7 ms·

Tokyo's Government Is Building Its Own Dating App to Combat Falling Birthrates

• shrimp_emoji 2y ago
  This is the way. Until we can grow people in vats, which is far superior.
• ajb 2y ago
  This might be a case where government has better incentives to get it right than the private sector. Although obviously there are huge potential pitfalls as well
• mikhael28 2y ago
  Nothing sexier than the government telling you what to do. Maybe they should focus on helping people work less, so they have more time to… get bored, and find someone.
• FLT8 2y ago
  Why would anyone want to have kids today? Most couples in the western world can barely support themselves while getting into home ownership, let alone trying to support multiple kids and put them through college while saving for retirement. The amount of capacity left in life for good child rearing is minimal. Add to that the fact that it's looking increasingly unlikely that there'll be jobs for their children anyway given the way AI is going, and even if there were jobs, previous generations are leaving them a burning hellscape full of toxic forever chemicals and microplastics that the kids will need to clean up, and a surveillance advertising driven economy that's increasingly difficult to escape. Toxic social media driving toxic expectations etc. It just seems cruel bringing kids into a world like that.
  • mattpallissard 2y ago
    Nah, it's actually a blast. We had our first kids when we're legitimately poor. We're fairly well off now and have had a few more. It was just as fun then as it is now. One's financial well being their childrens' happiness are not intrinsically linked. My oldest kids were just as happy as my youngest. They don't care if your rich or poor. They only care about how you treat them. Check your outlook friend. There is plenty of bad stuff in the world, but it's mostly good. Go out and enjoy life.
  • Jyaif 2y ago
    > it's looking increasingly unlikely that there'll be jobs for their children anyway given the way AI is going Unless there's a robot revolution, there will be jobs. AI is not going to farm, provide elder care, or do maintenance. And that's assuming we get to AGI, and not get stuck on this LLM plateau.
  • CalRobert 2y ago
    Add to that our increasingly lonely lives and fraying communities mean much less of a support network. Parenting is also exhausting now that “go outside and play, come back for dinner” is impractical (for various reasons good or bad).
    • LeanderK 2y ago
      > “go outside and play, come back for dinner” why is this impractical? EDIT: I'm getting downvoted but I am seriously not sure. I don't have kids right now but its part of how I intend to raise them when I get them.
      • mensetmanusman 2y ago
        People who are misinformed by watching too much news will call the cops on kids without grownups near by. This is somewhat rare, but it feeds into a real culture of misinformation where parents think this happens enough to fear letting them roam. The feedback loop self reinforces because of lack of education - many people don’t realize the more news they consume the less they know about the statistics on the ground. Also, cars are more dangerous now than before for kids to get crushed by.
        • averageRoyalty 2y ago
          The rarity here cannot be overstated. I enjoy stories like this - in the same way someone who enjoys true crime doesn't actually support murder - and they're heavily overreportd but quite uncommon. If you want to let your kids go out and play it's unlikely you'll have issue. I suspect for many it's just an excuse to plonk their kids in front of the iPad all day.
          • mensetmanusman 2y ago
            Screen time is also a symptom of a very different form of misinformation - complete lack of information. The human body is so much healthier with sufficient exposure time to the outdoor environment. Sitting is long term pain. If parents knew this more, they would pushback on screen time in the same way they don’t let their kids eat ice cream all day.
  • TOMDM 2y ago
    People are wealthier and healthier today than almost any other point in history. Better times than now are a blip in the grand scheme of things. We have a huge number of social ills that contribute towards peoples reasons for not wanting children, but wealth and physical health are not among them.
    • Dalewyn 2y ago
      If anything, reality suggests the problem is in fact wealth. The poorest countries have the highest birth rates and throwing more money at this has produced quite literally zero success.
      • mensetmanusman 2y ago
        Wealthy countries pay women more to work and punish women financially if they have a baby due to the opportunity cost.
    • locallost 2y ago
      The truth is for me somewhere in the middle. Happiness and satisfaction are not absolute, they can exist only in relation to your surroundings. Thus younger people in the US might be objectively better off than people in say India, but that doesn't matter. Their surroundings are as the OP described and that dictates how they feel about the present and future day. On physical health it's actually wrong for the US as people's physical health is deteriorating evident by the falling life expectancy. But with all that said, the actual idea in Japan is for me pretty stupid, as I consider dating apps to be one of the reasons people are connecting less and less. The choice is too large, it's very superficial, most people want the "best" thus large number of people are out of luck.
    • CJefferson 2y ago
      If you are looking at "all of history", for most of history it was usual for one person in a couple to spend most of their time at home, which is very hard to do now while covering rent.
      • 2y ago
  • timr 2y ago
    > previous generations are leaving them a burning hellscape full of toxic forever chemicals and microplastics that the kids will need to clean up Please, folks, take a step back and realize that most of what you've read about this stuff in the pop media is based on extremely speculative data, usually from weak, observational studies, or small laboratory experiments in non-human animals. The threat to your life, individually, has been greatly exaggerated. You are far more likely to die of eating too much and getting too fat than whatever microplastics are supposedly doing to you. I'm not saying that there aren't issues here, but as someone else on this thread already noted, we're living longer than ever before. To the extent that human lifespans have declined, it's largely due to the fact that we're succumbing to diseases of lifestyle that are entirely within our control as individuals. Worry about that, not theoretical future concerns about chemicals.
    • sigmoid10 2y ago
      On microplastics I agree, but on climate change the issue is almost reversed. We have tons of high profile research coming out all the time that even our worst case models were too optimistic and we are bound for a shitshow of unimaginable proportions. This shouldn't come as a surprise for people who know how the IPCC reports are created (sort of a least common denominator between science, politics and lobbyists). So every time they say official "worst case" model, that is the worst case that the fossil industry is willing to admit. And that is already pretty bad. What we're actually going to experience could very well amount to a civilisation-ending event. Especially if oceans keep acidifying, which is a highly overlooked doomsday gun and could not just end modern civilisation, but actually kill us and most other land based oxygen breathing creatures. We even know this has happened once already, most likely from a combination of impact events and volcanism. But today's CO2 emission rate is an order of magnitude greater than it was back then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extin...
      • bryanlarsen 2y ago
        The worst case used to be 6.5 degrees. The worst case has been revised down to ~4 degrees.
  • foobarbecue 2y ago
    > Why would anyone want to have kids today? I'm gradually learning through experience and anecdotes that most women seem to have an innate biological drive to procreate, which is separate from sex drive. I think that's the main reason.
    • mensetmanusman 2y ago
      The drive to procreate is the sex drive, we only recently decided to decouple them in abstraction due to technology.
      • GordonS 2y ago
        I'm not sure that's true; it's possible for a woman to desperately want a baby, but still have a low libido and have little interest in sex just for fun.
        • mensetmanusman 2y ago
          Low libido is evolutionarily informed to also signal that now is not the right time to procreate. In this light, it’s not surprising that hormonal birth control, which tells the body it can’t have a baby now, very often reduces libido.
          • GordonS 2y ago
            Even without female birth control pills, it can be the case.
        • Detrytus 2y ago
          Yes, but usually one baby is enough to satisfy that drive, which is not enough to keep the population from shrinking. And recently some women decide to have 0 babies, and settle for a dog or cat instead. I've heard them using terms like "dog-child" or "cat-child", or "cross-species family" :)
          • 2y ago
  • throwaway6734 2y ago
    for a few reasons:children allow you to fulfill a whole new role in life, its a duty to pass on the gift of life, and family is important. people have lived through much worse
  • bamboozled 2y ago
    If you think about it, there has never been a good time to have children. In 1920 I could’ve said why have kids, they might die from an infection. 1820s, famine or war etc.
  • Tycho 2y ago
    Snap out of it. The standard of living has never been so high. It’s your attitude that’s toxic.
  • glimshe 2y ago
    The world has never been safer and humanity has never been better equipped to support the survival of a child than now. I don't have an explanation for the phenomenon, but it's certainly not the horror reasons you mention.
    • Vvector 2y ago
      Wealth and fertility have an inverse relationship. This is true worldwide, and through recent history (~50 years). Just one of many reasons, women are going to college and having careers at historical highs. And the same women are punished for having kids. "This decreasing relationship between fertility and income is well known to economists and demographers alike. In addition, it holds true over time: Rich countries, such as the U.S., have experienced a remarkable decline in their fertility rate as they became rich. Also, the relationship holds at the individual level, as rich families tend to have fewer children than poor families." from: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/december/link-fertility-income https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/december/link...
    • gravescale 2y ago
      I think it's just as simple as when you're already poor, having children doesn't fundamentally change things. Children don't actually cost that much when you have nothing much to give them anyway, and quickly turn into free labour if anything. If you're very lucky, they can get a job in the city/abroad and send money home. But for generations, having children and having them continue much the same, generation after generation, is just how is always been. It's often also required by religions, because religions that encourage children grow, and so it's self-reinforcing. The problem is in modern "wealthy" society, everyone is allowed to work (to be clear I'm not saying that's not a problem in itself), and the Red Queen effect means that within a couple of generations¹, most couples are both in full-time work just to afford rent and the "basics" of a modern lifestyle. Children are now a huge opportunity cost, one that might cost you your home. Then, because the couple would have prospects to offer the child, the common human instinct is to invest everything in them or their future, spurred on by the social expectations and the Childhood Industrial Complex. Vitamins and private healthcare into expensive high chairs, a "safe" car and a top-line car seat, toys, computers, clothes, experiences, holidays, housing near good schools, tutoring, a degree etc. Plus the fairly modern sentiment that you should spend as much time as possible with the child, which may inhibit large families even for those who can financially afford them. The expectations around what a "minimally non-negligent parent" must provide children are so high that many people think "I quite literally cannot be sure to provide that, so I should not have children". Of course in the background, "don't have children if you can't afford them" has been the tabloid "anti-scrounger" slogan for at least a generation now, and religious adherence is way down in wealthy societies. It's a hell of a catch, as Heller would say. Be poor and offer your children almost nothing material in life, and so have them, or be rich and be unable to offer your children far more in an absolute sense than the poor person could, but still far below what you would want to, and so forgo them. ¹ After a couple of generations of taking up the slack in the middle classes (e.g. go-getter Yuppies giving their children unthinkably luxurious childhoods with their new dual incomes, plus the productivity revolution initially paying out as worker wages), the Millennial generation was the first to really notice en masse that they really could not provide to their children what their parents provided to them. Certainly I can't give my children what my parents gave me, and I'm in roughly the same income decile.
• pixxel 2y ago
  Create more social clubs, promote hobbies etc. and ban phone use (some comedy clubs have you leave your phone at the door). Or don’t. Have everyone upload every intimate detail into a government database. SMFH.
• scirob 2y ago
  On the other hand a non-profit dating app could really change the landscape as all others are bought up by match Co and are all designed for profit not matching
• mvc 2y ago
  Maybe a public service dating app makes sense. The alignment of incentives are all wrong for private dating apps. They obviously lose when you find someone and pair up so they're incentivised not to find a match.
  • rwmj 2y ago
    Are there dating apps that work like recruitment, eg. it's free but you pay a fee when you get married or something like that?
    • foobarbecue 2y ago
      I like the concept, but it seems impossible in practice. How on earth would the billing system work? If it's self-reporting, no one will report. It's interesting how "honor system" can work for certain in-person businesses, but I don't think it could ever work for a dating app.
      • lolc 2y ago
        I've been thinking an escrow system could work. On signup, you pledge to donate to a charity when you leave. Candidates won't be able to get back their funds, they can only release them. Once they have a mate, their mate would make sure the money is released. The platform could take a cut to finance their operations. The amount pledged and the charity could be public for extra virtue signaling.
        • foobarbecue 2y ago
          Oh wow! That's brilliant! I think it could work.
    • optimalsolver 2y ago
      RumpelApp asks for your first-born child should you successfully match.
  • nox101 2y ago
• deidei 2y ago
  > reports that said the app will require a confirmation of identity, such as a driver’s license, your tax records to prove income and a signed form that says you are ready to get married. Not sure why someone would sign up for a dating app that is this invasive
  • Barrin92 2y ago
    because it means you're going to get matched with people who are real, honest about their income and serious about marrying. If I was looking to date this is probably the only app I'd consider signing up for.
  • tjpnz 2y ago
    Not sure why the Tokyo Metropolitan Government would need that info to begin with. They're going to have most of that on file already.
• beretguy 2y ago
  Give people 6 hour workday with mandatory no-overtime and the problem will fix itself. It’s not rocket science.
  • underseacables 2y ago
    I think the crushing time commitment of Japanese professionals to their jobs is part of the problem. From my limited western understanding, after work, and socializing with your colleagues from work, there's very little time for Japanese couples to start a family.
  • averageRoyalty 2y ago
    In Japan? If you did that, the economy would immediately fall over. I don't think you're very well informed on this subject matter.
    • beretguy 2y ago
      > I don't think you're very well informed on this subject matter. I am, son. I studied Japanese language and culture and considered working there. I know that my suggestion is a fat chance but having people work less and be less obsessed with work is the only way.
    • aaomidi 2y ago
      Seems like the economy is going to fall over when they have no more workforce left :)
  • ryanwaggoner 2y ago
    Initiatives like this haven’t seemed to work in Sweden, among other countries. I don’t know if any countries have successfully reversed a plummeting birth rate, but it doesn’t seem to be for lack of trying. Maybe the reality is that, given the choice, most women don’t want to have more than one or two kids under any circumstances?
• admissionsguy 2y ago
  I know that a government’s primary objective is to perpetuate itself and grow, but other than that, what is wrong with a declining population? Especially as young people concentrate in urban centres which remain dynamic. People often quote the need for workforce to maintain the extravagant lifestyles of the retirees, but they will not starve in any case, will they? And if everywhere has Japan’s birthbrate, you get to solve pollution emissions, housing crisis and other problems in one or two generations.
  • mensetmanusman 2y ago
    Nothing wrong with population decline. This is concern with the derivative of population decline. We are about to live through an inverted black plague where the population goes down the rollercoaster, every industry is disrupted because of no labor force, BUT the vast majority of people left are old instead of young and fit (after the plague). I’m surprised Hollywood hasn’t jumped at the opportunity to portray what’s about to happen.
    • harry_ord 2y ago
      We had children of men which I guess is a dramatisation of what is happening
  • harry_ord 2y ago
    It should be fine, everything I've seen write about it seems to say it's like a cliff or steep descent rather than a gentle decline.
• underseacables 2y ago
  At which point does it make sense for the Japanese government to just start a baby production facility? Pay women to be artificially inseminated for the purpose of human generation. Feasible, yes, ethical and moral, questionable, but ..it might be scalable.
  • polski-g 2y ago
    You didn't even need the women. Artificial wombs exist.
    • rPlayer6554 2y ago
      That's the plot of Brave New World right?
• owisd 2y ago
  Would that more governments set up app development companies with broader remits under a PSB model to act as a break on enshitification.
• Kydlaw 2y ago
  I am genuinely curious of how they are going to design the matching system. Which features are going to be used to describe individuals? I feel like the government has access to many more data than a private company, and the temptation to tap into PII for that might be high.
• anacrolix 2y ago
  Dating is so high stakes nobody will go with the flow because that's what the government wants. Employment is high stakes and already uneven opportunity enough (those that need assistance get the bottom of the barrel). Dating will be much worse than this.
• bamboozled 2y ago
  Has the government ever just done some research and maybe...asked people why they're not having kids and then address the issues? There is something about the way Japan governs that has issues, I think it's because the society is very hierarchical and those at the top never to consider those beneath them might actually have something to say.
  • karmakurtisaani 2y ago
    I find it somewhat funny how there's sometimes these news about Japan trying to tackle the birth rate problem in various ways, yet remaining extremely conservative in the work culture. What good is the dating app if you have to stay at the office until 11pm every night because that's what your boss does?
    • bamboozled 2y ago
      Yeah, there is also a pretty large expectation on employees to participate in company sports teams events etc on the weekend.
• gullevek 2y ago
  Typical JP Gov bollocks. Instead of bloody dating up do actual things to support people with kdis - support single parents, most kids of single parents are living in POVERTY - support free school lunch, free Kindergarten, etc - make companies pay people a decent amount of money so you don't have to have two people work forever so they can sort of afford one kid where most pay then goes into a Kindergarten so both can work, so they can pay ... - looking at the yen right now and how everything gets overlay expensive and how no company is really willing to raise wages ... yeah good luck with kids - stop building places that are smaller than the places build 30~40 years ago. The new apartment block in front of mine has everything so small, you can barely fit a family with one kid ... - support other contraception methods financial ... - perhaps stop having politicians in say that just constantly complain why women aren't a housewife like in the olden days A dating up will fix nothing.