Its only motivator is to get you and someone else to start making babies as soon as possible. Which is often what the users want too.
Maybe they should have a Rebound app as well.
The societal costs otherwise aren't just the obvious direct costs - there are other things like (in divorces where there are children involved) negative effects on labour force mobility.
There are many situations for which a divorce is better than staying in a bad mariage, but divorce are still obviously costly for society: it drives the housing demand up, the legal process is costly and encumbers courts, single-mom households are more prone to poverty and its negative effects, etc.
The key point is that ideal for individuals (a couple that is happy together) is also the ideal for governments.
I give it about a month before they start gaming the algorithm to pair people who are likely to be on government benefits with people who can support them.
You make $150k, congratulations all your matches are McDonalds crew members.
You make $200k, the same but now they're all mentally ill because the algorithm deems you capable of supporting thyat too.
This is the primary worry with governments getting involved with dating apps, is it not?
Many of our countries are just one election cycle away from the politicians mandating that the official government dating app only incentivise Anglo-Saxon baby-making...
<insert bad faith comment about how it's ok because they're not literally sterilizing anyone and you can opt out of you want>
(bonus points if it's from an account that has a bunch of comments whining about interface defaults and algorithmic nudges matter in technical contexts)
For a given quality of "output" at age 18 it takes a certain amount of input to get there, at least at a macro level.
Even assuming that you can figure something out that doesn't suck and produce way to high of a ratio of shitty non-productive people the way the current foster care system does, where is the surplus that the state can seize to raise these kids gonna come from?
If artificial wombs will get them to stop forcing women to have children they don't want or can't afford, that should have many economic advantages.
Consider for example, if we didn't force 13 year old rape victims to give birth and raise children (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/14/mississippi-ab...). The pregnant child could focus on healing from what she went through, complete her education, get a well paying job and be a stronger contributor to the economy. The infant wouldn't be raised by a traumatized and impoverished 7th grader which could help raise the "quality of output" as you put it. To be honest though, I suspect they really just want an underclass to exploit so "quality" isn't a metric they're worried about.
Second, I wasn't even looking at it on that level. I was just looking at the high level economics. I'm saying that it takes certain amount of material plenty to get a kid from vagina to workforce. You've got food, clothing, the labor of educators, etc, etc, etc. None of that is free. Current foster care system costs do not scale. Our society is simply not wealthy enough to afford that for any sizable fraction of children. You could perhaps cheapen it up but I don't see much potential there since the outcomes are already sub par. You could perhaps make it more efficient, but what form would that take?
Unless we commit to walking back the standards of acceptable levels of investment in children by 70-100yr there's just no way rich western countries are gonna have more kids. Even if you pop them out of artificial wombs the whole rest of the "infant to workforce" pipeline is a mess.
> Current foster care system costs do not scale. Our society is simply not wealthy enough to afford that for any sizable fraction of children.
I suspect that the US is more than wealthy enough, it's just historically been unwilling to do any better. It would take some massive changes, and there'd still need to be a lot of administration to make sure that the kids were safe and well cared for, but our current foster care expenses probably aren't a good way to judge the cost.
Forster care is hugely inefficient and involves a lot of overhead which pushes the price tag way above the usual cost of raising a child. A child might cost a typical family $18,000 a year, but the cost for one child in the foster care system over that same period could cost $40,000 to $200,000.
Many of those costs wouldn't apply to a situation where the state was committed to raising a kid from birth though. For example all the legal costs involved in determining if kids should be placed into or taken out the system and then also doing that wouldn't exist. There would a lot less need for kids to be shuffled around. Plus lots of kids in the system need extra care, either because those needs made it impossible for their parents to care for them, or because they ended up in the system after traumatic circumstances.
Or at least to start practicing how to make babies.