For the first time since records were kept, a majority of American adults are single.
From Single Americans become majority for first time — RT USA:
More people in the United States are apparently leaving wedding rings sitting in jewelry stores, as new data shows a majority of American adults are now single.
Specifically, about 50.2 percent of American adults over the age of 16 – roughly 124.6 million people – were single in August, according to a new Bureau of Labor Statistics report cited by Bloomberg. This marks the first time that single Americans make up the majority of the adult population since the government began tracking the data 38 years ago.
In 1976, single Americans made up 37.4 percent of the adult population. The number of individuals who have never been married also rose to 30.4 percent, up notably from 22.1 more than three decades ago. Divorced Americans, meanwhile, now compose 19.8 percent of the population, compared to 15.3 percent in 1976.
As these numbers continued to rise, economist Edward Yardeni said the development will have significant ripple effects for the economic, social and political scenes in the United States.
According to Yardeni, who penned a letter to clients on Tuesday, single Americans as a group generally prefer to rent housing rather than own it outright, and they are less likely to have children. These trends mean that changes in spending will also be on the way.
And yet, as Catherine Rampell points out, most of these singles want to be married:
Even as marriage rates have plummeted — particularly for the young and the less educated — Gallup survey data show that young singles very much hope to get hitched. Of Americans age 18 to 34, only about 9 percent have both never been married and say they do not ever want to marry.
“Although there is now a growing class divide in who gets and stays married in America, there is virtually no divide in the aspiration to marry,” says W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. “It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, white, black or Hispanic. Most Americans are married or would like to marry. The challenge, then, facing the United States is bridging the gap between the nearly universal aspiration to marry and the growing inability of poor and working-class Americans to access marriage.”
The real problem, according to that column, is economics, that young adults, about a third of whom still live with their parents, can’t afford to get married or enjoy other aspects of the American dream, which they still aspire to.
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