cost would be the end of open world game economies and their associated social glue. Which is what happened.

Now in 2026 I’m in the process of advocating for a series of new technologies that will solve the Demographic Collapse problem. Just like my tech was buried at USC in 2009, I expect history to repeat. And to be totally honest, the Demographic Collapse problem is another self-correcting system. There just aren’t enough resources to sustain 8.3B people on Earth, at least not at our current tech level. Is 4B sustainable? If we lost 4.3B people, would things stabilize? Maybe it would have in 1979, but we’ve done so much damage to the planet that we might only be able to sustain 3B now.

So if we don’t raise our tech level, I’m expecting us to lose 5B people before we achieve Replacement Rates again. Do nothing, and the problem solves itself. Unless some masters go insane and burn the planet down, then what’s left of the planet might not carry 3B anymore.

Then perhaps the question becomes “Why bother? What difference can we make?” I don’t consider the efforts I made to solve the problems with open world economies to have been a waste. I don’t consider my warnings about the coming game development correction that I issued in 2017 to have been a waste, even though we ignored them and are still suffering from that correction. Humans don’t tend to change unless forced to. We are creatures of habit.

The masters get greedy, so young people revolt by not having children anymore. We make too many people, and the planet ramps up microbial threats to deal with that (which I warned about in 2010 in my Third Tier of Game Development paper, 9 years before Covid). Action > Reaction. I can’t solve the overpopulation problem, I think a solution that does not involve losing billions of people is mathematically impossible. But Demographic Collapse, there is a lot that can be done to solve that. By smoothing out the decline curve (slowing the rate of decline), maybe…just maybe we can avoid total economic collapse.

More importantly, from my perspective, is that we can make people less desperate. Desperate people do stupid things, like burning the planet. People don’t fly out of their mother’s womb thinking “I’m going to destroy the planet.” But if they get sufficiently entitled, and don’t get what they want, they can throw a big tantrum. If they have enough power, like the billionaire I’m going to embarrass in the next paper, they might do a lot of damage with that tantrum. No not that guy, I bet 99% of my readers have never heard of the guy pulling our reproductive strings.

The bottom line here is that no one can stop Demographic Collapse. Even if every technology I’ve been developing over the last 16 years got fully funded and deployed, DC would still happen. It just would happen slower and give countries more time to adapt instead of collapsing. I’m good either way, when I went full vegan in 2012 I made a promise that I wouldn’t eat ice cream again until the Earth’s population got back down to 4B. If I can live to the age of 100 or 110, you might see me eating Haagen-Dazs again. Sooner if we have a big war.

Still, there is more to life than just living. Quality of life matters. The more we understand our situation, our shared responsibilities, and a solution plan that promises a better tomorrow, we will be nicer to each other and start less wars. Desperate people do mean things to each other and the planet.

Okay so Option 1 isn’t going to work. There are not enough resources left on Earth, and too many people, for the replacement wage Smith described to be achieved again without a major population drop. I do feel strongly that Option 2 could make that a whole lot more pleasant an option on the way down. You will have to be the judge after I finish the next paper explaining what Option 2 looks like.

All you Billionaires can relax, I’m not going to advocate for “land reform” or anything that reduces your power. You might have to join the rest of us in treating each other better though and accept that you aren’t smarter than the masters that came before you that didn’t screw up as badly as you are today.