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Comment by pcthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

If people are oriented towards traditional relationships, then pairing people up younger probably leads to higher overall fertility rate in the population, so I could see governments with existentially declining fertility rates (read: almost all of them) taking an interest in actually providing a successful service here (unlike the commercial dating apps).

Of course, a lack of a match is not the only thing that prevents people from having kids, but I'm curious what the impact of an optimal matching service would be on fertility rates.

edit: I think governments might do well to provide funding for dating apps (whether privately or publicly owned) based on how many matches from the app actually lead to children. Completely flip the classical incentives on their head. Should be easy enough to ask if newborns were a product of a participating app as part of the birth certification process.

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At least in the US, the declining fertility rate seems to be entirely caused by a combination of fewer people getting married and fewer people having children out of wedlock. Between 2007 and 2023, the percentage of reproductive-age women who were married fell from 42% to 37% and the births/1,000 unmarried women fell from 41.0 to 30.3, but the births/1,000 married women actually went up a bit from 102.3 to 107.4. See https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/63/2/695/4092...

It is important to remember governments aren’t living things with their own agency. The people at the top running the governments are usually all dead in 30 years tops. They have no long term incentives. Put them in charge of a dating app and they will run it to enrich themselves just like all the other ones.

Nice idea in principle but (in the case of private) too long a time horizon for typical corporations to care about, sadly.

Dating Apps don’t need to be corporate. You could make an app for a whole country with a company of less than 10 people.

If there was no fraud and abuse and legal issues and ...

No, even with that. 10 people are a lot, actually.

From people who deal with the trust and safety side of things, at a national scale of a few billion people, 10 people is definitely not enough.

What size of population are you considering for this hypothetical nation?

Which problems do you see that would require all of this, given that it is a nation platform where you are authenticated via your government ID?

And which nations are scaled to a few billion people?

And they all date? Every single one of them? The married couples? The children and the elderly?

Every platform. Just being authenticated by government ID doesn’t change the issue. You still have fraud and inauthentic behavior.

India is a billion plus people. Google says that the dating app user base is 100mn, which is much lower than the total number of people who would use a government match making app.

That’s why the question regarding scale. That assumption makes a 10 person firm for a nation viable or impossible.

Singapore's population is 6 million, about 1.7 million are aged between 16 and 40.

That's 1000 times smaller than your "few billion" scale, before you remove those already in partnerships or those who don't want to.

The gp comment said:

> You could make an app for a whole country with a company of less than 10 people.

Perhaps you could do it for Singapore, I’d love to know how those 10 people would be split across functions, and how they would handle the fraud and safety issues that crop up.

In practice it would be 10 managers and in-between contractor types siphoning all allotted money and then an unexperienced dev building a terrible overburdened service that noone wants to use.

depends on the country. this type of corruption is guaranteed in some countries, less so in others. Singapore is usually good at avoiding it. Their online services are very good.

the government can switch up the incentives and for example make payment contingent on people actually using the platform as well as opening the tender to startup teams (usually they are locked out).

Sure it's easier to keep eyes on in a tiny country like Singapore, but basically all major western countries struggle with stuff like this because politics is way too spread out and ingrained with too many local interests. Strong federalism is the cradle of corruption, but if you can walk across your country in a day there's simply not enough room to federalize. OTOH federalism is necessary if your seat of government is 500 miles away, because there is no way for them to effectively govern local issues anymore.

The UK had some success with GDS. Not all IT in bigger countries is failures.

I honestly think that labeling corruption as corruption and a popular sentiment towards slamming a few people in jail for it would go a long way towards fixing these problems.

Instead even among the general public the sentiment is "government is just incompetent" which helps soften the reaction to it and thus indirectly encourages it to get worse.

There's no shortage of countries around the world that have dug themselves a corruption hole they struggle to get out of. It's easier to fix it starting from here than there but we don't want to end up there.

Amazon (and Tesla) famously had very patient shareholders, and they are both private companies.

If playing the super long game, the app could get a consistent fraction of tax revenue from generated new taxpayers.

Hell no. Sorry for the reaction, but market optimization under current market principles, will result in the narrowest interpretation of the goal.

As a worse case example, you could succeed by matching people least likely to abort, but most likely to have multiple partners.

I think it's unlikely for your worst case scenario to be realized. Underspecified objectives can cause unexpected results, but it can also lead to desired results. Fortunately experimentation is relatively cheap and tuning optimization metrics is the norm for most apps.

What is a traditional relationship? Fathers selling their daughter off?

People having “large” numbers of children.

The modern trend of most families with 0-2 kids isn’t sustainable. We don’t need to go back to 5+ being the norm but a self stable society needs to be able to offset non parents thus requiring 3+ children families to be quite common.

For that, one prerequisite would be housing that can house such families.

Which, in times of working from home, means 4 bedrooms, 2 offices, 1 living room.

Ideally with walls not built from paper mache, so that they can actually be used for encapsulation of different requirements.

So, in your opinion it is not possible to have kids unless you have 7(!) rooms?

Possible for sure, but not necessarily pleasant, which is for sure a significant part of the reasons why people decide against having (more) children.

If we want them to have 3+ children, we need to reduce these sources of friction of doing so.

Not everyone works from home. But if you do, you can live in unexpensive areas of your country, so it's a non-issue.

Well I mean the whole discussion was about "why is the fertility rate so low it should not be so low".

So that does sound like it is very much an issue. To someone, anyway. I don't really care. I have no horse in this race.

To cover the expected pedantic reply:

Of course technically it's everyone's problem. But just because it technically affects you doesn't mean that you have to emotionally involve yourself in stupid online discussions that don't comprehend systemic views and mistake them for personal whining.

Until you get laid off or they do RTO, then it’s move back to the big city

Traditionally families often just had one bedroom for children. That's what things like bunkbeds are for.

That might very well be, but now people evidently seem to prefer not doing that, so what is your point?

"Just stop preferring that"? Good luck enforcing that.

That still works up to like age 7. It really is needed for that age up to ~18, which means you can get with providing that service for ~15 years (multiple children) and then going back to smaller apartments.

Or you can keep the smaller apartments and make boarding schools more common. Small kids all live in the same room while the ones old enough to need their own space move out completely to a boarding school. Depending on the specifics, may be a much better solution overall.

Hm. Indeed that is an idea, but I'm not sure if that doesn't come with other downsides that might be undesirable.

I guess this will work for something like 10-20%? Maybe? (Speaking from a very german cultural background)

So like, the idea of traditional family is "have kids raised by an institution, have them visit you once in a while"?

I actually attended high school in that way in Poland, despite it being very rare here. I was 15 when I started. While I think it was great for me, I would not recommend doing it for younger people - you need some basic emotional maturity and safety.

Even then, it would not solve any problems here, really.

It is not about preference, but because of regulation. Nowadays the government demand is that each child needs to have a separate studying and sleeping area. If a sliding wall in a room counts as a separate area is up to the officials' discretion.

On one hand, all of this is understandable, but on the other hand these policies do indeed raise the cost of having children.

What government does that? That's something new to me.

I have never heard of a government demanding that. Where does that happen?

Where I live, even when government does make demands, as in the case of foster parenting, they still allow two boys or two girls to share a room.

As someone who ho grew up in a smalll bedroom with multiple siblings until I was 19…

Fuck that.

I'm not sure what your problem is with sheetrock, but you can achieve pretty high levels of sound isolation with sheetrock walls.

This is very much a worst case. It assumes three children, each with their own bedroom, and two work from home parents each with their own office.

Why do you need an entire room each for an office? I work in a corner of a bedroom, and have previously had a desk in a living room. I know lots of people who do the same. I know few families where both parents work from home. Where more than one person works from home they can share an office.

If people work from home to a large extent, less office space is required, so the cost of land should go down. It does not because most people are not working from home.

Yes, but, as said, there are probably also a lot of people that decide either against children at all or against having +1 of them due to these constraints.

No one said that one cannot make do. One can always make do.

Maybe we can also go back to the "traditional relationship" where a single person's income can pay for a house, a car, and support 7+ people.

You'll have to do that over the dead bodies of everyone who benefits from all those things being expensive.

That's a lot of bodies.

Was there a time when an average single person could do that and support did not meant "they live in abject poverty"?

For a time, everywhere people typically had homes and cars and families it was required that they could afford it all on a single person's income because women were property, and not allowed to work outside the home (at least after marriage), or get an education, or own anything.

What time do you think that was?

Exact times do vary by country, but female 'emancipation' is largely starting around WWI, whereas the middle class lifestyle you're suggesting doesn't arise until after WWII.

Lots of people did it in the 1970s. Maybe not one income, but one fill time income and one part time income.

That was never traditional anywhere. It was possible in the 1950s in a few places. Anyone thinking it was traditional is seriously undervaluing women's work.

I thought it was clear from context that I was referring to people who want to have kids with a romantic partner (I suppose for fertility rate purposes it doesn't even necessarily need to be with just one romantic partner, or within a monogamous relationship).

Lots of people don't want kids these days relative to 50 years ago, but even among those who do, they're delaying the process, often to the point where it becomes less ideal due to age. Many people who wanted kids when they were younger end up not having them as a result (and many who want them haven't had them yet).

Having a partner (or partners) to do it with is a significant factor for many, among other factors like concerns about affording food and housing for oneself, let alone for additional dependants.

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