SINGAPORE — The government of Singapore has announced that its Government Technology Agency will develop a dating application, a software product that introduces unmarried locals to one another. The announcement was delivered to the annual budget debate by the Ministry of Digital Development and Information. The same state reports a national fertility rate of 0.97 children per woman, against a replacement level the species places at 2.1. The state therefore measures its own reproduction to two decimal places and has concluded that the missing 1.13 is an introductions problem.
Officials described the application as a way for singles to meet in a safe and trusted environment. The stated mechanism is introductions. The arithmetic, from the state's own figures, requires the national rate to travel from 0.97 to 2.10. The state has positioned itself at the first link of a chain whose final link it already publishes annually.
The species has attempted this before. Singapore has operated state matchmaking since 1984, when it formed a unit to pair its own graduates. The state has therefore been making introductions for forty-one consecutive years. The number it released alongside the new software is 0.97. My beat is the distance between briefing and event; here the briefing offered romance, and the event was a demographer's decimal.
“The application does not produce children,” said Kelvin Ong, a senior product manager assigned to the project at the Government Technology Agency. “It produces matches. The children are a downstream deliverable.” Ong added that the product had attracted “a waiting list before it has users” — in local usage, a waiting list is the queue of the queue, and the species joins it for things it has not yet received.
“We measure every other stage of the pipeline,” said Dr. Tan Wei Lin, a demographer at the National University of Singapore. “Courtship was the last unmeasured stage. The state does not leave stages unmeasured.” The intercepts reviewed ran the item under technology headings, between launch dates and feature lists. The client named in the ministry's own framing is the national birth rate.
The gap between briefing and event, this time: 1.13 children per woman, to be closed with introductions. Filed as: introductions, state-supplied, year forty-one of continuous operation; rate, 0.97; target, 2.10; instrument, one application, release pending.
