Comment by wbillingsley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wbillingsley | Hacker News Reader

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Just removing the "another five'll be along tomorrow" effect of the way most dating apps work might help.

25 years married, so pardon my knowledge of modern dating being what I've heard on social media (which is always from people complaining about it, of either gender) as I'm not on any!

As I understand it, for a lot of young men, one of their preferences for settling down is that their partner's list of ex-partners is not longer than their own. (If so, there's is no point debating the gender-political rights or wrongs of their preferences because you're not going to be able to argue someone into falling in love or wanting to marry someone.) On swipe-dating apps, that creates an incentive for neither party to settle down. One party is so successful that the app keeps signalling they should keep their options open (here's more matches, why settle for this one). The other finds that matches pass their visible preferences for dating but not their invisible preferences for settling down with (because not being too successful at the dating game was one of their hidden preferences). The vitality of the market for dating kills the market for marriage.

I have met very few men for whom prospective partners' body counts is a red line. It might be a preference, but it's always in context of the larger picture.

I think there has been much topical research on this now, and from what I can glean, there are at least two forces working at the same time.

1. Gendered preferences didn't change, but society did. Women still prefer men who earn more than them (by a very wide margin). This would be okay if we still lived in the 1940s, but childless women outearn men now in most metro cities. Sometimes by a wide margin. Women are graduating in high-paying professions at ratios of 60:40, 70:30, and even higher, meaning this problem is getting much worse. Increasingly, the majority of women are focused on the top 10-20% of men who outearn them, to the exclusion of all other men. This is compounded because incomes are just one of many selectors. There is also height (which remains a surprisingly strong preference for women), attractiveness, many personality traits, social standing, wealth, political affiliation, etc.

2. Dating apps have made the above exponentially worse. It's very easy for a woman of average attractiveness (I say this in a academic sense, not derogatorily) to only swipe right on the most attractive men. Those men are perfectly happy to have a lot of casual sex with said women, but would never consider them for marriage. This has warped the perception of their "league." Many of these women end up 40 and alone and deeply unhappy. Or they "settle" for a man of average attractiveness and income and resent him.

This is almost impossible to untangle. We don't want women to be less educated, or earn less. We don't want them to feel like they're "settling." At the same time, there are many amazing men out there in their league, and they could have a happy marriage. I applaud Singapore trying something, because the future of the West looks like a lot of angry, bitter, single, childless, lonely people.

>the future of the West looks like a lot of angry, bitter, single, childless, lonely people

In the short term; longer term that culture will die out and the future will be evangelicals, ultra-orthodox Jews, the Amish and whatever other high-fertility subgroups migrate in in large enough number. Natural selection applies to culture just like it applies to genes, and cultures that don't produce enough children will be replaced by those that do.

You assume culture is unchangeable, like race. Right now their higher fertility seems to be balanced out by people leaving them, and this has been true for a while.

Religiosity is around 30-50% heritable (compared to 50-80% for IQ), and social conservatism is around 40-60% heritable. If the leaver culture remains low fertility, the personality traits that encourage leaving will be selected against.

This comment doesn't really respond to the parent; heritability says nothing at all about mutability or whether transmission is cultural.

Assuming such traits exist. Fact is, living on a farm for the sole purpose of reproduction is a shit life.

Yet another person talking about inheritability without understanding what the word means.

I find this oddly comforting :)

All of those cultures involve restricting women's rights.

Israel is a notable exception. They're well above replacement, even if we remove the Haredi. Women have full equality. I'm not sure what that means though. That healthy fertility requires constant war? Or that it requires high religiosity?

Supposedly, Tel Aviv University reports a TFR of 2.3, which I would not classify as well above replacement rate of 2.1.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/demography-in-israel-no-long...

>Haredi women average roughly 6.75 children, while non-ultra-Orthodox Jewish women have a rate of 2.3.

Haredi women all live in countries where they legally have full equal rights, and the recourse to stop being Haredi if they’re unhappy (and some do, but nearly all don’t).

They are also, ironically, more educated than Haredi men - girls’ schools are run almost entirely by female staff and teachers, and they give themselves a good secular education (performing well against national averages of high school education).

It is women who drive the perpetuation of Haredi culture amongst girls and women (and to some extent their boys), and most of them will tell you that they’re very happy to be Haredi.

Interesting, I do not understand how the power dynamics are working in the Haredi community. I also do not understand how they can be primary breadwinners with a TFR of 6.75. Doesn’t seem possible with working environments in most countries, unless Israel is also providing lots of subsidies.

https://news-archive.hds.harvard.edu/news/2015/03/24/heredi-...

>There is a paradox: on one hand, Haredi women are excluded in the Haredi public sphere. On the other hand, we must remember that Haredi women are the main bread winners of the community since the leaders decided that almost all men need to dedicate their lives to the study of the Talmud.

This is specific to Israel - Haredi men in other countries do work, and to some extent subsidize the men learning in Israel through charity.

Power dynamics and individual rights are nuanced. In Western liberal cultures women were officially given “the right to work”, but what it actually did was remove the right of women to choose not to work and raise kids instead.

Many women in developed countries feel like they can’t afford the children they want, and that is because the cost of living has been adjusted for two working adults per household.

Western liberal cultures are also breeding grounds for modern misogynistic movements and behaviors like the manosphere, (due to a large number of involuntarily celibate and childless men).

While it’s easy to point to traditional ritualistic differences between men and women in Haredi society, in practice it’s hard to be a misogynist when you have like 3 daughters.

>Many women in developed countries feel like they can’t afford the children they want, and that is because the cost of living has been adjusted for two working adults per household.

I don’t know, pretty much all women I have spoken to, almost all in the 90th percentile in income/wealth with the ability to to have more kids and have luxuries still choose to have 2 at most. Maybe 3 if they end up with 2 boys or 2 girls first. And that is because pregnancy and birth and breastfeeding and infant rearing suck.

Hell, as a man, I didn’t have to do any of that and I still wouldn’t want to have more than 2 kids. So whatever mentality leads to financially independent women choosing to have 7 kids is certainly very unique.

>in practice it’s hard to be a misogynist when you have like 3 daughters.

I have seen a lot of people be discriminatory towards groups of people, but choose to treat some members of that group of people better, e.g. if they are useful in some way or perhaps relatives, etc. They can even do it with traits they themselves have!

Single women are basically the happiest demographic category.

The way our society developed with the immense pressure on women to marry and general lack of autonomy led to the situation that given a choice they would often prefer to avoid this.

I don't think this is accurate, but perhaps it matters how you slice the data. Women's mental health has been steadily declining across all strata for decades - faster and worse than men's. It's at record lows now, irrespective of whether they are single, married, or with kids. For example, [the UK recorded a 46% increase in mental health issues among women aged 16-64 since 1993.](https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/sta...) Further, when we look at the data between single and married women, [married women in the U.S. General Social Survey (GSS) are about 78% more likely to describe themselves as “very happy”, while never-married women are about twice as likely to say they are “not too happy”.](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/08/27/marriage-h...)

The irony with all this data is that as women have achieved parity with men in all kinds of domains, their happiness has commensurately declined. This is one of those hot button topics which most sociologists refuse to research.

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