Plenty of dudes are still able to settle down with women and have children. A bunch of dudes choosing to be losers doesn't mean shit for any country that isn't a small island nation like Japan or the UK.
I am a believer in radical responsibility. It forces you to recognize your agency and to exercise as much of it as you can in any situation. That goes for the dating realm as well.
But, that said, there will be no bootstrapping competition amongst men that will fix the problems created by a combination of:
1) female hypergamy (as definitively observed as an
average tendency in women from all cultures), plus
2) a move by women into the workplace (and all other institutions), creating direct competition between men and women for the same jobs, and the subsequent alteration of the workplace to cater to women to the exclusion of men.
"Try harder," is the
right message to give to an individual. But it will not result in a positive sea change for all men and all women in the face of these widespread changes. When institutions become geared towards women, men are in trouble. Many of their natural instincts about how to behave (including how to work together) will be "wrong." So they'll tend to move elsewhere if they can (for example, away from higher education as it becomes
more feminized and even hostile to masculinity). And if men then move to jobs women don't want or can't do (physical labor, high risk work), and if those jobs are not prestigious or attractive enough to women (because they don't command as much money as they used to), then women have literally priced themselves out of the dating market. This is a serious problem.
And some of the biggest economic issues mentioned in this thread are directly caused by women's move into the workplace and their new focus on career success as a life goal. Demand is what sets prices. Everyone wants a house. Supplies of housing are scare. If people want them badly enough to pay for them with
two incomes instead of one (and they do), house prices will rise accordingly, and they'll
never come down again to the level of, say, the American 50s. This is a serious problem.
I'm not even really going to go into the low quality of so many modern women who seem
proud to be undesirable. You're out of your mind if you think men should bust their asses to become outlier successes to attract fat, resentful single parents.
None of this means men shouldn't pursue self improvement as a way to find happiness, in dating and otherwise. (Everyone on Earth would benefit from doing that.) But the problems we are faced with are serious ones, and they're unparalleled in human history.