Tokyo dating app to promote marriage, keep out phonies

https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15292637

by rntn • 2 years ago

19 27 2 years ago

Such performative garbage. If your society is structured such that you cannot have a child without the whole family being completely miserable, a dating app will not help you. But the government already knows that, they just don't want to change. You reap what you sow.

Rinzler898• 2 years ago

Most of highly wealthy and developed parts of the west (North America, Europe, Australia, etc) don't have Japanese society's strict conformism issues (quite the opposite actually) and yet birth rates of the locals are still shit, depending on immigration to stay positive.

What if, birth rates are a much more complex topic that can't be reducted just to one cause or the other but a cumulation of multiple factors.

Personally from where I'm standing (EU urbanite), I see the falling birthrates seem to be mostly caused by unaffordable housing in the big cities where most young people live, which seems to plague most of the developed west, as that's where all the jobs the young generations are taking, but there's no affordable space to raise a family in.

Sure, you can move out of big cities to the countryside with affordable land, but you'll either have to give up your white collar job and social circles you worked so hard for, or spend hours per day commuting (no, fully remote work isn't an option for most employees unfortunately). So middle class couples are struck between a rock and hard place where they're constantly waiting for the winds to turn in their favor till their biological clocks run out.

To me it seems that mass urbanization, as in the move from rural to urban, is a huge factor in killing birthrates across the world, not just the west, but also in places like China who in their rural poverty days had too many people that they had to cap the max number of children by law and now when a lot of it is urbanized and developed, they have the exact opposite problem.

jwells89• 2 years ago

Housing being unaffordable is a big one, but in my opinion the bigger aspect (which housing factors into) is long-term financial security (as in, there being little to no risk of financial crisis in the ~20 year timespan of raising a family) sitting just beyond reach. This incentivizes putting off having children as long as possible in attempt to achieve aforementioned security, but many never reach that point and end up never starting a family.

This isn’t a factor for the very poor or very wealthy, because financial security was never a possibility for the former to begin with and the latter already have it. Everybody in between gets tied up trying to become the latter because it seems possible, even if it’s not probable.

downrightmike2• 2 years ago

That's because we also have the same thing: "If your society is structured such that you cannot have a child without the whole family being completely miserable"

Japan is basically where we'll be in 30 years if we are extremely lucky

bitshiftfaced• 2 years ago

Could you elaborate on what you mean? How is society structured (and by whom?) to make families miserable if they have a kid?

intrasight• 2 years ago

"Users will also be required to enter 15 items of personal information, including height, educational background and occupation, which will be disclosed to potential matches."

Can only imagine the unintended consequences here.

Rinzler898• 2 years ago

I've seen an episode from Ricky Gervias's "An Idiot Abroad" satire-documentary, where this British guy was trying out a dating matching service in India around 2009 and you had to provide this exact kind of personal information, since as a man you were judged mainly on those factors: academic titles, career, salary, wealth, family background. Some parts of Asia seem very status and wealth oriented to me. Brutal and sad.

quanto• 2 years ago

For any transaction in a market, two things are needed

1. price: a number to be agreed upon

2. liquidity: availability of a willing buyer and a willing seller to transact at some price

A seller can set a price for her item very high; even if there are many otherwise willing buyers, no one will buy the item due to the unreasonable price. Conversely, even if the price is fair (by some common metric), sellers and buyers may not transact due to the opaqueness of the market: the sellers and buyers may not know the availability. This is why auction houses/farmers' markets exist: to make the information more available and make the market less opaque.

In a dating market, a dating app solves the problem with (2) liquidity, but it does not help with (1) price. In fact, it makes the problem with (1) price worse by giving people the illusion of choice and availability, inflating their egos and thus asking for unreasonable prices. In other words, expectations for romantic partners are higher than ever, but both economic and social factors contribute to people not meeting these requirements. Japan's NEET phenomenon is a classic, well-studied example of a problem with (1).

Rinzler898• 2 years ago

In fact, it makes the problem with (1) price worse by giving people the illusion of choice and availability, inflating their egos and thus asking for unreasonable prices.

Worse for who? The dating app's goal is to keep you as a long term paying customer, not help you find THE ONE quickly. So if people are constantly mismatching due to inflated egos, but staying on the platform due to the illusion of overabundance, it's a slam dunk for the dating app's shareholders' bottom line. People finding their mate quickly is bad for business.

It seems that dating, just like with housing and healthcare, if you turn it into a private business for shareholder to rentseek on, it's guaranteed to be turned to shit for most people as they're now seen as cash cows to be milked for all they're worth rather than human being with human problems.

megadal3• 2 years ago

That's why dating apps should focus on lifestyle and romance as well as matching.

Couples still could use apps to help coordinate their dates, etc. find suggestions of places to go, meet other couples for double dates, find couples events nearby etc...

squigz• 2 years ago

There's something deeply unsettling to me about referring to intimate human relationships in terms of a market.

RockRobotRock• 2 years ago

It's really the HN special.

tuatoru• 2 years ago

There are six (maybe more, but I have six so far) factors in low nuptiality (marriage rates)[1] and consequently sub-replacement fertility, under the headings of religion, medicine, technology, geography, sociology, and ethics.

1. Secularism. Secular populations are less fertile than highly religious populations.

2. Infant survival (low infant mortality).

3. Mechanisation particularly of agriculture.

4. Urbanisation.

5. Credentialism, the social requirement for people to spend an increasing fraction of their fertile years in pre-employment education. Simple literacy is also pretty important in causing early fertility decline in developing countries.

6. Universalism together with a tolerance for inequality. Universalism is applying the same rules to everyone, so women can enter the workforce and make their own life decisions just as men do. Tolerance for inequality I hope I don't have to explain. (I am split whether this is one factor or two.)

There is some interlinkage in these, they are not all totally orthogonal, but they are all fairly distinct dimensions of the problem.

Japan (and South Korea, and China) max out on credentialism and tolerance for inequality but also score highly in all of the others.

Finally this is a great example of one of Iain Banks's "Outside Context Problems".

More than a black swan, it's a problem that governments are simply not equipped to understand or in some cases even see, so they can't do anything to solve it.

1. https://www.allendowney.com/blog/2020/10/21/millennials-are-...

Overtonwindow• 2 years ago

This sounds a little dystopian. Almost like arranged marriages. Instead of creating an app for dating, I think the Japanese government needs to undergo severe reforms of employment, and work/life balance. There is so little time for actual dating.

My understanding is that Japanese men work ridiculous hours, and they are expected to go out drinking with their coworkers after work, and by the time they get home, they can only get sleep before they have to return to work the next day. The relentless salary man focus cannot possibly lend itself to proper dating, courtship, marriage, and children.

reciprocity• 2 years ago

As far as I'm aware there have been a number of efforts to counteract declining birth rates - in South Korea, at least. I think this idea is worth exploration but I hope they're giving this great consideration and thinking about this idea in terms of its success in any long term time frame.

More generally I'm wondering if there are more reasons as to why the Tokyo government is pursuing this other than declining birth rates. Wouldn't broader reform be more effective over a dating app? I guess a dating app would be "way easier" to design and manage (if this isn't just two programmers and a parrot in some basement somewhere), but by that metric wouldn't you view this as a half-baked solution to a much larger problem? Declining birth rates is a pretty big reason to look into implementing or passing something that isn't low effort, comparatively? One advantage here is that this wouldn't have misaligned incentives like the dating apps people here are already familiar with. The housing market, financial security, loneliness, work/life balance; this idea is interacting with many themes.

egberts1• 2 years ago

Best way to boost birth rate is to DRASTICALLY give more tax breaks for having children for middle-class folks, and might be the only way.

Tokyo dating app to promote marriage, keep out phonies

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