You know, there's probably fewer perverse incentives with a government run dating service. Obviously I can imagine ways it could suck, but when I compare them to how commercial dating services are run it's hard to see how they could do a _worse_ job.
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.
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.
> 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.
Things similar to GDS exist in many wealthy countries by now. And quite a few of them do work more or less. But it you ever get to work with the government on something like this or even just get a peek behind the scenes at how critical software decisions are made, you would share the same opinion.
my previous comment was about my peek behind the scenes.
the worst software decisions were primarily about corruption, even when they looked like they were about competence.
ime the private sector isnt any more competent on average it's just that most companies' IT budgets can't be milked endlessly with the right connection. even there there are exceptions though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the early 20th century, most women in the United States did not work outside the home, and those who did were primarily young and unmarried. In that era, just 20 percent of all women were “gainful workers,” as the Census Bureau then categorized labor force participation outside the home, and only 5 percent of those married were categorized as such. (<a href="https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-history-of-womens-work-and-wages-and-how-it-has-created-success-for-us-all/" rel="nofollow">https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-history-of-womens-wor...)
A marriage bar is the practice of restricting the employment of married women. Common in English-speaking countries from the late 19th century to the 1970s, the practice often called for the termination of the employment of a woman on her marriage, especially in teaching and clerical occupations. Further, widowed women with children were still considered to be married at times, preventing them from being hired, as well. (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_bar" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_bar)
> the middle class lifestyle you're suggesting doesn't arise until after WWII.
Most US families owned a car before WWII. 60% in 1929.
Around half of the people in the US owned their home in 1890. They actually owned the homes too. Before 1934 Americans typically paid off their homes in just 3-5 years. After that the 15 and 30 year mortgage had a strong majority of Americans in houses, but they were actually owned by the bank for decades.
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.
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.
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.
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 <a href="https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/63/2/695/409215/Decoupled-The-Persistent-Relevance-of-Marriage-for" rel="nofollow">https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/63/2/695/4092...
water-data-dude · · focus · HN ↗
pcthrowaway · · focus · HN ↗
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.
phreeza · · focus · HN ↗
ant6n · · focus · HN ↗
zurfer · · focus · HN ↗
hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
intended · · focus · HN ↗
What size of population are you considering for this hypothetical nation?
hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
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?
intended · · focus · HN ↗
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.
hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
intended · · focus · HN ↗
iso1631 · · focus · HN ↗
That's 1000 times smaller than your "few billion" scale, before you remove those already in partnerships or those who don't want to.
intended · · focus · HN ↗
> 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.
sigmoid10 · · focus · HN ↗
pydry · · focus · HN ↗
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).
sigmoid10 · · focus · HN ↗
pydry · · focus · HN ↗
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.
sigmoid10 · · focus · HN ↗
pydry · · focus · HN ↗
the worst software decisions were primarily about corruption, even when they looked like they were about competence.
ime the private sector isnt any more competent on average it's just that most companies' IT budgets can't be milked endlessly with the right connection. even there there are exceptions though.
eru · · focus · HN ↗
4848488484 · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
expedition32 · · focus · HN ↗
Retric · · focus · HN ↗
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.
hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
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.
watwut · · focus · HN ↗
hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
If we want them to have 3+ children, we need to reduce these sources of friction of doing so.
sacado2 · · focus · HN ↗
hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
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.
b3ing · · focus · HN ↗
somenameforme · · focus · HN ↗
hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
"Just stop preferring that"? Good luck enforcing that.
KptMarchewa · · focus · HN ↗
Lvl999Noob · · focus · HN ↗
hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
I guess this will work for something like 10-20%? Maybe? (Speaking from a very german cultural background)
watwut · · focus · HN ↗
KptMarchewa · · focus · HN ↗
Even then, it would not solve any problems here, really.
bragh · · focus · HN ↗
On one hand, all of this is understandable, but on the other hand these policies do indeed raise the cost of having children.
hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
Calazon · · focus · HN ↗
kubb · · focus · HN ↗
Fuck that.
Amezarak · · focus · HN ↗
graemep · · focus · HN ↗
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.
hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
No one said that one cannot make do. One can always make do.
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
cucumber3732842 · · focus · HN ↗
That's a lot of bodies.
watwut · · focus · HN ↗
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
jcranmer · · focus · HN ↗
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.
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
A marriage bar is the practice of restricting the employment of married women. Common in English-speaking countries from the late 19th century to the 1970s, the practice often called for the termination of the employment of a woman on her marriage, especially in teaching and clerical occupations. Further, widowed women with children were still considered to be married at times, preventing them from being hired, as well. (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_bar" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_bar)
> the middle class lifestyle you're suggesting doesn't arise until after WWII.
Most US families owned a car before WWII. 60% in 1929. Around half of the people in the US owned their home in 1890. They actually owned the homes too. Before 1934 Americans typically paid off their homes in just 3-5 years. After that the 15 and 30 year mortgage had a strong majority of Americans in houses, but they were actually owned by the bank for decades.
graemep · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
bluGill · · focus · HN ↗
pcthrowaway · · focus · HN ↗
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.
intended · · focus · HN ↗
As a worse case example, you could succeed by matching people least likely to abort, but most likely to have multiple partners.
derangedHorse · · focus · HN ↗
intended · · focus · HN ↗
Even without my personal experience being used, we see the outcomes and decisions made by dating firms.
Firms have to satisfy their investors/shareholders.
fidotron · · focus · HN ↗
forshaper · · focus · HN ↗
bluecheese452 · · focus · HN ↗
ndiddy · · focus · HN ↗