A demographic trend that is currently the subject of much punditry is an apparently widespread increase in the number of adults who live alone. The data that support this trend is often too aggregated to be certain who exactly makes up this clearly growing set of singletons, but it seems clear that the choice to live alone has been getting more popular.
This raises an obvious question: what is driving this? There is no shortage of hypotheses: rising incomes, the trend to later marriages, lower divorce costs. Predictably, someone somewhere is of the view that 'something needs to be done about this!'. (I had no idea the US Federal Govt has a program that bribes single parents to get married....) and someone else has raised the specter of a new category of bigotry: 'singlism'.
The trend is perhaps made more surprising by a body of evidence that single life is bad for you. One of the attached papers points out something that one can read in many other places: singles report being less happy than non-singles, on average. The other piece from Forbes.com mentions two medical studies that find that (1) loneliness and (2) living alone are, respectively, bad for one's health (an abstract of the second study is also attached).
So, for today: what do we think is really driving this trend (or maybe, antecedent to that - is it really a trend at all)? And what if any are the economic/social policy changes to be contemplated if it is a real trend? Perhaps a Federal Bureau of Matching is in order...
See you @ the FUBar.
