For many young South Koreans, dating is too expensive, or too dangerous
cnn.com
cnn.com
Not to dig into such petty stuff as human rights which entirely forbid arranged marriages, that would be too easy, but as if that would even solve the problem that is literally described in the article, people having no time to develop meaningful relationships or interpersonal skill because in a cutthroat environment all that matters is more useless "certifications" and working one's ass off in underpaid crap jobs just to survive, much less afford a date?
Fix minimum wages, overtime limits and job supplies, and (young) people will start procreating all on their own!
Majority of marriages in south east Asia and India are arranged marriages. There's nothing unethical about it.
In many countries, the husband has a legal right to demand sex from his wife and rape in a marriage is not a crime either - in fact, even "civilized" countries such as Germany had it until recently, it took us Germans until 1998 to finally make marital rape a crime. One of the politicians in favor of keeping it legal actually ended up being our current Interior Minister but ah well, I digress... point is, the line between arranged and outright forced marriage is thin, very thin.
JFK was right when he said a rising tide lifts all boats. Every politician everywhere should make this a foundation of their platform.
It's not good. Our civilization is quickly becoming inhospitable to humans.
But realistically currently controlling population is the aspect that is most important so improving well being should be done in a way that does not result in a higher birth rate.
Transferrin receptor, Temporary Fly restriction, Terrain Following Radar, Time Frequency Representation
And a Truck in Thailand is named TFR also...
Your parent comment is right in pointing out that it is not a familiar abbreviation.
Having a child used to be a random experiment and you needed to make sure that one makes it through to care for you when you will be old or sick. Pensions, health and welfare systems and much better child mortality rates make it unnecessary to have many children. A replacement fertility rate of slightly over 2.0-2.1 is/would be fine in developed countries.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab...
(You can change the countries displayed by clicking the (+) sign on the right hand side of the graph. I preselected UK, US, Germany, Iran and South Korea here.)
Yeah, but that's now what we're having. My country sits at 1.4, and the only subpopulations with above replacement rate TFR are non-indigenous, so to speak.
South Korea has a TFR of below 1.
Japan has a TFR of ~1.4.
Most European countries are somewhere between 1.4 and ~1.7.
The US is below 2.
The West is dying out, and has been for a while.
And many developed countries are far below that. That's what I read the parent to write about, not the shift from pre-industrial to industrial times.
I don't think that was the idea, rather: fix the circumstances and the people will do the rest themselves.
> For example in India's case it would be madness to encourage even more fertility.
And fertility rates there haven't dropped as they did in the developed world, so it's really not the same issue.
That depends on the definition of "better". In purely material terms, the developed world is the best there ever was. Yet depression, drug abuse, loneliness etc are rising, so maybe humans require more than just material things.
For animals, living in a zoo is the best thing to do. Steady meals, a doctor on call and they'll even bring you mates to reproduce. Yet somehow, many animals in captivity don't want to breed, maybe it's similar for humans.
Medicine has improved such that it is far less of an evolutionary pressure. I imagine psychological well being, and wealth are more of an issue. It would be interesting to look at the correlation between mental health and wealth, or if there’s a key point between them.
Or there could be a selection pressure for more social groups of humans, a eusocial society, I can’t remember who suggested that.
We really do not need more humans, we are not an endangered species. The only reason we think we do is because many societies have essentially created Ponzi schemes where the welfare of the elderly generation relies on ever increasing numbers of younger generations, which will inevitably become unsustainable.
According to the dictionary "inhospitable" means "Unfavorable to life or growth", and it's much harder for me to have one children than it was for my grandparents to have five.
The problem for men is that the women generally don't think the average man is good enough.
The problem for women is that they're mostly lusting after and eventually, in the long run, sharing the same top 20% men.
If you're a man, it's a winner takes all market. Either almost all women desire you, or not a single one does.
Arranged marriage used to solve this.
It's a little dramatic, but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2briZ6fB0 explains it well.
Firstly, the way you interact with and judge strangers is completely different to the way you behave with your friends who you've known for 10 years. The us vs them tribal mentality is built into our brains. Random people are considered as disposable as you don't have any attachment to them and can effectively never see them again in your life if you choose so. Smartphones allow us to instantly tap into an infinite pool of strangers.
Secondly, social media lets us see the lives of the top 0.1% every day. Beforehand you lived in your small filter bubble and didn't know any better. Most people don't look like or hang around with fitness stars or male models in real life. But when you follow a ton of them on Instagram and see their photos daily, your mindset and standards start to change.
Third, the amount of choices online is effectively limitless and a "candy store" effect happens. Why would you pick an "ok" candy when there's 100 brands to pick from that taste like heaven in your mouth?
And really, arranged marriage as a "solution"? Really?
I always feel like this is swept under the carpet because 1) victims are male, and who cares about males, and 2) there is no easy solution to it.
I'm not sure that gp would be the person to implement it, but if the problem is a literal read of the headline then arranged marriages are a reasonable solution. I might be about to learn some, but I'm not aware of any compelling argument that arranged marriage + liberal approach to divorce wouldn't work well vs the western-style dating system.
Something like half of marriages (major Anglosphere countries) end in divorce,and there are some extremely well grounded stereotypes suggesting that people under the age of 30 don't make great long-term decisions. Self-assessing your prospects as a young person is also difficult; there isn't a lot of life experience to fall back on.
In principle it is better for people to organise themselves personally. But if that isn't working out, then a more communal effort is a reasonable fallback. It probably wouldn't lead to worse outcomes.
If the "top 20%" (in the example above) married the opposite "top 20%" and this permanently removed them from the pool of available young people, then the matching could proceed on the rest. But if instead they form temporary bonds, then the system is more complicated, and you can have a state where (perhaps) the top 50% of one side take turns with the top 20% of the other. By "take turns" (apologies if it's a strange phrase) I mean both medium term dating and marriage with divorce, both common patterns now (e.g. some people are coupled most years of their 20s, some just a few).
But seriously, think about the implications of these numbers: do 8 women just patiently wait in line for 2 men, doing literally nothing in the meantime while the remaining 8 men just stare at their feet or something? Is it something that people think actually happens in real life?
Where the stat kind of fails flat is that the same is true of the top 20% of women.
That said, the model (with no statement being made of how much that model reflects reality) being described is sequential monogamy. One of the top 20% men will continuously have one or two partners, switching them out for new ones; the rest of the men will only rarely get a partner; and women will fall between those two. Matching them percentile-to-percentile, the average number of new partners in some timespan for a given percentile for women will be larger for women than for men, up until some crossover percentile X% at which point men will have more partners.
I do think that if a person's primary mode of dating is through online apps, they end up with a skewed mental model of what dating is like. They are, however, already the main mode of new relationships being formed, and perhaps are still increasing in importance.
[0] "Top 20%" being defined as the 20% of men who have the most sexual partners
Sorry, repeating the same point won't make it any more true. Still haven't seen any evidence for this stat, only American stereotypes.
It's hard to track people's sex lives for obvious logistical/ethical reasons, but the most accurate study I've read on that was about teenagers in a high-school in a small rural town, so a closed environment that's easy to control. Forgot the link, will track it down if you're interested. But basically the "sex encounter" graph was fairly evenly spread and evenly balanced between men and women. Sure enough there were "clusters" but they were engaged with each other, not monopolizing 80% of everyone.
As it turns out, if your social circle is made up of sociosexually unrestricted people, everyone involved is going to have lots of sex. If it's made up of restricted people, few people are going to have encounters. But one person or two keeping all women in a sort of "serial monogamous schedule" while they do liteally nothing else? That doesn't make sense and I've never seen it happen, nor have I read any actual scientific study about this.
The social skills of the youth are also getting worse due to smartphones, leading to less interaction in schools at workplaces etc
1. The 80/20 rule is a rule of thumb that happens to apply in many fields, but you can't take it as a general law and stipulate that "Probably the top 20% [0] of men are involved in the 80% of heterosexual sexual couplings". It's an empirical question.
2. "the same is true of the top 20% of women". No, probably not. The statistics for men and women look quite different (which goes to show that you can't just apply the 80/20 "rule" willy-nilly).
If anything, our evolutionary history indicates a promiscuous lifestyle with everyone having sex with everyone else and post-spermatic competition.
Certainly not in the environments that I frequent and not in my circle of friends either. Lots of normal couples, though.
If you want to find these people, they will be at the night club. In the gym locker room. In the suggestion list of your Instagram feed.
To reiterate from the article: unemployment is high. Wages are low. Prices are high.
Improve the economic well-being of the median person, and what will happen? People will be more confident in their futures, have more leisure time, and will be happier.
Every school of economics agrees on this. They differ in what they recommend to achieve it.
For South Korea, unemployment is quite low at 3.8%, but youth unemployment is over 10%:
https://tradingeconomics.com/south-korea/youth-unemployment-...
Perhaps if dating is too time-intensive for these people, they should (somewhat) go back to arranged marriages. Also, if one otherwise has to go on many dates, arranged dates/marriages are probably less expensive. Finally, this should also increase the safety aspects that, according to the article, many young people fear.
For men, yes.
As long as they have all the money and can have lovers, how is that even a question?
Not sure if that's the case in historic Germanic regions, but it's a crutch to take the principle "women are universally oppressed by men" and believe that's all you need in order to make any statement about gender across all of time and space.
It wasn't (aside from food and other common needs).
> it's a crutch to take the principle "women are universally oppressed by men"
I did not say that. The OP spoke of centuries where arranged marriages were common in Germany, and there's no doubt that women did not have equal rights during that time. The crutch here is to define "success of marriages" through fertility rates and number of divorces.
Also, giving women free reign is causing great inequality between men and women in their chances of having a partner and forming a family, which I believe will be problematic in the future. Very well explained by this other user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19891412
His point wasn't about happiness for either party, it was that men simply had more societal control and rights than woman at the time arranged marriages were common - so it wasnt so much a partnership as it was one party having a huge amount of control over the other party's autonomy. That may not be the case with arranged marriages today, but I think the historical trend points in that direction.
>Also, giving women free reign is causing great inequality between men and women in their chances of having a partner and forming a family, which I believe will be problematic in the future. Very well explained by this other user:
This is just sexist drivel, to me you're a.) making frankly unwarranted generalizations about how both genders date, b.) reiterating the shirt 80/20 meme spouted by right wing incels, and c) proposing a system that takes away both party's freedom of choice with relationships because it's "unfair" to men.
Meh, in my experience (Indians I know) females in both families have the same amount of power when choosing a mate, even more power than males I'd say.
>This is just sexist
Reality is sexist. Both genders are different. That's just the way it is.
>making frankly unwarranted generalizations about how both genders date
You have statistics here, which paint a broader picture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19601600
>reiterating the shirt 80/20 meme spouted by right wing incels
Why is my argument bad? "People I don't like say the same thing" is not an argument.
>proposing a system that takes away both party's freedom of choice with relationships because it's "unfair" to men
I didn't propose that we go back to arranged marriages, and I agree that there's no easy solution. In fact I've got nothing to propose. The fact that there's no solution doesn't mean we should just pretend there's no problem.
Either way, ok there are some biological differences between the genders and reality can be sexist, but neither of those points support or justify what you are saying about men and woman.
Can you be more specific on what in the link is suppose to support your point?
And the "80/20 rule" is a bad argument because it isn't supported by actual studies or whatever as far as I know, its more of a gross misuse of the Pareto rule by right-wing incels, Redpillers, or whoever to how woman date.
Edit: that is not to say, that sometimes relationships don't dissolve for good reasons... but even then, more could be done to make things fair, predictable, etc. as opposed to incentivizing both parties, and their lawyers, to fight and be as mean and nasty to each other as possible.
There are cultures and countries for which this is true but Germany is not one of them.
> The Western European marriage pattern is a family and demographic pattern that is marked by comparatively late marriage (in the middle twenties), especially for women, with a generally small age difference between the spouses, a significant proportion of women who remain unmarried, and the establishment of a neolocal household after the couple has married. In 1965, John Hajnal discovered that Europe is divided into two areas characterized by a different patterns of nuptiality. To the west of the line, marriage rates and thus fertility were comparatively low and a significant minority of women married late or remained single and most families were nuclear; to the east of the line and in the Mediterranean and particular regions of Northwestern Europe, early marriage and extended family homes were the norm and high fertility was countered by high mortality.[1][2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_marriage_patt...
> There are cultures and countries for which this is true but Germany is not one of them.
My grandmother (from Germany) told me how in former generations, it was not uncommon for parents to look out for marriage partners for their children. Formally, this is indeed not an arranged marriage, but de-facto, it mostly is/was.
EDIT: Or even more indirectly, parents send/sent their children to social occasions where the child is very likely to meet the kind of marriage partners that the parents desire. To me, this still has a strong "smell" of (partly-)arranged marriage.
> parents send/sent their children to social occasions
Absolutely people try to position their kids into the best social class they can. And still do, this is 90% of what parents house-shopping for "good schools" are doing, not to mention the great college admissions game. But this is not the same thing as an arranged marriage culture.
If that were true people wouldn't automatically switch to love marriage when uncoerced. My experience of dating people from cultures where arranged marriage is still a (dwindling) thing tells me that no, they absolutely wouldn't go back to the days where it was prevalent.
"But they learned to make do and be happy in the end!" is not an argument. It can be used to justify literally any practice, because people always strive to be happy even in the worst conditions.
Seriously, what's with people wanting to coerce other people's romantic lives? When did we switch from "live and let live" to "the state should give me a girlfriend"?
Hey, if the state (that is: the people that pay taxes) should give you free food, housing, education, health care etc - why stop at romance?
When people start treating jobs like marriages (a nurtured ideology), this is what you get...