The effect social policy has on mate selection seems to a taboo subject that the elites want to keep out of sight. In reality, though, social policy has far-reaching influence on mate selection. An easy example is an exuberant welfare state in which even the non-productive members of society can live like millionaires. If economic success and one’s ability to compete for resources is taken off the table then women are essentially free to choose any man. In reality, as long as there is not complete equality, there are still significant differences. However, for a very large part of society in a welfare state, the man’s ability to provide for the family is no longer relevant for mate selection.

To put it simply, women desire two aspect about a man: looks and money. I cannot quite imagine how the looks premium that comes with great genes can ever be taken away, outside of a Harrison Bergeron scenario, so the big lever is money. The more politics meddles with this aspect, with the misguided aim for creating a supposedly more just society, the more women are free to choose a man without economic constraints. In the short term, and for the affected women, this may seem like a great deal. Finally, the taxpayer funds everything while they can do whatever they want, have sex with whomever they want, and not fear any negative consequences. For society, such an approach is disastrous, both in the short and long term.

In order to create a more highly-performant society, there have to be rewards for productive people, normally in the form of money and status. Both should increase your relative level of success on the dating market, regardless of your socioeconomic position in life. Of course, money is not the sole determinant of female interest, but it is often a sine qua non, i.e. if you do not have resources at the level some woman desires, you are not going to get anywhere with her. To some extent, this mechanism still works in society, but at the moment it seems fundamentally broken. Boomers have such a stranglehold on the economy that anybody from Generation X onward is worse off. Your boomer ancestors paid their way through college with a summer job, got their first job by walking into an office building and asking to speak to the manager, and their women were non-tattooed virgins. This is not quite the world the later generations found themselves in.

The current system is fundamentally broken. Taxes are so high in the West that it is virtually impossible to get ahead. If you are a top-income earner, you can easily end up with a marginal income rate of over 50%, and the little you have left over goes up in smoke via exorbitant rents or mortgage rates. As a consequence, if you do not come from old money, you will find it next-to-impossible to really set yourself apart from your competition. Someone making 40 or 50% more than you may only live in a marginally bigger apartment and otherwise have the same lifestyle. It is even possible that these people are a lot worse off overall. This may sound paradoxical, but this is the reality. In many large Western European cities there are strong rent controls, which means that the difference between your rent and your neighbor’s rent could be several hundred percent. I am not making this up. If you look for an apartment in Berlin today, you will easily pay 16 to 20 euros per square meter whereas people who moved into the very same building ten or fifteen years ago may only pay half. I even know of a particularly egregious case of a tenement building in the district Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, where today’s rent for a new tenant is close to 20 euros per square meters whereas the old tenants pay between four and six euros per square meter, for virtually the apartment. This has the effect that if you come in today, as a high-powered Big Corp stooge with a decent salary, you may have less left over after expenses than your neighbors who had moved in fifteen years ago and whose jobs are not nearly paid as well as yours.

Humanity has striven on competition. The best hunters, warriors, farmers had the most offspring. Today, this is no longer the case. Our hostile elite is much more concerned with creating some kind of a broth of humanity in which there are no distinctions at all anymore. If you make a lot of money, you get taxed to the hilt. In contrast, if you have no marketable skills, the government will provide for you lavishly. It is thus perhaps not much of a surprise that the welfare class has many more children than the professional class. Imagine have no duties at all, more money than you can plausibly spend, and a dating pool that consists of people who are similarly irresponsible. This is the society our leaders want. To change it, there needs to be fundamental shift in social policy. With a much reduced welfare state, I am quite sure that mate selection would become a bit saner again.