Thread

Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm

466 points · 499 comments · rzk

janalsncm · 1790819453 · focus · HN ↗
In principle this can be a lot better than regular dating apps.
Tinder doesn’t know if they were successful or not. They just know you stopped opening the app. In fact they are incentivized not to make matches that lead to marriage, because then you will stop paying.
The government knows whether you got married and stayed married, and given the social cost of divorce, they are pretty incentivized to keep people married.
1. derangedHorse · 1790822474 · focus · HN ↗
  > given the social cost of divorce
  I think they're more concerned about their fertility rate and labor force. A 0.87 total fertility rate for 2025 [1] is pretty bad.
  [1] <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-12/singapore-low-fertility-rate-existential-challenge/106397470" rel="nofollow">https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-12/singapore-low-fertili...
  1. yutter4 · 1790822990 · focus · HN ↗
    Western governments don't seem at all concerned about this, unfortunately. They no longer represent the people, they represent the economy. And the economy is far more interested in importing millions of unskilled adult migrants from developing countries who are immediately eligible for debt, rent, mortgages, and low-paying jobs to prop up the GDP, rather than a crying baby that will leech on public services for 18 years beforehand. Culture, stability, safety, happiness, long-term prosperity and survival be damned.
    aprilthird2021 · 1790831690 · focus · HN ↗
    > And the economy is far more interested in importing millions of unskilled adult migrants from developing countries who are immediately eligible for debt, rent, mortgages, and low-paying jobs to prop up the GDP, rather than a crying baby that will leech on public services for 18 years beforehand.
    This is such a wrong idea about immigration and the economy and how it grows that it's almost more funny than sad.
    No Western government is growing its economy through sectors primarily staffed with low wage workers. The US, for example has seen much of its growth in the tech sector. And as it's had huge numbers of immigrants to meet the demand caused by tech growth, real wages in that sector have risen for nearly a decade. And they outpace wage growth in many other sectors over that time.
    But regardless of that, when an economic sector grows it's able to convert human productivity into returns beyond the pay of those humans. And often that growth allows the return rate over productivity to increase over time, making it more attractive for a business to hire more and raise wages. In such a market, when a population doesn't grow, there needs to be workers from either outside the country or imported in. You can't just have mandated degrowth of growing businesses. That's worse than communism
    yutter4 · 1790834990 · focus · HN ↗
    >In such a market, when a population doesn't grow, there needs to be workers from either outside the country or imported in. You can't just have mandated degrowth of growing businesses.
    It's not mandated degrowth, it's natural. The people do not exist, no government is mandating that. You do not just get to import millions of foreigners to grow your slop app.
    I would far sooner have natural highs and lows in economic metrics as our population naturally adjusts to its environment than to have a corporatist multiethnic hellscape that holds "line must go up" as its founding truth. My children deserve a homeland, not an arbitrary economic zone surrounded by strangers in which to pay taxes.
    aprilthird2021 · 1790839979 · focus · HN ↗
    Mandated or not, degrowth of businesses would be disastrous for the people of any country. Your children won't have much of a future in your homeland if there are no economic opportunities for them when they are adults. They might even leave the homeland for good finding those opportunities elsewhere and becoming immigrants themselves. A tale as old as time for nearly every country whose economy hits the toilet the way you think the government should force it to

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