When we keep animals in zoos and they refuse to breed, we consider this proof that their conditions are poor or even unacceptable. When TFRs plummet across the developed world, young people stop having sex, many consider this good because of overpopulation.
It's not good. Our civilization is quickly becoming inhospitable to humans.
Indeed. In fact the aim of controlling population is also to improve well being.
But realistically currently controlling population is the aspect that is most important so improving well being should be done in a way that does not result in a higher birth rate.
Actual problem is that writing "TFR" or "Total Fertility Rate" takes a constant time (independent from the number of readers) while everyone looking it up is function of the number of readers.
Your parent comment is right in pointing out that it is not a familiar abbreviation.
Not obvious to me, but it means Total Fertility Rate. From wikipedia, TFR of a population is basically the average number of children that would be born to a woman over her lifetime.
TFR (total fertility rate) plummets because it used to be necessary that it was way higher when the child mortality rate was higher - and indeed a decreased in fertility rate follows a decrease in child mortality with a few years of delay.
Having a child used to be a random experiment and you needed to make sure that one makes it through to care for you when you will be old or sick. Pensions, health and welfare systems and much better child mortality rates make it unnecessary to have many children. A replacement fertility rate of slightly over 2.0-2.1 is/would be fine in developed countries.
(You can change the countries displayed by clicking the (+) sign on the right hand side of the graph. I preselected UK, US, Germany, Iran and South Korea here.)
> A replacement fertility rate of slightly over 2.0-2.1 is/would be fine in developed countries.
Yeah, but that's now what we're having. My country sits at 1.4, and the only subpopulations with above replacement rate TFR are non-indigenous, so to speak.
South Korea has a TFR of below 1.
Japan has a TFR of ~1.4.
Most European countries are somewhere between 1.4 and ~1.7.
Becoming inhospitable to humans because of overpopulation in certain areas and skewed economic, political and ecological practices in all areas. This won't be fixed by forcing people to reproduce more. Each region's problems must be tackled differently. For example in India's case it would be madness to encourage even more fertility. This may not be the case in other areas. As a whole the planet has quite enough humans at 7 billion. We don't need so many unless we're planning on settling other worlds which is still more than a century away.
It's well established that people (nations and groups within nations) have fewer children as their circumstances improve. Fixing circumstances will lead to fewer children, not more.
This has only been true generally in the West since ~1800 or so. Charles Darwin had fewer grandchildren than children. It’s also not universally true even in the West. Sub populations with higher fertility for the wealthy exist, Mormons and Hasidim for two. Culture beats biology, see Hutterites and the Amish in the US.
> Better circumstances are responsible for low fertility rates, not bad circumstances.
That depends on the definition of "better". In purely material terms, the developed world is the best there ever was. Yet depression, drug abuse, loneliness etc are rising, so maybe humans require more than just material things.
For animals, living in a zoo is the best thing to do. Steady meals, a doctor on call and they'll even bring you mates to reproduce. Yet somehow, many animals in captivity don't want to breed, maybe it's similar for humans.
Exactly this, but it's also why, whilst we should all be conscious of what we're doing to the planet, I'm not so despondent about our future and population endlessly spiraling out of control. It's been shown that once a country achieves a GDP of somewhere around $6-7k they begin to take a bigger interest in issues like climate change, more efficient energy sources and population control more seriously (China is about there now; India, Indonesia, Thailand and other large population Asian countries are getting there pretty quickly). As a planet with finite resources in terms of food and energy we can support a global population of about 10-11 billion. If it's becoming such that once societies advance to a level of development we see in places like S Korea and Japan that population begins to balance out or even slightly decrease, is that such a bad thing?
The issue here isn't a slight decrease in population. Japan is facing a projected decline of 1/4 of their population by 2050. A change of that magnitude will mean severe consequences for their economy and overall culture. Even China has abandoned their one child policy and now has a birth rate of 1.6. We're sailing into uncharted territory where our only comparable previous experiences are famines or plagues.
The problem isn't just that the total population is declining. It is that the dependent population relative to working population is increasing. This leads to all sorts of distortions to how things are supposed to be.
This is when evolution kicks in. Those that can pair up and have children are more likely to be selected for in future generations
Medicine has improved such that it is far less of an evolutionary pressure. I imagine psychological well being, and wealth are more of an issue. It would be interesting to look at the correlation between mental health and wealth, or if there’s a key point between them.
Or there could be a selection pressure for more social groups of humans, a eusocial society, I can’t remember who suggested that.
No, civilization is not becoming inhospitable to humans, this is literally the best time in history to be alive, civilization has never been more hospitable than it is today.
We really do not need more humans, we are not an endangered species. The only reason we think we do is because many societies have essentially created Ponzi schemes where the welfare of the elderly generation relies on ever increasing numbers of younger generations, which will inevitably become unsustainable.
>No, civilization is not becoming inhospitable to humans, this is literally the best time in history to be alive, civilization has never been more hospitable than it is today.
According to the dictionary "inhospitable" means "Unfavorable to life or growth", and it's much harder for me to have one children than it was for my grandparents to have five.
Just a consideration: for many centuries (at least in Germany), arranged marriages were quite a success story, while love marriage are a quite modern invention.
Perhaps if dating is too time-intensive for these people, they should (somewhat) go back to arranged marriages. Also, if one otherwise has to go on many dates, arranged dates/marriages are probably less expensive. Finally, this should also increase the safety aspects that, according to the article, many young people fear.
Being responsible for making the money is different from having the agency to spend the money. It's fairly common for cultures to grant that role to the woman of the household.
Not sure if that's the case in historic Germanic regions, but it's a crutch to take the principle "women are universally oppressed by men" and believe that's all you need in order to make any statement about gender across all of time and space.
> Not sure if that's the case in historic Germanic regions
It wasn't (aside from food and other common needs).
> it's a crutch to take the principle "women are universally oppressed by men"
I did not say that. The OP spoke of centuries where arranged marriages were common in Germany, and there's no doubt that women did not have equal rights during that time. The crutch here is to define "success of marriages" through fertility rates and number of divorces.
Men and women have the potential to be equally unhappy when you force a partner on them.
Also, giving women free reign is causing great inequality between men and women in their chances of having a partner and forming a family, which I believe will be problematic in the future. Very well explained by this other user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19891412
>Men and women have the potential to be equally unhappy when you force a partner on them.
His point wasn't about happiness for either party, it was that men simply had more societal control and rights than woman at the time arranged marriages were common - so it wasnt so much a partnership as it was one party having a huge amount of control over the other party's autonomy. That may not be the case with arranged marriages today, but I think the historical trend points in that direction.
>Also, giving women free reign is causing great inequality between men and women in their chances of having a partner and forming a family, which I believe will be problematic in the future. Very well explained by this other user:
This is just sexist drivel, to me you're a.) making frankly unwarranted generalizations about how both genders date, b.) reiterating the shirt 80/20 meme spouted by right wing incels, and c) proposing
a system that takes away both party's freedom of choice with relationships because it's "unfair" to men.
>His point wasn't about happiness for either party, it was that men simply had more societal control and rights than woman at the time arranged marriages were common - so it wasnt so much a partnership as it was one party having a huge amount of control over the other party's autonomy.
Meh, in my experience (Indians I know) females in both families have the same amount of power when choosing a mate, even more power than males I'd say.
>This is just sexist
Reality is sexist. Both genders are different. That's just the way it is.
>making frankly unwarranted generalizations about how both genders date
>reiterating the shirt 80/20 meme spouted by right wing incels
Why is my argument bad? "People I don't like say the same thing" is not an argument.
>proposing a system that takes away both party's freedom of choice with relationships because it's "unfair" to men
I didn't propose that we go back to arranged marriages, and I agree that there's no easy solution. In fact I've got nothing to propose. The fact that there's no solution doesn't mean we should just pretend there's no problem.
I should be clear, more of what I was saying was aimed at the other HN comment you linked. So when I say "you say", I am more likely referring to what the other user said.
Either way, ok there are some biological differences between the genders and reality can be sexist, but neither of those points support or justify what you are saying about men and woman.
Can you be more specific on what in the link is suppose to support your point?
And the "80/20 rule" is a bad argument because it isn't supported by actual studies or whatever as far as I know, its more of a gross misuse of the Pareto rule by right-wing incels, Redpillers, or whoever to how woman date.
Isn't a bigger problem, what's the point of marriage, if it can be easily dissolved (with various, often completely unpredictable, risks for one or both parties)? Part of the idea of marriage, family, etc. is some concept (or at least illusion) of long-term safety, sustainability, predictability, stability. This illusion is slowly shattering, for different kind of reasons (divorce, problems with pensions, job security, chilling effects on free speech, gloomy outlook on climate change, ...). We probably need to start looking at these reasons, and start fixing them, i.e. address the underlying causes, not just fix the symptoms (less long-term relationships and marriage).
Edit: that is not to say, that sometimes relationships don't dissolve for good reasons... but even then, more could be done to make things fair, predictable, etc. as opposed to incentivizing both parties, and their lawyers, to fight and be as mean and nasty to each other as possible.
> Just a consideration: for many centuries (at least in Germany), arranged marriages were quite a success story, while love marriage are a quite modern invention.
There are cultures and countries for which this is true but Germany is not one of them.
> The Western European marriage pattern is a family and demographic pattern that is marked by comparatively late marriage (in the middle twenties), especially for women, with a generally small age difference between the spouses, a significant proportion of women who remain unmarried, and the establishment of a neolocal household after the couple has married. In 1965, John Hajnal discovered that Europe is divided into two areas characterized by a different patterns of nuptiality. To the west of the line, marriage rates and thus fertility were comparatively low and a significant minority of women married late or remained single and most families were nuclear; to the east of the line and in the Mediterranean and particular regions of Northwestern Europe, early marriage and extended family homes were the norm and high fertility was countered by high mortality.[1][2]
> > Just a consideration: for many centuries (at least in Germany), arranged marriages were quite a success story, while love marriage are a quite modern invention.
> There are cultures and countries for which this is true but Germany is not one of them.
My grandmother (from Germany) told me how in former generations, it was not uncommon for parents to look out for marriage partners for their children. Formally, this is indeed not an arranged marriage, but de-facto, it mostly is/was.
EDIT: Or even more indirectly, parents send/sent their children to social occasions where the child is very likely to meet the kind of marriage partners that the parents desire. To me, this still has a strong "smell" of (partly-)arranged marriage.
There are exceptions, and stories people tell, but GP is correct about the broad picture (in my understanding of the data). The west was unusual, and we have tended to misunderstand its past by looking at the more recent past of other societies.
> parents send/sent their children to social occasions
Absolutely people try to position their kids into the best social class they can. And still do, this is 90% of what parents house-shopping for "good schools" are doing, not to mention the great college admissions game. But this is not the same thing as an arranged marriage culture.
If that were true people wouldn't automatically switch to love marriage when uncoerced. My experience of dating people from cultures where arranged marriage is still a (dwindling) thing tells me that no, they absolutely wouldn't go back to the days where it was prevalent.
"But they learned to make do and be happy in the end!" is not an argument. It can be used to justify literally any practice, because people always strive to be happy even in the worst conditions.
Seriously, what's with people wanting to coerce other people's romantic lives? When did we switch from "live and let live" to "the state should give me a girlfriend"?
It is interesting that the majority of these young adults’ spare time is spent looking for better jobs and certificate training, with no time to pursue romantic relationships.
"It's the economy, stupid." -- Bill Clinton's major campaign slogan.
To reiterate from the article: unemployment is high. Wages are low. Prices are high.
Improve the economic well-being of the median person, and what will happen? People will be more confident in their futures, have more leisure time, and will be happier.
Every school of economics agrees on this. They differ in what they recommend to achieve it.
I suspect the same is happening here in the US as well. There’s a growing “incel” population who are shunned because they don’t meet standard definitions of beauty or social fitness. The problem compounds as men become less and less confident about their prospects which leads to behavior like the one described in the article.
It has a lot to do with smartphones and socialization moving online.
Firstly, the way you interact with and judge strangers is completely different to the way you behave with your friends who you've known for 10 years.
The us vs them tribal mentality is built into our brains.
Random people are considered as disposable as you don't have any attachment to them and can effectively never see them again in your life if you choose so. Smartphones allow us to instantly tap into an infinite pool of strangers.
Secondly, social media lets us see the lives of the top 0.1% every day. Beforehand you lived in your small filter bubble and didn't know any better.
Most people don't look like or hang around with fitness stars or male models in real life. But when you follow a ton of them on Instagram and see their photos daily, your mindset and standards start to change.
Third, the amount of choices online is effectively limitless and a "candy store" effect happens.
Why would you pick an "ok" candy when there's 100 brands to pick from that taste like heaven in your mouth?
"Red pillers say X, hence X is false" doesn't sound like an argument. There are also statistics that support this point of view, namely https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19601600 which was discussed a month ago.
I always feel like this is swept under the carpet because 1) victims are male, and who cares about males, and 2) there is no easy solution to it.
> And really, arranged marriage as a "solution"? Really?
I'm not sure that gp would be the person to implement it, but if the problem is a literal read of the headline then arranged marriages are a reasonable solution. I might be about to learn some, but I'm not aware of any compelling argument that arranged marriage + liberal approach to divorce wouldn't work well vs the western-style dating system.
Something like half of marriages (major Anglosphere countries) end in divorce,and there are some extremely well grounded stereotypes suggesting that people under the age of 30 don't make great long-term decisions. Self-assessing your prospects as a young person is also difficult; there isn't a lot of life experience to fall back on.
In principle it is better for people to organise themselves personally. But if that isn't working out, then a more communal effort is a reasonable fallback. It probably wouldn't lead to worse outcomes.
In the West the previous system was not arranged marriages, it was just monogamy.
If the "top 20%" (in the example above) married the opposite "top 20%" and this permanently removed them from the pool of available young people, then the matching could proceed on the rest. But if instead they form temporary bonds, then the system is more complicated, and you can have a state where (perhaps) the top 50% of one side take turns with the top 20% of the other. By "take turns" (apologies if it's a strange phrase) I mean both medium term dating and marriage with divorce, both common patterns now (e.g. some people are coupled most years of their 20s, some just a few).
No data, no citations, implying other people are lying, and mostly just a vaguely misogynistic incel rant. HackerNews deserves better quality comments.
Are you sure ? There are multiple dimensions for competition between men. Money, power, intelligence, artistic talent can transcend looks to some degree for example.
I believe the stats mentioned are from Tinder data where everything but looks has little to no influence. Given that most people aren't outliers regarding money, power, intelligence or artistic talent, that probably don't play as large a role in the general population either.
I see the "women go after 20% of men" line repeated over and over again as if it's some sort of self-evident truth. Aside from the fact that people who spew this line generally go on to justify why women's agency should be reduced ("enforced monogamy" or whatever that means), I have never seen any evidence for this stat. And no, how people behave on dating sites is not an accurate representation of social dynamics at large. It takes a certain kind of personality to go on dating sites and American men and women on Okcupid don't represent all men and women in the world. Dating apps also highly bias the way you engage people with undisclosed algorithms and shady practices aiming at maximizing your time on their apps. They don't have people's best interests at heart and influence them as part of their business model.
But seriously, think about the implications of these numbers: do 8 women just patiently wait in line for 2 men, doing literally nothing in the meantime while the remaining 8 men just stare at their feet or something? Is it something that people think actually happens in real life?
I mean, the 80/20 rule is seen in all kinds of places. Probably the top 20% [0] of men are involved in the 80% of heterosexual sexual couplings, with the remaining 80% of men being involved in the other 80%.
Where the stat kind of fails flat is that the same is true of the top 20% of women.
That said, the model (with no statement being made of how much that model reflects reality) being described is sequential monogamy. One of the top 20% men will continuously have one or two partners, switching them out for new ones; the rest of the men will only rarely get a partner; and women will fall between those two. Matching them percentile-to-percentile, the average number of new partners in some timespan for a given percentile for women will be larger for women than for men, up until some crossover percentile X% at which point men will have more partners.
I do think that if a person's primary mode of dating is through online apps, they end up with a skewed mental model of what dating is like. They are, however, already the main mode of new relationships being formed, and perhaps are still increasing in importance.
[0] "Top 20%" being defined as the 20% of men who have the most sexual partners
"I mean, the 80/20 rule is seen in all kinds of places"
Sorry, repeating the same point won't make it any more true. Still haven't seen any evidence for this stat, only American stereotypes.
It's hard to track people's sex lives for obvious logistical/ethical reasons, but the most accurate study I've read on that was about teenagers in a high-school in a small rural town, so a closed environment that's easy to control. Forgot the link, will track it down if you're interested. But basically the "sex encounter" graph was fairly evenly spread and evenly balanced between men and women. Sure enough there were "clusters" but they were engaged with each other, not monopolizing 80% of everyone.
As it turns out, if your social circle is made up of sociosexually unrestricted people, everyone involved is going to have lots of sex. If it's made up of restricted people, few people are going to have encounters. But one person or two keeping all women in a sort of "serial monogamous schedule" while they do liteally nothing else? That doesn't make sense and I've never seen it happen, nor have I read any actual scientific study about this.
Dating in real life within a small(ish) social circle and modern online dating where the available pool is literally millions of people is completely different
Online dating is a tiny, tiny blip in the world of dating. Dating itself is a uniquely American practice and a tiny, tiny blip in the world of sociosexual dynamics. People meet, hook up with and bond with each other in all sorts of creative ways that goes way beyond Tinder, Bumble and Okcupid. If your only outlook on this stuff is through the lens of apps owned by shady companies optimizing for user engagement, you're going to have a skewed and miserable worldview.
Online dating is the only dating for many young people nowadays. Alcohol used to be a major factor in finding a partner but young people are drinking less and less by the year.
The social skills of the youth are also getting worse due to smartphones, leading to less interaction in schools at workplaces etc
1. The 80/20 rule is a rule of thumb that happens to apply in many fields, but you can't take it as a general law and stipulate that "Probably the top 20% [0] of men are involved in the 80% of heterosexual sexual couplings". It's an empirical question.
2. "the same is true of the top 20% of women". No, probably not. The statistics for men and women look quite different (which goes to show that you can't just apply the 80/20 "rule" willy-nilly).
Yes, empirical data is necessary for both, and it exists for both (I'm sure people will be posting that data, and I'm too lazy to look it up myself), but I'd bet an arbitrary amount of money that the top 20% of men get closer to 80% of the couplings than 20% of the couplings. It's an almost equally good bet that the top 20% of women get closer to 80% of the couplings than 20% of the couplings.
It is well established, from what I gather, that in many species, most (=more than half of the) ancestors (of the extant population) are female. For most of human history, most women had children, while most men did not have children. So, that is something that happened in real life.
I don't understand what you said. I also don't understand what children have to do with this and how they relate in any way to the amount of sex one may have beyond "once or twice".
If anything, our evolutionary history indicates a promiscuous lifestyle with everyone having sex with everyone else and post-spermatic competition.
That 80/20 comes from Tinder sharing stats a couple of years back. Same was done by other dating sites with similar outcome. But that is probably not the only source for it.
It's called a filter bubble. Imagine a retail worker going "where are these people who are millionaires? Certainly not in the environments that I frequent and not in my circle of friends either. Lots of normal working class people, though"
If you want to find these people, they will be at the night club. In the gym locker room. In the suggestion list of your Instagram feed.
Please don't take HN threads into this gender flamewar internet talking point stuff. It's bloody tedious, and we've all heard it all enough times already.
ITT: people advocating for forced arranged marriages. Jeez, what the hell?
Not to dig into such petty stuff as human rights which entirely forbid arranged marriages, that would be too easy, but as if that would even solve the problem that is literally described in the article, people having no time to develop meaningful relationships or interpersonal skill because in a cutthroat environment all that matters is more useless "certifications" and working one's ass off in underpaid crap jobs just to survive, much less afford a date?
Fix minimum wages, overtime limits and job supplies, and (young) people will start procreating all on their own!
In many countries, the husband has a legal right to demand sex from his wife and rape in a marriage is not a crime either - in fact, even "civilized" countries such as Germany had it until recently, it took us Germans until 1998 to finally make marital rape a crime. One of the politicians in favor of keeping it legal actually ended up being our current Interior Minister but ah well, I digress... point is, the line between arranged and outright forced marriage is thin, very thin.
But it has nothing to do with arranged marriages. I know Indians in the US who have gotten into an arranged marriage, and obviously the local rules apply. OTOH if marital rape in not a crime in some country, it might as well be committed whether or not it was an arranged marriage.
Yes, and from experience when South Asian people (especially women) get to experience this free-agency dating thing we have in Europe and America they suddenly become very reluctant to switch back to their arranged spouse. Strange how these things go.
Interesting how illicit filming during intercourse is one of the reasons young people don't want to enter an intimate relationship. There must be quite the horror stories floating around.
94 comments
[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadIt's not good. Our civilization is quickly becoming inhospitable to humans.
But realistically currently controlling population is the aspect that is most important so improving well being should be done in a way that does not result in a higher birth rate.
Transferrin receptor, Temporary Fly restriction, Terrain Following Radar, Time Frequency Representation
And a Truck in Thailand is named TFR also...
Your parent comment is right in pointing out that it is not a familiar abbreviation.
Having a child used to be a random experiment and you needed to make sure that one makes it through to care for you when you will be old or sick. Pensions, health and welfare systems and much better child mortality rates make it unnecessary to have many children. A replacement fertility rate of slightly over 2.0-2.1 is/would be fine in developed countries.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab...
(You can change the countries displayed by clicking the (+) sign on the right hand side of the graph. I preselected UK, US, Germany, Iran and South Korea here.)
Yeah, but that's now what we're having. My country sits at 1.4, and the only subpopulations with above replacement rate TFR are non-indigenous, so to speak.
South Korea has a TFR of below 1.
Japan has a TFR of ~1.4.
Most European countries are somewhere between 1.4 and ~1.7.
The US is below 2.
The West is dying out, and has been for a while.
And many developed countries are far below that. That's what I read the parent to write about, not the shift from pre-industrial to industrial times.
I don't think that was the idea, rather: fix the circumstances and the people will do the rest themselves.
> For example in India's case it would be madness to encourage even more fertility.
And fertility rates there haven't dropped as they did in the developed world, so it's really not the same issue.
That depends on the definition of "better". In purely material terms, the developed world is the best there ever was. Yet depression, drug abuse, loneliness etc are rising, so maybe humans require more than just material things.
For animals, living in a zoo is the best thing to do. Steady meals, a doctor on call and they'll even bring you mates to reproduce. Yet somehow, many animals in captivity don't want to breed, maybe it's similar for humans.
Medicine has improved such that it is far less of an evolutionary pressure. I imagine psychological well being, and wealth are more of an issue. It would be interesting to look at the correlation between mental health and wealth, or if there’s a key point between them.
Or there could be a selection pressure for more social groups of humans, a eusocial society, I can’t remember who suggested that.
We really do not need more humans, we are not an endangered species. The only reason we think we do is because many societies have essentially created Ponzi schemes where the welfare of the elderly generation relies on ever increasing numbers of younger generations, which will inevitably become unsustainable.
According to the dictionary "inhospitable" means "Unfavorable to life or growth", and it's much harder for me to have one children than it was for my grandparents to have five.
Perhaps if dating is too time-intensive for these people, they should (somewhat) go back to arranged marriages. Also, if one otherwise has to go on many dates, arranged dates/marriages are probably less expensive. Finally, this should also increase the safety aspects that, according to the article, many young people fear.
For men, yes.
As long as they have all the money and can have lovers, how is that even a question?
Not sure if that's the case in historic Germanic regions, but it's a crutch to take the principle "women are universally oppressed by men" and believe that's all you need in order to make any statement about gender across all of time and space.
It wasn't (aside from food and other common needs).
> it's a crutch to take the principle "women are universally oppressed by men"
I did not say that. The OP spoke of centuries where arranged marriages were common in Germany, and there's no doubt that women did not have equal rights during that time. The crutch here is to define "success of marriages" through fertility rates and number of divorces.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Also, giving women free reign is causing great inequality between men and women in their chances of having a partner and forming a family, which I believe will be problematic in the future. Very well explained by this other user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19891412
His point wasn't about happiness for either party, it was that men simply had more societal control and rights than woman at the time arranged marriages were common - so it wasnt so much a partnership as it was one party having a huge amount of control over the other party's autonomy. That may not be the case with arranged marriages today, but I think the historical trend points in that direction.
>Also, giving women free reign is causing great inequality between men and women in their chances of having a partner and forming a family, which I believe will be problematic in the future. Very well explained by this other user:
This is just sexist drivel, to me you're a.) making frankly unwarranted generalizations about how both genders date, b.) reiterating the shirt 80/20 meme spouted by right wing incels, and c) proposing a system that takes away both party's freedom of choice with relationships because it's "unfair" to men.
Meh, in my experience (Indians I know) females in both families have the same amount of power when choosing a mate, even more power than males I'd say.
>This is just sexist
Reality is sexist. Both genders are different. That's just the way it is.
>making frankly unwarranted generalizations about how both genders date
You have statistics here, which paint a broader picture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19601600
>reiterating the shirt 80/20 meme spouted by right wing incels
Why is my argument bad? "People I don't like say the same thing" is not an argument.
>proposing a system that takes away both party's freedom of choice with relationships because it's "unfair" to men
I didn't propose that we go back to arranged marriages, and I agree that there's no easy solution. In fact I've got nothing to propose. The fact that there's no solution doesn't mean we should just pretend there's no problem.
Either way, ok there are some biological differences between the genders and reality can be sexist, but neither of those points support or justify what you are saying about men and woman.
Can you be more specific on what in the link is suppose to support your point?
And the "80/20 rule" is a bad argument because it isn't supported by actual studies or whatever as far as I know, its more of a gross misuse of the Pareto rule by right-wing incels, Redpillers, or whoever to how woman date.
Edit: that is not to say, that sometimes relationships don't dissolve for good reasons... but even then, more could be done to make things fair, predictable, etc. as opposed to incentivizing both parties, and their lawyers, to fight and be as mean and nasty to each other as possible.
There are cultures and countries for which this is true but Germany is not one of them.
> The Western European marriage pattern is a family and demographic pattern that is marked by comparatively late marriage (in the middle twenties), especially for women, with a generally small age difference between the spouses, a significant proportion of women who remain unmarried, and the establishment of a neolocal household after the couple has married. In 1965, John Hajnal discovered that Europe is divided into two areas characterized by a different patterns of nuptiality. To the west of the line, marriage rates and thus fertility were comparatively low and a significant minority of women married late or remained single and most families were nuclear; to the east of the line and in the Mediterranean and particular regions of Northwestern Europe, early marriage and extended family homes were the norm and high fertility was countered by high mortality.[1][2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_marriage_patt...
> There are cultures and countries for which this is true but Germany is not one of them.
My grandmother (from Germany) told me how in former generations, it was not uncommon for parents to look out for marriage partners for their children. Formally, this is indeed not an arranged marriage, but de-facto, it mostly is/was.
EDIT: Or even more indirectly, parents send/sent their children to social occasions where the child is very likely to meet the kind of marriage partners that the parents desire. To me, this still has a strong "smell" of (partly-)arranged marriage.
> parents send/sent their children to social occasions
Absolutely people try to position their kids into the best social class they can. And still do, this is 90% of what parents house-shopping for "good schools" are doing, not to mention the great college admissions game. But this is not the same thing as an arranged marriage culture.
If that were true people wouldn't automatically switch to love marriage when uncoerced. My experience of dating people from cultures where arranged marriage is still a (dwindling) thing tells me that no, they absolutely wouldn't go back to the days where it was prevalent.
"But they learned to make do and be happy in the end!" is not an argument. It can be used to justify literally any practice, because people always strive to be happy even in the worst conditions.
Seriously, what's with people wanting to coerce other people's romantic lives? When did we switch from "live and let live" to "the state should give me a girlfriend"?
Hey, if the state (that is: the people that pay taxes) should give you free food, housing, education, health care etc - why stop at romance?
When people start treating jobs like marriages (a nurtured ideology), this is what you get...
The press is in the hands of women.
To reiterate from the article: unemployment is high. Wages are low. Prices are high.
Improve the economic well-being of the median person, and what will happen? People will be more confident in their futures, have more leisure time, and will be happier.
Every school of economics agrees on this. They differ in what they recommend to achieve it.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE/
For South Korea, unemployment is quite low at 3.8%, but youth unemployment is over 10%:
https://tradingeconomics.com/south-korea/youth-unemployment-...
The problem for men is that the women generally don't think the average man is good enough.
The problem for women is that they're mostly lusting after and eventually, in the long run, sharing the same top 20% men.
If you're a man, it's a winner takes all market. Either almost all women desire you, or not a single one does.
Arranged marriage used to solve this.
It's a little dramatic, but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2briZ6fB0 explains it well.
Firstly, the way you interact with and judge strangers is completely different to the way you behave with your friends who you've known for 10 years. The us vs them tribal mentality is built into our brains. Random people are considered as disposable as you don't have any attachment to them and can effectively never see them again in your life if you choose so. Smartphones allow us to instantly tap into an infinite pool of strangers.
Secondly, social media lets us see the lives of the top 0.1% every day. Beforehand you lived in your small filter bubble and didn't know any better. Most people don't look like or hang around with fitness stars or male models in real life. But when you follow a ton of them on Instagram and see their photos daily, your mindset and standards start to change.
Third, the amount of choices online is effectively limitless and a "candy store" effect happens. Why would you pick an "ok" candy when there's 100 brands to pick from that taste like heaven in your mouth?
And really, arranged marriage as a "solution"? Really?
I always feel like this is swept under the carpet because 1) victims are male, and who cares about males, and 2) there is no easy solution to it.
I'm not sure that gp would be the person to implement it, but if the problem is a literal read of the headline then arranged marriages are a reasonable solution. I might be about to learn some, but I'm not aware of any compelling argument that arranged marriage + liberal approach to divorce wouldn't work well vs the western-style dating system.
Something like half of marriages (major Anglosphere countries) end in divorce,and there are some extremely well grounded stereotypes suggesting that people under the age of 30 don't make great long-term decisions. Self-assessing your prospects as a young person is also difficult; there isn't a lot of life experience to fall back on.
In principle it is better for people to organise themselves personally. But if that isn't working out, then a more communal effort is a reasonable fallback. It probably wouldn't lead to worse outcomes.
If the "top 20%" (in the example above) married the opposite "top 20%" and this permanently removed them from the pool of available young people, then the matching could proceed on the rest. But if instead they form temporary bonds, then the system is more complicated, and you can have a state where (perhaps) the top 50% of one side take turns with the top 20% of the other. By "take turns" (apologies if it's a strange phrase) I mean both medium term dating and marriage with divorce, both common patterns now (e.g. some people are coupled most years of their 20s, some just a few).
But seriously, think about the implications of these numbers: do 8 women just patiently wait in line for 2 men, doing literally nothing in the meantime while the remaining 8 men just stare at their feet or something? Is it something that people think actually happens in real life?
Where the stat kind of fails flat is that the same is true of the top 20% of women.
That said, the model (with no statement being made of how much that model reflects reality) being described is sequential monogamy. One of the top 20% men will continuously have one or two partners, switching them out for new ones; the rest of the men will only rarely get a partner; and women will fall between those two. Matching them percentile-to-percentile, the average number of new partners in some timespan for a given percentile for women will be larger for women than for men, up until some crossover percentile X% at which point men will have more partners.
I do think that if a person's primary mode of dating is through online apps, they end up with a skewed mental model of what dating is like. They are, however, already the main mode of new relationships being formed, and perhaps are still increasing in importance.
[0] "Top 20%" being defined as the 20% of men who have the most sexual partners
Sorry, repeating the same point won't make it any more true. Still haven't seen any evidence for this stat, only American stereotypes.
It's hard to track people's sex lives for obvious logistical/ethical reasons, but the most accurate study I've read on that was about teenagers in a high-school in a small rural town, so a closed environment that's easy to control. Forgot the link, will track it down if you're interested. But basically the "sex encounter" graph was fairly evenly spread and evenly balanced between men and women. Sure enough there were "clusters" but they were engaged with each other, not monopolizing 80% of everyone.
As it turns out, if your social circle is made up of sociosexually unrestricted people, everyone involved is going to have lots of sex. If it's made up of restricted people, few people are going to have encounters. But one person or two keeping all women in a sort of "serial monogamous schedule" while they do liteally nothing else? That doesn't make sense and I've never seen it happen, nor have I read any actual scientific study about this.
The social skills of the youth are also getting worse due to smartphones, leading to less interaction in schools at workplaces etc
1. The 80/20 rule is a rule of thumb that happens to apply in many fields, but you can't take it as a general law and stipulate that "Probably the top 20% [0] of men are involved in the 80% of heterosexual sexual couplings". It's an empirical question.
2. "the same is true of the top 20% of women". No, probably not. The statistics for men and women look quite different (which goes to show that you can't just apply the 80/20 "rule" willy-nilly).
If anything, our evolutionary history indicates a promiscuous lifestyle with everyone having sex with everyone else and post-spermatic competition.
Certainly not in the environments that I frequent and not in my circle of friends either. Lots of normal couples, though.
If you want to find these people, they will be at the night club. In the gym locker room. In the suggestion list of your Instagram feed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Not to dig into such petty stuff as human rights which entirely forbid arranged marriages, that would be too easy, but as if that would even solve the problem that is literally described in the article, people having no time to develop meaningful relationships or interpersonal skill because in a cutthroat environment all that matters is more useless "certifications" and working one's ass off in underpaid crap jobs just to survive, much less afford a date?
Fix minimum wages, overtime limits and job supplies, and (young) people will start procreating all on their own!
Majority of marriages in south east Asia and India are arranged marriages. There's nothing unethical about it.
In many countries, the husband has a legal right to demand sex from his wife and rape in a marriage is not a crime either - in fact, even "civilized" countries such as Germany had it until recently, it took us Germans until 1998 to finally make marital rape a crime. One of the politicians in favor of keeping it legal actually ended up being our current Interior Minister but ah well, I digress... point is, the line between arranged and outright forced marriage is thin, very thin.
JFK was right when he said a rising tide lifts all boats. Every politician everywhere should make this a foundation of their platform.