It seems that even the offer of taxpayer money is failing to persuade young Chinese to get married. It would be interesting to see a deep dive into this topic – because by many measures Chinese people should be on the happy upswing part of Prof. Handy’s Sigmoid Curve – unlike those of us in the West.
"As marriage registrations in China continued to decline in the first quarter of the year, local governments have dangled cash rewards as high as 40,000 yuan (US$5,487) in front of young couples in a bid to rekindle the will to wed and stave off the worst of a demographic crisis.
In the first three months of 2025, 1.81 million couples registered for marriage, the Ministry of Civil Affairs said last week. This represents a decrease of 159,000 couples compared to the same period last year for an 8 per cent drop, with a simultaneous 10 per cent increase in the number of divorce registrations.
The bleak marriage figures, coupled with the country’s low birth rates and shrinking population, are worrying signs for an economy already facing considerable challenges. …"
You have to cut out the middleman between fertile age females and male provisioning lest you end up in the africanization of your civilization hence its collapse.
I tried warning people back in 1992 with my essay race gender in the frontier and the sociology priesthood finds that “intersection” to be the essence of discourse about “white supremacy”:
Part of the problem is not simply that I have an immunization against group think from my adolescent development but I also experienced the sexual power of polygamy hence had a visceral understanding of the power of africanization. The vast majority of sociologists are either wannabe African big men (look at all that nice nubile pussy around me!!!) or they are African extended phenotype involuntary celibates hoping to be a sneaky beta if only they can mouth the shibboleths of feminism.
Wealthy and powerful men are of course the culprits. They’ll never stand for Militia.Money. Since they won’t help me nuke the social pseudosciences with Hume’s Guillotine, they must be killed. That’s the consequence of supporting lies that kill humanity by killing the meaning of life. Ignorance is no excuse when you are wealthy and powerful.
Only Christianity kept the wealthy and powerful in check but that was gutted. People blame that on Henry the 8th but it had long been gutted by hypocrisy within the priesthood itself.
To me this means that more and more people, men and women can afford living alone, by themselves. This suggests a higher wealth of the society than before.
Just an example of technological changes leading to societal changes.
Yep there ya go! Another “theory” that, were Hume’s Guillotine or sorting proponents of social theories into governments that test them (sortocracy.org) permitted by wealthy and powerful men, we might get at the truth.
And, by the way, I’ve heard from “The Resistance” that well we’re already assortatively migrating therefore no one has anything to complain about!
This comes from Libertarian Party members of “The Resistance”.
Among wealthy and powerful men, Elon Musk is, of course, our best hope to save wealthy and powerful men from genocide. However, given that he’s a second-level social contact with me via the PayPal Mafia, it is pretty clear that my repeated efforts are being ignored. This is tragic and not just for Western civilization but for technological civilization.
The sole reason for marriage is the protection of female sexuality.
“Protection” in the sense that women are physically weaker than men and are very vulnerable during pregnancy, nursing,etc. And also in the sense of ownership: that men want to be sure the children they are bestowing property and hereditary honors upon are really their issue.
And there’s no need for either of those any more. Guns are the great equalizer in terms of physical security (along with rights at law). And paternity can be easily verified.
So who needs marriage?
Weddings, OTOH are still very popular. But the costumes and the party are The Thing. A wedding is over in one day.
Those are some interesting perspectives there. The glass is half-full – people are rich enough nowadays to afford to live on their own, and women are capable of providing their own physical & material security. So let’s Party at the now-unnecessary wedding!
Then there is the glass half-empty part – declining populations, along with a probable skewing of the next generation towards the less happy part of the IQ curve.
Maybe robots, socialism, and wise all-knowing Rulers will save future generations. Maybe not. It is probably a good idea to keep a close eye on what happens in Japan, where the solution today seems to be (you guessed it!) increased immigration.
Declining fertility isn’t due to declining marriage.
Why should it be, now that extramarital sex is probably as or more common than marital sex?
The price of having a man protect your weakness and support your babies used to be marriage. Now as I said women have other protections, and they can get the support married or not, and illegitimacy and out -of-wedlock pregnancy are no stigma.
Who needs/ wants marriage?
Weddings are becoming kinda detached from marriage too. I know two young (well, 30ish ) women who are getting legally married, y’know, the license,the verba in praesenti— with no ado at a courthouse or local church—and then re-enacting it at an elaborate ceremony at some very expensive venue. (And it’s expensive for the wedding guests too!) I’ve always hated weddings.
Elon Musk throws millions down the unprincipled model selection rat hole, failing to provide actionable intelligence on TFR decline. Of course it is in Austin.
Will both women get to wear stunning white wedding dresses with trains and flower girls? Will both fathers be there to give the “brides” away? Just asking – I am out of touch with modern practices.
Yes, they’ll wear the white at the second, fake wedding. And families will be in attendance at the do-over. And ppossibly even at the real wedding, if it’s convenient.
What you may not know, if you don’t have youngish friends or relatives ,is that even the engagement has to be a performance. I mean, the couple know they’re getting married, they’re already living together, they’ve bought rings, but still the gent has to “surprise” the girl, and her friends have to be lurking nearby to take pictures of the Q and A moment. So asinine IMHO. But I read somewhere that this is all such a big deal just because the wedding ceremony will not mean any change in their lives; it won’t be their first night together, they’ll probably just be resuming a joint life they’ve been living for some time. So the ceremony has to be a potlatch.
And as you point out, the couple, having waited till 30something, has also amassed a lot more money by the time they wed. So at least the bride’s parents aren’t necessarily on the hook for the cost.
I think marriage still serves a purpose. It solves, permanently, the problem of loneliness. It also creates the opportunity to practice the virtues of being a husband or a wife, which give meaning to people’s lives.
Unfortunately, the legal institution of marriage doesn’t facilitate a permanent union. On the contrary, the state provides every incentive for the female partner to abandon their spouse. This is made worse by a culture that encourages people to treat relationships as disposable.
Until recently, I had wanted to get married for romantic reasons. I still plan to have a committed relationship and children, but I probably won’t get married. It’s too much of a financial risk.
I wonder if there is data that is more granular on characteristics of individuals versus the risk of divorce? Like automobile accidents, I would speculate that people with certain traits are high risk and others low risk.
Unfortunately I think people confuse acquaintances with friends and these same people have issues picking spouses. It is a difference of who can be trusted. I think this is a confusing what it means to not judge people. You have to judge people in a relationship. You don’t have to tell the world your thoughts.
People confuse nice or friendly with being trustworthy.
In the one hand why take any risk? What is the advantage of a piece of paper even if the risk of divorce is low?
I waited a long time to ask my wife to marry me. I never felt any pressure to marry. I wasn’t concerned about my future wife. She was and is a better person than me. I was concerned about me. I also recall thinking about the meaning of a piece of paper.
I personally think that people that are 100 percent certain are either not good at understanding risk or are caught up in the euphoria of a new relationship.
One day I asked myself what I was doing. Kind of a shit or get of the pot moment. I decided to ask. Although I didn’t think the piece of paper mattered, I was surprised to find that marriage did matter for me. The relationship became much more important to me and these doubts I had about myself went away. We were now not a couple, but a partnership moving forward together. I concluded that I should have asked sooner.
I am happy I got married and I do think it would have turned out different without that commitment from me. That was 30 years ago times have changed and it was specific to me so I don’t know what the right thing is for men today, but I do think it is different and better. I think it has to do with trust. I have and had complete trust in my wife. How can getting married be a risk when there is complete trust? Yes, people can make mistakes even when they understand trust and how to know who is trustworthy.
I friend and I recently had a conversation about whether we would remarry if our wife died. At the time I said the reason people do is to avoid loneliness. However, I think this is wrong in most cases it is because having someone that loves and cares for you is a better life. When my mother lived at an independent living facility, she had all kinds of friends. She had not been that busy with activities since her children were kids. This wasn’t as fulfilling for her as being married to my father. All those young men taking advice from other young men are doing themselves a disservice. They need to talk to someone that is beyond the here and now.
The argument can be made that you don’t need to remarry to have someone that loves and cares for you.
My wife and I had that conversation a long time ago. We expect each to move on if tragedy strikes.
At a prior (Catholic) parish, a relatively young deacon (40-ish) lost his wife to a sudden cancer. (Pancreatic, IIRC.) My wife was close to his wife, as she loved to baby-sit our then very young children. And my wife knew that the deacon had had that discussion with his wife, and had her blessing to marry after she was gone.
He had to be laicized from the deaconate to do so (and did, after a couple years), and it scandalized the parish’s excessively orthodox members. But not us, knowing the situation. And my wife and I came to the same conclusion.
From my very skimpy knowledge of history, it seems that marriage (the man-woman kind) has been an almost universal element of human societies, in many different locations and in different religions. Why?
Perhaps the answer is that marriage has historically been about the children. Any human society that failed to develop a way of encouraging procreation (easy) and rearing (less easy) would have been – maybe was – quickly given the bum’s rush by demography.
What we are seeing now, most obviously with things like lesbian “marriage”, is that marriage is all about ME! Children have become an afterthought or a nuisance – with similar trends evident in China, Japan, the West … even apparently India.
Of course, demographic change is generally a slow process, measured in generations rather than years. Will Darwin eliminate all the genes of people who are not focused on children, leaving a rather different global population?
Are you kidding? Even if there were such data, the response from Our Junkie Betters is guaranteed to be “Correlation Doesn’t Imply Causation”, etc… as I’ve described before.
The Church of Social Pseudo-Science has humanity tied down for a mass gang-rape by the zombie mobs.
For example, let’s take Chris Langan’s recent post on TFR collapse:
Other than nuking the social pseudosciences there is another option to killing the wealthy and powerful men:
Killing the urban areas which includes, of course, strategic and total nuclear war among other things.
This came to mind today after I had tried to reach out to some rural authorities about getting support for nuking the social pseudosciences. The talk turned to the long-term trend of dying rural culture. That’s when I was directed toward a philanthropic nonprofit called the Lakin Foundation which I was told was all about reversing the decline of rural culture specifically in Southwest Iowa.
Hope springing eternal, I went to the Lakin Foundation site and, being the realist that I am, I went and looked at their list of grants for 2018-present. At first glance it didn’t look very much like what I had been led to believe, so I decided to blow off a day of analysis to see what was going on. Using a coding assistant and API access to Anthropic to fill out the rest of the data in a spreadsheet, even my inner cynic was surprised at just how much of a con this foundation was. It reminded me of the glee with which some Ford Foundation trustees like to brag about calling Henry Ford “The Grave Spinner”.
Here’s the email I sent a bit ago:
Dear Name Withheld,
Find the attached database file I created today to investigate the degree to which the Lakin Foundation may be seen to advance rural culture.
The best argument I can make on behalf of the Lakin Foundation is that some of the programs administered out of the urban area organizations provide some benefits to non-urban populations and that if one restricts one’s attention to only the rural towns that have received grants, the per capita amount received is about 4 times that received by the urban populations.
However, this argument suffers the following weaknesses:
Taking the entire non-urban population of Southwest Iowa (about 100,000) the per capita is less than a third of that going to the urban centers.
Urban organizations that administer funds have the appearance of a conflict of interest when it comes to programs that are supposed to benefit all populations.
Although #2 is, in part, because rural communities tend not to have the legal and administrative resources required to establish the kinds of organizations that can be entrusted with major grants (hence my recent request for such assistance) this is exactly the kind of thing a foundation that purports to benefit rural communities should be sensitive to.
The last half century’s public policy has neglected the maintenance of rural populations, and this has given rise to the recent urban vs rural tensions. The seriousness of these tensions are apparent in the stark difference in perception of the assassination attempt on Trump between these populations.
Anyone who has experienced the political process as a remedy for #4 can attest that the existing political processes systemically favors urban organizations.
10 years ago I addressed these things in my countycurrency.org proposal. However, this would require that major property owners be brought on board, and there is a growing rift between rural property owners and the surrounding rural populations due to the aforementioned public policies.
My focus is, therefore, on reforming the public policy system from two angles: 1) The way the social sciences treat data and thereby influence public policy and 2) The way the existing political process disenfranchises rural populations relative to urban populations.
