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The Dating Market is Broken

70 years ago, most people didn't sleep together without getting married first, and most people managed to get married. The guys who were 9 out of 10's married women who were 9's, the guys who were 2's married women who were 2's, and most people got somebody.

Then contraception became widely available and it became socially acceptable to sleep around. There was an assumption that both genders wanted the same thing out of sex, but that assumption was completely wrong. While many straight men found sex with not-very-attractive strangers quite appealing, women were much more choosy in their partners (that goes for most animals, not just humans), and were completely uninterested in sex without quite a lot of romantic commitment.

Polls show that while men rate 50% of women's looks as "below average", women rate 80% of men's looks "below average".

The most attractive (whatever that means) men generally find, at some point, that it isn't feasible to end relationships with female bed partners without inflicting enormous amounts of emotional pain on them. The ethical men respond to this by committing to someone and leaving the sexual marketplace. The unethical ones, who shall be referred to as "heart breakers", continue from woman to woman, indifferent to the suffering they are dishing out.

If people meet through friends, heart breakers reap a lot of negative social consequences. But online dating services are a heart breaker's paradise. He can pursue women he wouldn't even want to be seen with in front of his friends, let alone commit to, then wine, dine, bed, and discard them without consequences.

This means that an average woman, who is a 5 out of 10, will occasionally have flings with fellows who are 8's or 9's out to 10, wonder why none of them are willing to commit, and she will let the years go by, running down her biological clock, waiting for an 8 or 9 who is willing to commit to come along, unaware of the fact that this is guaranteed to never happen.

In the meantime, a guy who is a 5 out of 10 with the best of intentions will send email after email to women on dating services, pouring his heart out, without getting any replies.

Polls show that over one-third of Gen Z adults have never been on a romantic date.

Women's Marriage Rate, 1900-2018

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that young women are outperforming men scholastically. Women receive about 60% of bachelor's degrees, men 40%.

People are giving up. Many women have children out of wedlock rather than settling for the sort of men who'd be quite happy to marry them, meaning that the children will grow up with step parents, who are often problematic, or without the example of a healthy romantic relationship in the home, and many sons may grow up without masculine role models. Many men get "red pilled", joining misogynistic online communities.

The Universities are Broken

College has become far too expensive. We've experienced runaway inflation in college tuition and the cost of textbooks. Young people are graduating with staggering debt that will take them many years to pay off, and student loan debt can't be discharged through bankruptcy.

The government's response has been to guarantee student loan debt through Sallie Mae, but this is just throwing money at the problem without any attempt to curtail costs, with the predictable inflation resulting.

Until the 1970's, young, pre-college children were "free range kids", allowed to roam the neighborhood unsupervised on the condition that they were home before dark.

In the 1980's, someone had the brilliant idea that the pictures of "missing" children should be displayed on milk cartons. Most of the kids shown had been abducted by their biological parents who had lost custody through divorce. These parents loved the kids and were taking great care of them, but most people assumed that all of the milk carton kids (and there were many) had been abducted by perverts, molested, and murdered.

Parents across the nation were terrified, thinking there were child molesters lurking on every city block, and society radically changed child-rearing so that children were raised under constant supervision, and it's been that way ever since.

18-year-old students arrive in college without any experience at resolving disputes without adult supervision, so universities hire armies of "administrators" who aren't teaching anything, just to supervise the kids. That's expensive.

Another problem is that the US News and World Report ranking of colleges does not in any way measure whether the kids have learned anything. Some college students take standardized tests like GRE's their senior year, but only those students going to grad school, so it's not a representative sample. As a result, schools are rated mostly on the basis of the research they do, rather than their teaching, and it's hard for affordable non-research teaching colleges to get credit.

There are many ways a person can learn independently, especially on the Internet, but it's hard to show that learning in any way that employers can easily evaluate. An employer can ask questions on a job interview about specific job skills, but it's difficult for an employer to assess general learning. If someone were to administer tests of general learning, something like a GRE, and make scores available to employers, it would be likely that performance would vary by demographic, as it does for SAT's and GRE's, and then using it would open the employer up for discrimination lawsuits, and the burden of proof would be on the employer to establish that the test performance would be relevant to job performance, a burden that is nearly impossible to meet. So we are left with a situation where only universities and not employers are allowed to use standardized tests like SAT's and GRE's to evaluate applicants, and universities have a near-total monopoly on credentialing applicants for jobs and costs continue to skyrocket.

There was a big drive to get universities to stop requiring standardized tests for admission and base admission entirely on other criteria, and many schools did, but it turned out that elite schools were admitting kids who had good grades through high school, but whose math and reading skills were at or below a 12-year-old level. So schools found they were unable to assess competence without standardized tests, yet employers still are legally barred from using them.