As well as regulating them, Western governments might want to actually fund high-quality, not-for-profit dating systems of some kind. Improved health for citizens, lessened extremism, not to mention possibly boosted population growth could result.
News article: https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/people/article/3248989/will-j...
Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39060790
So, how do we move "love and human relationships" back into a progressive position in a time when entrenched power profits from lonliness and division?
When you tell people that they’re unique individuals and self actualization is the highest virtue, there’s little room for family.
Will it swing back?
Because now we see other toxic stuff showing up that comes from individualism. Loneliness epidemic, scammers because lonely people are easier targets.
I wonder if there is a sweet spot somewhere in between.
Yeah, and many people in the US would be way more eager to do that had we had:
- affordable housing
- minimum wage that allows a single parent to support themselves
- universal healthcare
- mandated paid (and then, unpaid) parental leave
- free childcare
- substancial financial assistance to new parents
- walkable safe environments, transportation, and regulations that allow children to move around on their own
- widely available after-school programs
- free college education
...you get the drift. Dating isn't the bottleneck here.
How much would you have left over for raising children?
I guess the middle class needs to pay 45% effective tax rate on all income. And, upper incomes would need to pay about 55% effective tax rate.
> How much would you have left over for raising children?
How much more do you need if you have all of those benefits? Not much.
Nevermind how much of our tax money goes towards the MIC. Rather see our money go towards these programs to help one another, over bombs to tear people apart.
With many western countries also seeing a large growth in the retired population, that leaves a segment of the population heavily subsidizing the elderly and single parents, along with all other government programs and similar groups that need help (like the poor, students, those too sick to work, etc)
When you frame it that way, you're setting it up to fail, asking "everyone else" to pay tax dollars to support "one". How about instead: one of the population (namely ultra-wealthy people and businesses) subsidizing everyone else. Now, it's the larger "everyone else" who is benefitting, at the expense of a small group who should hold less democratic power due to its size.
I'm not saying you're doing this but phrases like the one quoted above are sometimes used to divide the "everyone else" group against each other, in order to erode support for programs that ultimately benefit them.
That said, with regards to dividing "everyone else" with such phrases, I wish politicians hadn't done so well leveraging phrases that best explain a program as divisive language. It is one part of the population subsidizing others, and there shouldn't be anything wrong with that. Politicians get involved, though and such phrases become weapons to keep "everyone else" divided and unaware how similar we all are. If you want to stay in power, just keep your people fighting themselves so they never look up.
But!
Turns out it doesn't work. At all.
Or remove old age benefits, and make it so you might only get them directly from your kids if the kids are willing to support you. That would put long term consequences more into view and link costs and benefits.
Society would rather take their chances with Gen Y and Millenials than open that pandoras box.
The issue being, they try to avoid paying more than the bare minimum anyway and if you pay less, that means dead old homeless people on the street. Would be a great advertisement to having children, thoug.
In my coutry, most people under 45 (who could actually bear children) doubt they will see any retirement ever. Of course that affects their desire for procreation as well.
I always thought this was closer to fair.
If (expected cost of child) >> (expected benefits for having child), are we really surprised that a lot of people decide not to?
If you want to look at the results when that changes to == or <, look at lower income families, where the US incentives are higher (additional low income-qualified programs + absolute tax breaks are more valuable) and child costs lower (greater use of public education and facilities).
But... given the nature of a free market, I expect adjusting the benefits for higher-income people would be cost-prohibitive.
Where exactly are all the workers going to come from to support this one? There's already a labor shortage, and presumably you want to make sure child-care workers are highly vetted. On top of this, with an aging population, there's a greater need for care workers for seniors, and here there's a lot of problems with these workers abusing the seniors.
>- walkable safe environments, transportation, and regulations that allow children to move around on their own
This would be great, but most Americans don't want this. They sure as hell aren't voting for it, and achieving it would require basically bulldozing most American cities. Americans have built themselves, ever since the end of WWII, a country and infrastructure that's entirely incompatible with the lifestyle you advocate here. I live in Tokyo now, and it's exactly what you're advocating here, but I simply can't imagine America somehow becoming like this in my lifetime. (It's one of the main reasons I came here.)
Anyway, as other posters have noted, other countries have much of what you want here, and their fertility rates are quite poor, worse than the US in fact.
If you really want to get people to have more children, you need to force society back to the "good old days", where women have far fewer rights, divorce is highly stigmatized, being non-religious or non-Christian is highly stigmatized, contraception is generally non-available, women basically can't have jobs except for schoolteachers (and only until they're married) or maids and need to just find a husband and become a SAHM, etc. Just look at the societies with high fertility, but contemporary and historically: they're absolutely horrible for women's rights. High fertility and large families have always been accomplished on the backs of oppressed women (and I'm not sure it was all that great for most men either).
> Where exactly are all the workers going to come from to support this one?
This extends to most child-cost related issues: childcare, primary-education, activities, secondary-education, tertiary-education.
Scaling the child:child-cost-worker ratio up needs to be a huge part of this.
Which is going to require some out of the box thinking (e.g. cultural acceptance of MOOCs / online degrees).
I suppose increasing salaries a lot might help, but we seem to be talking about government workers here, so that seems unlikely to happen.
I often hear similar arguments for the need to help parents offload certain portions of childcare so they can go to work, I don't know that I've ever really heard any meaningful push to help parents offload work so they can raise their children full-time.
Homeschooling has no quality control whatsoever--parents can just teach whatever the hell they want, which usually involves a lot of religious BS and skipping over all the science stuff. On top of that, they only teach their own kids. One of the reasons kids go to school is because one teacher can handle a class of 15-30 kids. If we all paid for one parent to stay at home with 1 or 2 kids, how the hell is society going to pay for that? It doesn't make any sense at all.
Raising children full-time is a luxury. It has to be paid for by one family member (usually the husband) working enough to pay for the entire family expenses, or keeping this term short enough that savings can be used until the kid is old enough that the parent can go back to work. There simply isn't enough money to tax people, then pay a portion of that back to those same people so they can stay at home.
You seem to have a base assumption that most people are bad parents and kids would be better off being raised by professionals. You also seem to have an assumption that both you and the state have the right to decide what is best for someone else's child. Maybe those are commonly held assumptions, but I definitely disagree with them and would be concerned that both could lead to a society that looks eerily similar to the Soviet Union.
There are two components of this problem: (1) allocation & (2) efficiency
Substituting others (or parents) for child care services is a reallocation. E.g. 1 hour of parent time instead of 1 hour of day care worker time.
Efficiency is instead looking at the "How many person-hours does it take to support 1 child in this way?" metric.
Blending them together muddies the solution, because both need to be improved.
We need to make sure that the most valuable allocation is being used. Whether that's parents receiving subsidized child care, so they can do more valuable work. Or whether it's making stay-at-home parenting financially tenable. Or offering both options!
But it's also using technology to push the scaling factor. I.e. it'd be great if every child received a 1 teacher:3 children ratio, but that would bankrupt every public school system in the country. So we've settled on our current ratio. But could we improve upon that...? (IMHO, tech to replace people for early childhood is dubious, but for late-primary there begin to be some options that aren't currently widely deployed)
And if we improved the scaling factor, we'd decrease costs (personal or government), which would open up reinvestment of those savings in incentive programs.
Is it fair to say you'd be on board with this kind of setup, where its effectively home schooling pooled to free up more parents to enter the workforce?
I'm less convinced that's impossible. E.g. better general classroom teacher + MOOC for math focus.
I know Khan videos were better-taught than some of my primary math courses...
Having specialized teachers, all being expected to generate their own lesson plans (based on local standards/templates, if existent), on very similar material, all across the country... doesn't seem like an efficient use of their skills.
If its a massive shift towards corporate taxes, I could probably get behind that.
That's the real paradigm shift.
A committed married couple having children at a healthy age, feeding them well, and keeping them safe are going to still perform extraordinarily well against what you've laid out, and will likely also have higher happiness levels.
It isn't immediately clear why this is a bad thing either. It seems intuitively fair, sustainable for the forseeable future, nobody is being forced to do anything against their will. Might be a good outcome. We can't all have growing populations; given the failures of manufacturing and energy policy in the west that would just lead to war and not having enough stuff to maintain a good lifestyle. We're already having trouble treading water when it comes to lifestyles, the last thing we need is more people.
Of course, population growth cannot continue forever, so we will have to figure this out anyway. Still, for any individual country, the smart move seems to be to stave it off for as long as possible, observe how other countries deal with it, and then implement the solutions that have actually worked for others yourself.
Money by itself is worthless if you can't exchange it for actually useful goods and services. So non-"pay-as-you-go" pensions cannot circumvent demography, either – if too many retirees with their accumulated capital would be chasing too little working-age people providing goods and services, you'd just get inflation and all your accumulated capital became worth less.
That's too sane! Human relationships are anathema to the profit, so what you suggest would be a disaster for capitalism and the meat grinder. Consumerism is driven by isolation, FOMO and insecurity. And without a supply of disocontented single young men, how will we feed the war machine?
Slightly less cynically, one of the big factors we've found in recent research for episode 2 of "Love Isn't" [0] relates to the lack of public spaces. In the UK we've decimated parks to build shopping centres and more housing, and most of the pubs have closed. We spoke to several wealthy and intelligent UK citizens in their 30s or 40s who say they are very frustrated because dating apps are rubbish, but where do you meet people IRL now?
With the current trend of more women graduating from university, this will probably get worse. Working towards getting more men into universities will end up benefiting women because it will probably create a healthier dating culture.
Without a financial stability and solved housing, this will be a hard one... hard to have a kid, if you have 4 roommates in your 30s. Let's not forget all the devaluing of trades and other non-college professions (where you start work at ~18, and start having kids at 20) in favour of colleges (in case of USA, with loans), slow rising careers and even if you manage to get a big enough house/apartment to put a kid in, you're 30+ by then, and having multiple kids is a lot harder.
Recruiters are just matchmakers after all.
If you start with the presumption that the government can do nothing but be a dystopia - it's easy to imagine ways anything can end up being a dystopia.
Do you think the government would be able to resist the temptation to engage in politics as it relates to dating?
Yeah.
I'd be willing to take that risk.
Don't get me wrong. I don't think the government is a good group to do this. I just think they're a less-bad group than the usual parties.
Yes, there are downsides to what is seen in the "secular west" as an illiberal over-involvement of families. 'Honour killings' and other regressive horrors can occur. But they're not the norm. Plus side is that healthy, supportive involvement from both sides of a family is super valuable.
But why stop at the family? Throughout most of human history the community, the village, respected friends etc, have held a really important place in matchmaking. Just read some Jane Austen :)
We like the illusion of total independence and choice. In 2024 we can have that. And thank goodness we've gotten past those old suffocating social norms that kept people in traps of class and normative gender roles.
But the model of isolated autonomous Bayesian-utility-maximising actors rationally selecting each other ... is a crock. We just don't do that. As soon as we get a serious date, what is the first thing we do... introduce them to our friends for approval!
So sure, there are any number of groups from which we could take healthier advice than from a for-profit company that feeds on loneliness and isolation, including maybe a benevolent government that funds services which ultimately result in better mental health and social stability.
Estimated rates of domestic violence are pretty high in those countries. That is the thing, if you make divorce socially costly, people will stay together whether happy or not.
I can barely pay my trash bill and can’t imagine a dating app run by any aspect of US federal, state, or local government.
it doesn't have to be bad, it just needs some effort and thought.
Have a law that lets citizens specify on which app they met their partner when getting married, and have the government pay a small (to the tune of $10) monthly subsidy to the makers of that app for as long as that marriage lasts. $10 per month per couple is not a lot of money for a government in the grand scheme of things, and the benefits to population growth and plain human happiness are incalculable.
I guess the fact that we disagree reaffirms the parent's point that we should look to studies/research instead of assuming.
https://www.science.org/content/article/fatherhood-decreases...
I think testosterone might have a big margin effect in unstable individuals.