I do not need to go into much depth about r/K selection theory. In short, you can subdivide species into two categories. There are those that produce many offspring but invest very little in them, which is the “r” strategy. In contrast, other species produce relatively few offspring but dedicate a lot of time and effort in ensuring their survival into adulthood. This is the “K” strategy. The same patterns can be observed also among humans, but even within the same ethnicity there are different selection strategies in place. In the end, evolution does not care, and one can rightly ask whether today’s environment does not actually favor the completely reckless individual who fathers one child after another, does not contribute economically at all, and is nothing but a burden on mainstream society.

I think that it is incontrovertible that the welfare class shows better genetic fit for the current environment than the hardworking members of society who keep this clown show going. The former can have as many children as they want. In fact, they make more money from the government by having more children. Supposedly, this is not the intended effect, but seeing that this has been going on for decades, one may very well have a different opinion. If you do not work, yet enjoy a higher standard of living than someone who is slaving away 40 to 50 hours a week, and manage to produce a multitude of children, you are far ahead in the evolutionary race compared to Jill and Joe who first need to get their Master’s degrees and get their careers off their ground before they perhaps manage to have one kid before her eggs finally dry up. I may be missing something, but I have a hunch that our elites are flooding our countries not with people who are in the second camp.

Over many decades, we have seen a gradual but accelerating shift towards a society that heavily favors r-selection. In fact, the K-selection crowd is literally getting crowded out and arguably already is in the minority. Again, evolution does not care. At some point the welfare state will collapse and hard times for the r-selection majority will come. Almost every country on this planet is a “failed state”, and this number may simply increase further. It may seem quite bizarre why a seemingly well-running society may shift towards r-selection and inevitable societal collapse, but if you look at major political and economical developments, which obviously have been heavily promoted by the elites instead of manifesting themselves out of thin air, it is much clearer how this could have happened. The first problem is the financialization of the economy, and this applies to companies as much as to the individual. The perspective of the individual is more interesting for this essay, however. The key observation is that saving is no longer seen as a virtue. instead, society actively promotes instant gratification. Strangely enough, this is a perfectly viable way of living one’s life.

If you go through your monthly expenses, you will probably notice that you can cover essentially all your costs with your monthly paycheck. It covers rent, food, clothing, entertainment, gas, etc. Even bigger purchases are normally not a problem, as long as your lifestyle has not outgrown your income. This means that if you make an average salary you could probably replace an average laptop or phone without breaking a sweat, seeing that a basic laptop can be had for $500, and a phone for $250, and if you make a lot of money, you could of course get the latest Apple laptop or phone whenever you want. Many people even no longer even have a computer, instead using their phone as a full replacement, which means that there is one big-ticket purchase less. The only expenses I can think of that the average person would have to save up for are down payments for a mortgage, the sticker price of a car, and fancy vacations.

In effect you do not need to save up much for a new car anymore. You just save up for the initial payment for a lease or the down payment. Again, if your purchase ambitions are broadly aligned with your income levels, this is not that much of a challenge. It would be much more difficult to save up 50% of the purchase price of a car, of course. Vacations are an interesting topic: men are a lot less interested in travel than women, in particular luxury travel, and women often develop a taste for this pastime only after having found a man who can foot the bill. Thus, the guy will have to save up for it, not the woman. This is the domain of the dutiful K-strategist who blows his money like the most retarded member of the r-selection crowd.

Housing I have left until the end for a very particular reason: where I live, housing has gotten so expensive that it is virtually unaffordable if you cannot get your boomer parents to chip in. We are talking about couples in their 40s having to take out 25-year mortgages. This is bad. Thus, with real-estate ownership being out of reach, the average person may just decide to instead spend more money. After all, he is not going to be able to afford a house, so why bother saving much at all? It would take discipline to instead put more money away every month. This is not what society wants you to do anyway. With real estate not really being an option, spending more money may seem to be the next best alternative, and there is no end to this downward spiral. We have managed to descent to a point where people not just purchase everything on credit but may even use questionable buy-now-pay-later providers, which offer you to pay back the money for the last pizza you bought in three installments. I wish I was making this up but this is the reality today.

The political and economical mainstream fully endorses taking on debt, so much so that it is no longer possible for most governments to ever repay their debts. On top, there is constant devaluation of your money in order to make you spend it. The bizarre mainstream theory in economics is that an inflation rate of 2% is ideal in order to encourage companies and people to spend their money. What the mainstream does not want is a stable economic environment or, worse, a deflationary one. Supposedly, you would simply not spend your money if its purchasing power kept increasing over time, completely ignoring that it seems rather healthy to make purchases when there is a good reason to, such as technological advancement. Thus, a deflationary environment promotes technical innovation. Yet, our rulers have decided that your money has to be worth less year after year, so the money printer never sleeps.

There is an obvious, yet not often talked about reason for why the elites do not care that much about inflation. They surely want to devalue your money, but to their money is safe because their wealth is in physical assets whose book value only goes up if there is inflation. On top, there is the Cantillon effect, i.e. the fact that the people and institutions closest to the creation of new money benefit the most from it. For them, newly created money has the same purchasing power as the old one but once it has trickled down in the economy, the average consumer bears the full brunt of the loss of purchasing power.

Unfortunately, this economic reality leads to rewarding a shortsighted way of thinking, and this happens naturally when people no longer save money and plan for the future. Instead of showing restraint and accumulating some money before making a purchase, they take out a loan and pay monthly installments. There is no long-term vision. The same can be said of companies who only move from one quarter to the next, without a clear understanding of the direction they want to go. Obviously, company executives cannot predict the future, but they should be able to extrapolate from existing trends. Apple under Steve Jobs was a great example. Apple under Tim Cook is not. This approach may work well in the near term but such an approach to management eventually undermines a company.

The lack of a (positive) long-term vision also affects politics. Today’s politicians have no skin in the game, unlike monarchs of yore. Maybe read up on the history of the Hohenzollern family and how they managed Prussia, or any other successful dynasty. There is a big difference between running a country for a few decades, then handing it to your son, compared to “democratic” elections, in which a highly reactive style of politics is the norm. You may quip that “democracies” clearly pursue long-term goals, such as the destruction of their own countries by bankrupting them, letting its infrastructure fall into disarray, and promoting unfettered mass immigration from the third world. While this is happening, even these plans are extremely short-sighted. I do not have the impression that these people have any idea about the society they want to build. You could even execute the project of wanting to destroy a Western nation much better if there was a clear and concrete long-term vision, instead of opportunism. You can see this wonderfully with mass immigration from Islamic countries, the women’s rights movement, and philosemitism. These are all causes the elites are backing, yet they seem to have missed that they do not go so well together.

I do not think there is a way out. You are probably better off if you live a fiscally reckless life, and your genetic line will most certainly go a lot farther if you father children with as many women as you can, while investing nothing at all in your offspring, offloading this task to the welfare state. The only problem with this approach is that you or your descendants are going to hit a brick wall at some point. However, it is not at all guaranteed that the K-strategist’s genetic line will even survive until then. This is a quiet sobering thought, but I do think that it is a realistic assessment. You can thank the financialization of society for all of this.