A question. You use the term "abundance." Have you defined it as resource certainty? I'm asking because your r-strategy model fits best with the baby-daddy welfare culture. If "abundance" matched up with total resources, you'd think that affluent liberals would be having lots of kids and affluent/powerful liberal males would further father kids from a string of mistresses. From what I've seen, though, affluent liberal males tend to have one or kids; many have none.
That disconnect between affluence and offspring could be chalked up to liberal Malthusianism, but that ZPG stuff could be a rationalization of feelings of uncertainty: the fear that the good times will run out.
While I'm on the subject, have you noticed that the greatest fertility rates in the K end of the spectrum are found in Christian cultures that aren't all that affluent? Familes like the Duggans, for example.
Also, the r-and-K seem to be mixed. There are lots of upper-middle-class liberals who seriously think that kids aren't worth having unless the parents can afford an expensive home in a quality-school district, Ivy League college, a large budget for extracurricular activites like riding lessons, etc. In terms of resource deployment, that "pre-Ivy" track is consistent with your K-strategy - namely, deploying a lot of resources on one single kid and deciding that, in the absence of such resources, there's no point in having a kid. As I noted, many professional-class liberals follow that strategy.
Have you worked socio-economic class standards into your model?
One hallmark of r-selection is diminished rearing drives. r-types don’t like kids as much, and it manifests in a lot of ways. Oddly enough one researcher tested Liberals and Conservatives and found females Liberals preferred the smell of coffee over newborn babies, while female conservatives preferred the smell of the babies. So it is probably a holistic thing. The other side of the coin is Elton John, who laments his child will be so horribly affected by not having a mother that he wants to get another kid who can commiserate with his current one about their horrible lives. Notice the female relatives of Homosexuals in the last post’s study had a diminished desire for kids, even as they had more offspring.
Now in a state of nature, without birth control, or abortion, or a knowledge of where babies came from, r-type drives produce a lot of mating, and fathers who aren’t driven to hang around to parent, and mothers who kick the kid out at the earliest moment for convenience, so they can begin on the next brood. That strategy maximizes r (the variable which represents reproductive rate in equations describing population dynamics), and doesn’t really have a downside. Your goal is to produce as many offspring as possible who go on to mate themselves. If resources are free, and there is no competition, the fact the kid was kicked out at twelve to fend for himself won’t be as deleterious as it would be if all the resources were taken by mature males, as they would be in K-selection.
So today, you have an r-type psychology, living in a world where having a baby is, for all intents and purposes, a conscious choice. Wealthy Liberals, who would probably score high on measures of conscientiousness, do what is necessary to avoid the child, and the costs inherent to it in our society. R-individuals who aren’t as conscientious don’t worry about anything but the moment, and they are the ones who end up with ten kids by ten different mommas.
I suspect in today’s world, the r-trait is going to adapt to the newer selection of easy birth control to be much less conscientious, maybe with a subset of individuals who really want kids, but don’t think too far ahead.
Of course, generous welfare is serving as an r-selective pressure, and it will favor the growth of a massive underclass of fast breeding individuals with low conscientiousness, as Charles Murray has been documenting.
On Liberals who hyper-invest, I see it as a confluence of variables. Notice, they don’t invest in a way which is personally costly to them. If they were poorer, I don’t think they would move to a more ramshackle house to have a kid. They tend to be mostly affluent, so the investing isn’t really personally costly to any measure of value to them.
Also the r-trait involves not wanting kids, so when you combine a hyper-affluent individual with one child, you are going to see a high level of investment, though I suspect it is superficial investment which isn’t personally costly, and which is more about competing with the Jones.
Personally, I see a woman who abandons her job to home-school as investing more highly (from a psychological perspective) in her offspring than a millionaire family who sends their offspring off to Andover, and only sees the child a few months a year.
But it’s worth noting, in nature, r and K are not clearly defined, with an ironclad line of demarcation between them either in individuals or species. Rather, you see it as you zoom out from the group, and statistics aggregate. At the individual level, it is possible for aspects of strategies to combine in an individual, and produce individuals who seem to follow hybrid strategies. Even many species, due to unique aspects of their environmental, can combine competitiveness with r-type mating strategies, or aversions to competition with K-type mating strategies. As you zoom out, they disappear, but they do exist. r/K is particularly noted as being density dependent.