Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Marriage Costs in China Are Out of Control

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 134 posts

Re: Marriage Costs in China Are Out of Control

#111

Post by ksec »

liftbigweights wrote: post #57
blfr wrote: post #55

A good start would be a law that ensures a woman’s claim on marital property in the case of a divorce. Current Chinese law makes no such provision, and thus provides a strong disincentive to marry and a very powerful incentive to charge higher bride prices. We have laws like this in Europe. Marriages keep happening later and TFRs keep plummeting. Why would it work any different in China. Journalists always push their…

Another false trope pushed by everyone... "Women are marrying later and having less kids because of career concerns, lack of maternity leave and child benefits." The countries with the best maternity leave and child benefits have the oldest marriage and lowest birth rates. And japan, where most women give up their jobs once married to start families and where the government pays women to have children have one of the…

>So it's not career/jobs, it's not maternity leave, it's not child benefits. Could it be societal? Media? Education?

Or Could it be so simple we can no longer afford to marry and have a Child even if both of us have a job.

Re: Marriage Costs in China Are Out of Control

#112

Post by EliRivers »

hkai wrote: post #2

I am planning to hopefully marry my girlfriend in the next couple of years and her parents are already asking for "at least a small amount like 10,000 USD", because "I'm white anyway", meaning I must be rich. Taking into account all the abuse she had to take from them, and their lazy and useless way of life, they're not getting a penny from me. Many people though feel powerless to resist and ruin themselves financial…

How does your fiance, the person you presumably love and care about most in the world, feel about you doing that to her parents? I wonder how it affects her too; is it some kind of cultural statement that your fiance isn't worth anything? Hope not!

It could be a pretty big insult to her parents that would affect her relationship with them (and possibly with the rest of her family as well) for the rest of her parents' lives, and depending on how she feels about it and how the rest of her family feels about it, could affect her for the rest of her life as well.

If she's fine with it, sure, great plan. If it's going to make her miserable, perhaps not so great.

Re: Marriage Costs in China Are Out of Control

#113

Post by davidiach »

ForHackernews wrote: post #107
fastball wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is the solution for women to stop having children and for humanity to die off? Also, I think the study needs to be much more longitudinal than "2 years on". Arguably the pay off for having children comes much, much later. For some, the pay off doesn't really come until they have grandchildren. Yes, having children is often a monumental PITA. But humans are social animals, and nothing is really comparable to fill t…

> So is the solution for women to stop having children and for humanity to die off? What a ridiculous false dichotomy. Earth has a huge (and increasing) number of humans on it. We are in far greater danger from unsustainable depletion of natural resources than we are "dying off" from gradually declining birthrates.

If we don't maintain the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman, the worlds population will eventually shrink exponentially. If that doesn't scare you, I don't know what will.

Re: Marriage Costs in China Are Out of Control

#114

Post by thucydidesofusa »

beefield wrote: post #102
blfr wrote: post #55

A good start would be a law that ensures a woman’s claim on marital property in the case of a divorce. Current Chinese law makes no such provision, and thus provides a strong disincentive to marry and a very powerful incentive to charge higher bride prices. We have laws like this in Europe. Marriages keep happening later and TFRs keep plummeting. Why would it work any different in China. Journalists always push their…

> All while populations that implemented them keep collapsing. You say it like it would be a bad thing? It's a bit weird because I have had this impression that overpopulation, not underpopulation is some kind of a problem here on our home planet...

But the countries that are growing are shitholes. We probably don't need more hungry mouths in Somalia but we need more of the people on this lists:

https://www.scienceheroes.com

A shrinking Germany or America is worse for the world than a shrinking Somalia. Unfortunately, without good ideas coming from the parts of the world that make advancements, the growing parts of the world need those advancements to deal with their problems.

Re: Marriage Costs in China Are Out of Control

#115

Post by echevil »

hak8or wrote: post #109
131sdfdasf wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does $10k mean they think you are rich? That's chump change. They are being generous.

What on earth is up with this mentality here on HN? I get that most of the people here are in tech and making probably at minimum 70k right out of college, with the higher end ones making 100k out of college. But surely you can't be serous? This 10k payment idea doesn't apply just to higher incom folks like you, this applies to a decent portion of the population there most of which is making less than 30k a year. 10k…

Even for poorest people in rural areas in China, it’s still possible that they’d pay 10k usd “bride money”. 10k is really considered to be a lot in China for such matters. A wedding could also cost a lot more than that. When they say “a small amount”, they mean it

Re: Marriage Costs in China Are Out of Control

#116

Post by watwut »

thrower123 wrote: post #61
watwut wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are gender imbalances destabilising historically? It woild be interesting to see the history. After wars there was lack of men in some areas. Excess of men was during gold rush, in Australia and is in silicon valley. (I am not sure how much it proves or disproved theory.)

In China, yes, very much so. Historically, when gender imbalances have gotten to the levels in the current statistics, rebellion and violent millenarian religious cults have found fertile ground, when times turned tougher. Having an excess of downtrodden single men without much to lose is not a great situation for stability anywhere.

Thank you. How did it happened? They killed female babies?

Re: Marriage Costs in China Are Out of Control

#117

Post by ForHackernews »

davidiach wrote: post #113
ForHackernews wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So is the solution for women to stop having children and for humanity to die off? What a ridiculous false dichotomy. Earth has a huge (and increasing) number of humans on it. We are in far greater danger from unsustainable depletion of natural resources than we are "dying off" from gradually declining birthrates.

If we don't maintain the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman, the worlds population will eventually shrink exponentially. If that doesn't scare you, I don't know what will.

Why is that scary? Human civilization might be much more sustainable with a billion people, rather than currently-predicted peak of 10 billion.

I'm much more worried about climate change leading to war and famine than I am about women voluntarily choosing to have fewer children. As far as I can see, population decline is only a problem because our current economic system assumes endless growth.

Re: Marriage Costs in China Are Out of Control

#118

Post by dang »

prablenha wrote: post #29
amrx431 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same shit is happening in India. If you dont have a H1B and never worked in US, good luck finding a girl. I am 27 right now and that too a low caste. I am seriously contemplating giving up hopes of marriage and remaining single. Will be tough as I dont have a family. All my family members were killed when I was young. I have stopped bothering and now just bury myself in work and reading to avoid the darkness.

So... The same thing that's happened for decades in the west? Good luck finding a woman if you're not over 8/10, taller than 180 cm, have a job, and accept her being a cheat... :-)

We ban accounts for commenting like this, so please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Marriage Costs in China Are Out of Control

#119

Post by tomjen3 »

rectang wrote: post #32
beerlord wrote: post #6

I think the title is misleading: its not really marriage costs, its a payment to the bride/parents to account for the gender disparity in China caused by sex-selective abortions. These bride costs should be allowed to climb infinitely, because it will serve as an incentive for families to have girls - and actually sex-selectively abort boys. Unfortunately we are seeing all this in the West, where Asian migrants to co…

> These bride costs should be allowed to climb infinitely, because it will serve as an incentive for families to have girls Wow, a market correction to counteract societal undervaluation of females. If it could happen that would be profoundly constructive, but attitudes about gender are durable. It's not hard to imagine that instead of letting the price rise to incentivize an increase in supply, we could see see pric…

How would you have price fixing and rationing? At most you could have that on the legal market, but the black market would never tolerate that, and it would only drive the (unofficial) price for women even higher.

Besides a great deal of the reasons the girls were aborted or killed were because in China a parent can count only on the support of their sons, not because Chinese parents don't love their daughters.

Re: Marriage Costs in China Are Out of Control

#120

Post by tomjen3 »

stonecraftwolf wrote: post #74
buckminster wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's contraception. The solution is for the government to randomly introduce placebos into the contraceptive supply. Or just accept that, given the choice, people don't want kids that much.

This. This thread is killing me. This might be the only comment so far to even consider women as having agency. When you give women control over their own bodies and equal enough rights to support autonomy — so, treat them like people, basically - it turns out they don’t want to have so many kids, because growing and birthing humans is incredibly taxing and traumatic. The trauma, in particular, is weirdly something t…

Giving birth is painful, but plenty of women want to do so more than once, so I doubt that more than a few (if any) have PTSD.

As for what women wants, since we can both agree that they have agency, we can ask them. Or better yet, look in to the surveys done on just that subject[0], and conclude that women do not get as many kids as they want to, or expect to.

[0]: https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-many-kids-do-women-want

Post reply on HN