Ah ok
10min de lecture
t'as pas une IA pour te traduire ça ?
Je suis tombé sur cette article très intéressant de The Economist qui parle de l'épidémie de célibat mondial
Ça parle de tout, de déséquilibre démographique jusqu'à l'émancipation des femmes en passant par la sur-sélectivité permise par les applications et pleins d'autres choses
En vrai si vous avez le temps, prenez le temps de tout lire parce que c'est très intérressant et ils ont une approche nuancée sans tomber dans un extrême ou l'autre
Pour les non anglophones traduction en FR de @Trapvador page 3
https://www.economist.com[...]7/2025&utm_id=2120234
Social media, dating apps and political polarisation all play a part
"I don’t date conservative or moderate men,” says Nancy Anteby, a 30-year-old New Yorker who works in social media. “I only date liberal men.” Politics is not her only concern. She is also looking for someone ambitious, with a stable career, who is Jewish and, perhaps most important, shares her desire to start a family. Finding dates who tick all of these boxes is not easy. “Very often a man will disappoint you,” she laments. Then again, she recently realised, “I don’t need to rely on a man to have the life that I dream of.”
Ms Anteby is far from unusual. Across America 41% of women and 50% of men in her age band (25-34) were single in 2023, a share that has doubled over the past five decades. Nor is America exceptional in this regard. Between 2010 and 2022 the share of people living alone (an admittedly imperfect measure of singlehood, but one for which data are more widely available) rose in 26 of the 30 members of the oecd, a club mostly of rich countries. Marriage rates are falling across much of Asia, including in China and India and especially Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. And singlehood is accelerating across different age cohorts. In Europe each new generation is less likely to be married or living with a partner than previous ones at the same age.
This relationship recession is hitting not just those wanting to marry or move in with a steady partner, but also those looking for a date or casual sex. Younger people are socialising less, dating less and starting to have sex later in life than previous generations. They are also having less sex in general (as, alas, are most of us).
Michael Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Stanford University, has found that the reduction in dating owing to the covid-19 pandemic produced 13.7m more singles in America in 2022 than if the singlehood rate (conservatively defined) had stayed at the level of 2017. To generate an estimate of the global increase in plus-nones, The Economist extrapolated from his data, while also taking into account sharp falls in marriage rates in a number of Asian countries, which predate the pandemic. We calculate that over the past decade such effects have swollen the ranks of single people around the world by at least 100m.
Two’s a crowd
Dating, sex, marriage and divorce are all intensely personal choices, and their effects are felt most directly by those making them. The fact that more people feel able to choose to be single now than in the past, when there was far greater social and economic pressure to marry, could be considered one of the great emancipations of the past half century. Untold numbers have been liberated from unhappy unions.
But not all those who remain single have chosen to do so. A study of singles in 14 countries found that only 40% said they were “not interested in being in a relationship”. A smaller survey of single Americans by the Pew Research Centre in 2019 did find that 50% were not interested in dating. Yet only 27% said they were not dating because they enjoyed being single. The rest gave reasons including being too busy, too old, or because no one would want to date them. No less than 34% of singles in the 14-country study said they did not want to be alone but found it “difficult to attract a mate”, with 26% describing themselves as “between relationships”. In short, there are growing numbers of lonely hearts, pining for a partner but unable to secure one.
Don’t want a ring on it
There is an alarming mismatch in this regard between women and men. In the Pew survey, 62% of single women did not want to date, whereas only 37% of single men felt the same way. America and South Korea, among other countries, have big, vocal movements of young men who feel they have been unfairly deprived of romantic opportunities. All over the world, a high proportion of unmarried young men is strongly associated with elevated levels of violence and crime.
Even relatively small shifts in coupling rates, when multiplied across a whole population, can have far-reaching effects on society as a whole. The biggest impact will be on fertility rates, since married women tend to have more children than single ones. This will be especially marked in East Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea, where only 2-4% of babies are born to unmarried mothers. All the world over, however, the rise of singlehood will be a further drag on already slowing birth rates. The effects will also be felt in property markets (more demand for housing, since more people will be living alone) and government finances (less public spending on maternity wards and schools and, in time, more on care homes).
The fact that a large proportion of single people would rather be in a relationship (whether they are still looking for one or have given up hope) suggests that either there is some sort of dating-market failure that is preventing compatible people from finding one another, or that society is changing in ways that are making large numbers of singles incompatible. In practice, it seems to be a bit of both.
In Asia, where singlehood is growing fastest, a mix of structural and cultural changes is increasing incompatibility. Start with demography. China’s one-child policy has created a huge imbalance in the ratio of men to women. When it comes to those of peak marriageable age, the country will have 119 men for every 100 women by 2027. In all, there may be 30m-50m “excess men” in China, reckons Xiaoling Shu of the University of California, Davis. Singlehood in China, like most places, is not evenly distributed. Instead, it is disproportionately concentrated among men who are poorer and poorly educated, and thus less attractive as mates, and among highly educated women (of which more later).
China’s one-child policy makes it an outlier, but heterosexual men in other countries with a strong cultural preference for sons will also struggle to find partners. Sex-selective abortions resulted in 111 boys being born in India in 2011 for every 100 girls, according to census data. The natural ratio is about 105. Although the distortion has since become less extreme, we calculate that around 20m more boys than girls were born in India in 2000-15.
Improved opportunities for women to go to university and enter the workplace are also fuelling the growth in singlehood in East Asia, argues Wei-Jun Jean Yeung of the National University of Singapore. As women gain financial independence, they no longer need a husband to support them. They also have more to lose by getting married. “There’s still a culture of patriarchy in Asia where women carry most of the responsibilities of caring for children and domestic housework,” says Dr Yeung. “The opportunity cost of getting married may be high: women think that if they get married they may have to give up working to take care of their in-laws, parents and children, plus do housework.”
One result of this is that well-educated women are also disproportionately likely to be single in a number of Asian countries. “The best-educated, urban, college-educated women are becoming more egalitarian in their gender attitudes,” says Dr Shu of women in China. “Many college-educated men are hostile towards feminist ideas or even feminists…[they] think these women are hurting their prospects and interests at a personal level.”
In South Korea the gap between women’s opportunities and men’s sexist expectations is particularly wide. Around half of young Korean men think they are discriminated against (other than having to do military service, they are not). Some 60% complain that feminism demeans them. They also tend to be terrible slouches when it comes to housework. Little wonder, then, that ambitious young women are far less keen on marriage than they are.
A similar pattern of singlehood pertains in America and Europe, despite their less ingrained gender roles. Until roughly the middle of the 20th century, far more men went to university than women. As a result there were far more couples in which the man was better educated than the other way round. More recently, however, women have surpassed men in studiousness. Across the oecd on average 51% of women aged 25-34 had a university degree in 2019, compared with 39% of men. That makes the old pattern impossible to sustain. “Highly educated women who still want to marry up won’t find enough candidates,” says Albert Esteve, the director of the Centre for Demographic Studies in Barcelona. “So the question is, are they going to start marrying down?”
If mathematics were the only driving force, rather than cultural norms, there would have been a big rise in the share of couples where the woman is better educated. Yet the expectation that women should marry up is hard to dispel. Researchers in Germany, for example, found that highly educated women over the age of 30 were more likely to remain single than settle for a man with less education.
[Suite en dessous]
Ça parle de tout, de déséquilibre démographique jusqu'à l'émancipation des femmes en passant par la sur-sélectivité permise par les applications et pleins d'autres choses
En vrai si vous avez le temps, prenez le temps de tout lire parce que c'est très intérressant et ils ont une approche nuancée sans tomber dans un extrême ou l'autre
Pour les non anglophones traduction en FR de @Trapvador page 3
All over the rich world, fewer people are hooking up and shacking up
Social media, dating apps and political polarisation all play a part
"I don’t date conservative or moderate men,” says Nancy Anteby, a 30-year-old New Yorker who works in social media. “I only date liberal men.” Politics is not her only concern. She is also looking for someone ambitious, with a stable career, who is Jewish and, perhaps most important, shares her desire to start a family. Finding dates who tick all of these boxes is not easy. “Very often a man will disappoint you,” she laments. Then again, she recently realised, “I don’t need to rely on a man to have the life that I dream of.”
Ms Anteby is far from unusual. Across America 41% of women and 50% of men in her age band (25-34) were single in 2023, a share that has doubled over the past five decades. Nor is America exceptional in this regard. Between 2010 and 2022 the share of people living alone (an admittedly imperfect measure of singlehood, but one for which data are more widely available) rose in 26 of the 30 members of the oecd, a club mostly of rich countries. Marriage rates are falling across much of Asia, including in China and India and especially Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. And singlehood is accelerating across different age cohorts. In Europe each new generation is less likely to be married or living with a partner than previous ones at the same age.
This relationship recession is hitting not just those wanting to marry or move in with a steady partner, but also those looking for a date or casual sex. Younger people are socialising less, dating less and starting to have sex later in life than previous generations. They are also having less sex in general (as, alas, are most of us).
Michael Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Stanford University, has found that the reduction in dating owing to the covid-19 pandemic produced 13.7m more singles in America in 2022 than if the singlehood rate (conservatively defined) had stayed at the level of 2017. To generate an estimate of the global increase in plus-nones, The Economist extrapolated from his data, while also taking into account sharp falls in marriage rates in a number of Asian countries, which predate the pandemic. We calculate that over the past decade such effects have swollen the ranks of single people around the world by at least 100m.
Two’s a crowd
Dating, sex, marriage and divorce are all intensely personal choices, and their effects are felt most directly by those making them. The fact that more people feel able to choose to be single now than in the past, when there was far greater social and economic pressure to marry, could be considered one of the great emancipations of the past half century. Untold numbers have been liberated from unhappy unions.
But not all those who remain single have chosen to do so. A study of singles in 14 countries found that only 40% said they were “not interested in being in a relationship”. A smaller survey of single Americans by the Pew Research Centre in 2019 did find that 50% were not interested in dating. Yet only 27% said they were not dating because they enjoyed being single. The rest gave reasons including being too busy, too old, or because no one would want to date them. No less than 34% of singles in the 14-country study said they did not want to be alone but found it “difficult to attract a mate”, with 26% describing themselves as “between relationships”. In short, there are growing numbers of lonely hearts, pining for a partner but unable to secure one.
Don’t want a ring on it
There is an alarming mismatch in this regard between women and men. In the Pew survey, 62% of single women did not want to date, whereas only 37% of single men felt the same way. America and South Korea, among other countries, have big, vocal movements of young men who feel they have been unfairly deprived of romantic opportunities. All over the world, a high proportion of unmarried young men is strongly associated with elevated levels of violence and crime.
Even relatively small shifts in coupling rates, when multiplied across a whole population, can have far-reaching effects on society as a whole. The biggest impact will be on fertility rates, since married women tend to have more children than single ones. This will be especially marked in East Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea, where only 2-4% of babies are born to unmarried mothers. All the world over, however, the rise of singlehood will be a further drag on already slowing birth rates. The effects will also be felt in property markets (more demand for housing, since more people will be living alone) and government finances (less public spending on maternity wards and schools and, in time, more on care homes).
The fact that a large proportion of single people would rather be in a relationship (whether they are still looking for one or have given up hope) suggests that either there is some sort of dating-market failure that is preventing compatible people from finding one another, or that society is changing in ways that are making large numbers of singles incompatible. In practice, it seems to be a bit of both.
In Asia, where singlehood is growing fastest, a mix of structural and cultural changes is increasing incompatibility. Start with demography. China’s one-child policy has created a huge imbalance in the ratio of men to women. When it comes to those of peak marriageable age, the country will have 119 men for every 100 women by 2027. In all, there may be 30m-50m “excess men” in China, reckons Xiaoling Shu of the University of California, Davis. Singlehood in China, like most places, is not evenly distributed. Instead, it is disproportionately concentrated among men who are poorer and poorly educated, and thus less attractive as mates, and among highly educated women (of which more later).
China’s one-child policy makes it an outlier, but heterosexual men in other countries with a strong cultural preference for sons will also struggle to find partners. Sex-selective abortions resulted in 111 boys being born in India in 2011 for every 100 girls, according to census data. The natural ratio is about 105. Although the distortion has since become less extreme, we calculate that around 20m more boys than girls were born in India in 2000-15.
Improved opportunities for women to go to university and enter the workplace are also fuelling the growth in singlehood in East Asia, argues Wei-Jun Jean Yeung of the National University of Singapore. As women gain financial independence, they no longer need a husband to support them. They also have more to lose by getting married. “There’s still a culture of patriarchy in Asia where women carry most of the responsibilities of caring for children and domestic housework,” says Dr Yeung. “The opportunity cost of getting married may be high: women think that if they get married they may have to give up working to take care of their in-laws, parents and children, plus do housework.”
One result of this is that well-educated women are also disproportionately likely to be single in a number of Asian countries. “The best-educated, urban, college-educated women are becoming more egalitarian in their gender attitudes,” says Dr Shu of women in China. “Many college-educated men are hostile towards feminist ideas or even feminists…[they] think these women are hurting their prospects and interests at a personal level.”
In South Korea the gap between women’s opportunities and men’s sexist expectations is particularly wide. Around half of young Korean men think they are discriminated against (other than having to do military service, they are not). Some 60% complain that feminism demeans them. They also tend to be terrible slouches when it comes to housework. Little wonder, then, that ambitious young women are far less keen on marriage than they are.
A similar pattern of singlehood pertains in America and Europe, despite their less ingrained gender roles. Until roughly the middle of the 20th century, far more men went to university than women. As a result there were far more couples in which the man was better educated than the other way round. More recently, however, women have surpassed men in studiousness. Across the oecd on average 51% of women aged 25-34 had a university degree in 2019, compared with 39% of men. That makes the old pattern impossible to sustain. “Highly educated women who still want to marry up won’t find enough candidates,” says Albert Esteve, the director of the Centre for Demographic Studies in Barcelona. “So the question is, are they going to start marrying down?”
If mathematics were the only driving force, rather than cultural norms, there would have been a big rise in the share of couples where the woman is better educated. Yet the expectation that women should marry up is hard to dispel. Researchers in Germany, for example, found that highly educated women over the age of 30 were more likely to remain single than settle for a man with less education.
[Suite en dessous]
Quand tu veux, j'ai envie de faire des enfants
10min de lecture
En anglais aussi
Je suis le donut du forum
Quand tu veux, j'ai envie de faire des enfants
...
Après en soit c'est ce qui se dit depuis dens années sur les forums
Je suis le donut du forum
Je suis tombé sur cette article très intéressant de The Economist qui parle de l'épidémie de célibat mondial
Ça parle de tout, de déséquilibre démographique jusqu'à l'émancipation des femmes en passant par la sur-sélectivité permise par les applications et pleins d'autres choses
En vrai si vous avez le temps, prenez le temps de tout lire parce que c'est très intérressant et ils ont une approche nuancée sans tomber dans un extrême ou l'autre
Pour les non anglophones traduction en FR de @Trapvador page 3
https://www.economist.com[...]7/2025&utm_id=2120234
Social media, dating apps and political polarisation all play a part
"I don’t date conservative or moderate men,” says Nancy Anteby, a 30-year-old New Yorker who works in social media. “I only date liberal men.” Politics is not her only concern. She is also looking for someone ambitious, with a stable career, who is Jewish and, perhaps most important, shares her desire to start a family. Finding dates who tick all of these boxes is not easy. “Very often a man will disappoint you,” she laments. Then again, she recently realised, “I don’t need to rely on a man to have the life that I dream of.”
Ms Anteby is far from unusual. Across America 41% of women and 50% of men in her age band (25-34) were single in 2023, a share that has doubled over the past five decades. Nor is America exceptional in this regard. Between 2010 and 2022 the share of people living alone (an admittedly imperfect measure of singlehood, but one for which data are more widely available) rose in 26 of the 30 members of the oecd, a club mostly of rich countries. Marriage rates are falling across much of Asia, including in China and India and especially Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. And singlehood is accelerating across different age cohorts. In Europe each new generation is less likely to be married or living with a partner than previous ones at the same age.
This relationship recession is hitting not just those wanting to marry or move in with a steady partner, but also those looking for a date or casual sex. Younger people are socialising less, dating less and starting to have sex later in life than previous generations. They are also having less sex in general (as, alas, are most of us).
Michael Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Stanford University, has found that the reduction in dating owing to the covid-19 pandemic produced 13.7m more singles in America in 2022 than if the singlehood rate (conservatively defined) had stayed at the level of 2017. To generate an estimate of the global increase in plus-nones, The Economist extrapolated from his data, while also taking into account sharp falls in marriage rates in a number of Asian countries, which predate the pandemic. We calculate that over the past decade such effects have swollen the ranks of single people around the world by at least 100m.
Two’s a crowd
Dating, sex, marriage and divorce are all intensely personal choices, and their effects are felt most directly by those making them. The fact that more people feel able to choose to be single now than in the past, when there was far greater social and economic pressure to marry, could be considered one of the great emancipations of the past half century. Untold numbers have been liberated from unhappy unions.
But not all those who remain single have chosen to do so. A study of singles in 14 countries found that only 40% said they were “not interested in being in a relationship”. A smaller survey of single Americans by the Pew Research Centre in 2019 did find that 50% were not interested in dating. Yet only 27% said they were not dating because they enjoyed being single. The rest gave reasons including being too busy, too old, or because no one would want to date them. No less than 34% of singles in the 14-country study said they did not want to be alone but found it “difficult to attract a mate”, with 26% describing themselves as “between relationships”. In short, there are growing numbers of lonely hearts, pining for a partner but unable to secure one.
Don’t want a ring on it
There is an alarming mismatch in this regard between women and men. In the Pew survey, 62% of single women did not want to date, whereas only 37% of single men felt the same way. America and South Korea, among other countries, have big, vocal movements of young men who feel they have been unfairly deprived of romantic opportunities. All over the world, a high proportion of unmarried young men is strongly associated with elevated levels of violence and crime.
Even relatively small shifts in coupling rates, when multiplied across a whole population, can have far-reaching effects on society as a whole. The biggest impact will be on fertility rates, since married women tend to have more children than single ones. This will be especially marked in East Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea, where only 2-4% of babies are born to unmarried mothers. All the world over, however, the rise of singlehood will be a further drag on already slowing birth rates. The effects will also be felt in property markets (more demand for housing, since more people will be living alone) and government finances (less public spending on maternity wards and schools and, in time, more on care homes).
The fact that a large proportion of single people would rather be in a relationship (whether they are still looking for one or have given up hope) suggests that either there is some sort of dating-market failure that is preventing compatible people from finding one another, or that society is changing in ways that are making large numbers of singles incompatible. In practice, it seems to be a bit of both.
In Asia, where singlehood is growing fastest, a mix of structural and cultural changes is increasing incompatibility. Start with demography. China’s one-child policy has created a huge imbalance in the ratio of men to women. When it comes to those of peak marriageable age, the country will have 119 men for every 100 women by 2027. In all, there may be 30m-50m “excess men” in China, reckons Xiaoling Shu of the University of California, Davis. Singlehood in China, like most places, is not evenly distributed. Instead, it is disproportionately concentrated among men who are poorer and poorly educated, and thus less attractive as mates, and among highly educated women (of which more later).
China’s one-child policy makes it an outlier, but heterosexual men in other countries with a strong cultural preference for sons will also struggle to find partners. Sex-selective abortions resulted in 111 boys being born in India in 2011 for every 100 girls, according to census data. The natural ratio is about 105. Although the distortion has since become less extreme, we calculate that around 20m more boys than girls were born in India in 2000-15.
Improved opportunities for women to go to university and enter the workplace are also fuelling the growth in singlehood in East Asia, argues Wei-Jun Jean Yeung of the National University of Singapore. As women gain financial independence, they no longer need a husband to support them. They also have more to lose by getting married. “There’s still a culture of patriarchy in Asia where women carry most of the responsibilities of caring for children and domestic housework,” says Dr Yeung. “The opportunity cost of getting married may be high: women think that if they get married they may have to give up working to take care of their in-laws, parents and children, plus do housework.”
One result of this is that well-educated women are also disproportionately likely to be single in a number of Asian countries. “The best-educated, urban, college-educated women are becoming more egalitarian in their gender attitudes,” says Dr Shu of women in China. “Many college-educated men are hostile towards feminist ideas or even feminists…[they] think these women are hurting their prospects and interests at a personal level.”
In South Korea the gap between women’s opportunities and men’s sexist expectations is particularly wide. Around half of young Korean men think they are discriminated against (other than having to do military service, they are not). Some 60% complain that feminism demeans them. They also tend to be terrible slouches when it comes to housework. Little wonder, then, that ambitious young women are far less keen on marriage than they are.
A similar pattern of singlehood pertains in America and Europe, despite their less ingrained gender roles. Until roughly the middle of the 20th century, far more men went to university than women. As a result there were far more couples in which the man was better educated than the other way round. More recently, however, women have surpassed men in studiousness. Across the oecd on average 51% of women aged 25-34 had a university degree in 2019, compared with 39% of men. That makes the old pattern impossible to sustain. “Highly educated women who still want to marry up won’t find enough candidates,” says Albert Esteve, the director of the Centre for Demographic Studies in Barcelona. “So the question is, are they going to start marrying down?”
If mathematics were the only driving force, rather than cultural norms, there would have been a big rise in the share of couples where the woman is better educated. Yet the expectation that women should marry up is hard to dispel. Researchers in Germany, for example, found that highly educated women over the age of 30 were more likely to remain single than settle for a man with less education.
[Suite en dessous]
Ça parle de tout, de déséquilibre démographique jusqu'à l'émancipation des femmes en passant par la sur-sélectivité permise par les applications et pleins d'autres choses
En vrai si vous avez le temps, prenez le temps de tout lire parce que c'est très intérressant et ils ont une approche nuancée sans tomber dans un extrême ou l'autre
Pour les non anglophones traduction en FR de @Trapvador page 3
All over the rich world, fewer people are hooking up and shacking up
Social media, dating apps and political polarisation all play a part
"I don’t date conservative or moderate men,” says Nancy Anteby, a 30-year-old New Yorker who works in social media. “I only date liberal men.” Politics is not her only concern. She is also looking for someone ambitious, with a stable career, who is Jewish and, perhaps most important, shares her desire to start a family. Finding dates who tick all of these boxes is not easy. “Very often a man will disappoint you,” she laments. Then again, she recently realised, “I don’t need to rely on a man to have the life that I dream of.”
Ms Anteby is far from unusual. Across America 41% of women and 50% of men in her age band (25-34) were single in 2023, a share that has doubled over the past five decades. Nor is America exceptional in this regard. Between 2010 and 2022 the share of people living alone (an admittedly imperfect measure of singlehood, but one for which data are more widely available) rose in 26 of the 30 members of the oecd, a club mostly of rich countries. Marriage rates are falling across much of Asia, including in China and India and especially Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. And singlehood is accelerating across different age cohorts. In Europe each new generation is less likely to be married or living with a partner than previous ones at the same age.
This relationship recession is hitting not just those wanting to marry or move in with a steady partner, but also those looking for a date or casual sex. Younger people are socialising less, dating less and starting to have sex later in life than previous generations. They are also having less sex in general (as, alas, are most of us).
Michael Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Stanford University, has found that the reduction in dating owing to the covid-19 pandemic produced 13.7m more singles in America in 2022 than if the singlehood rate (conservatively defined) had stayed at the level of 2017. To generate an estimate of the global increase in plus-nones, The Economist extrapolated from his data, while also taking into account sharp falls in marriage rates in a number of Asian countries, which predate the pandemic. We calculate that over the past decade such effects have swollen the ranks of single people around the world by at least 100m.
Two’s a crowd
Dating, sex, marriage and divorce are all intensely personal choices, and their effects are felt most directly by those making them. The fact that more people feel able to choose to be single now than in the past, when there was far greater social and economic pressure to marry, could be considered one of the great emancipations of the past half century. Untold numbers have been liberated from unhappy unions.
But not all those who remain single have chosen to do so. A study of singles in 14 countries found that only 40% said they were “not interested in being in a relationship”. A smaller survey of single Americans by the Pew Research Centre in 2019 did find that 50% were not interested in dating. Yet only 27% said they were not dating because they enjoyed being single. The rest gave reasons including being too busy, too old, or because no one would want to date them. No less than 34% of singles in the 14-country study said they did not want to be alone but found it “difficult to attract a mate”, with 26% describing themselves as “between relationships”. In short, there are growing numbers of lonely hearts, pining for a partner but unable to secure one.
Don’t want a ring on it
There is an alarming mismatch in this regard between women and men. In the Pew survey, 62% of single women did not want to date, whereas only 37% of single men felt the same way. America and South Korea, among other countries, have big, vocal movements of young men who feel they have been unfairly deprived of romantic opportunities. All over the world, a high proportion of unmarried young men is strongly associated with elevated levels of violence and crime.
Even relatively small shifts in coupling rates, when multiplied across a whole population, can have far-reaching effects on society as a whole. The biggest impact will be on fertility rates, since married women tend to have more children than single ones. This will be especially marked in East Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea, where only 2-4% of babies are born to unmarried mothers. All the world over, however, the rise of singlehood will be a further drag on already slowing birth rates. The effects will also be felt in property markets (more demand for housing, since more people will be living alone) and government finances (less public spending on maternity wards and schools and, in time, more on care homes).
The fact that a large proportion of single people would rather be in a relationship (whether they are still looking for one or have given up hope) suggests that either there is some sort of dating-market failure that is preventing compatible people from finding one another, or that society is changing in ways that are making large numbers of singles incompatible. In practice, it seems to be a bit of both.
In Asia, where singlehood is growing fastest, a mix of structural and cultural changes is increasing incompatibility. Start with demography. China’s one-child policy has created a huge imbalance in the ratio of men to women. When it comes to those of peak marriageable age, the country will have 119 men for every 100 women by 2027. In all, there may be 30m-50m “excess men” in China, reckons Xiaoling Shu of the University of California, Davis. Singlehood in China, like most places, is not evenly distributed. Instead, it is disproportionately concentrated among men who are poorer and poorly educated, and thus less attractive as mates, and among highly educated women (of which more later).
China’s one-child policy makes it an outlier, but heterosexual men in other countries with a strong cultural preference for sons will also struggle to find partners. Sex-selective abortions resulted in 111 boys being born in India in 2011 for every 100 girls, according to census data. The natural ratio is about 105. Although the distortion has since become less extreme, we calculate that around 20m more boys than girls were born in India in 2000-15.
Improved opportunities for women to go to university and enter the workplace are also fuelling the growth in singlehood in East Asia, argues Wei-Jun Jean Yeung of the National University of Singapore. As women gain financial independence, they no longer need a husband to support them. They also have more to lose by getting married. “There’s still a culture of patriarchy in Asia where women carry most of the responsibilities of caring for children and domestic housework,” says Dr Yeung. “The opportunity cost of getting married may be high: women think that if they get married they may have to give up working to take care of their in-laws, parents and children, plus do housework.”
One result of this is that well-educated women are also disproportionately likely to be single in a number of Asian countries. “The best-educated, urban, college-educated women are becoming more egalitarian in their gender attitudes,” says Dr Shu of women in China. “Many college-educated men are hostile towards feminist ideas or even feminists…[they] think these women are hurting their prospects and interests at a personal level.”
In South Korea the gap between women’s opportunities and men’s sexist expectations is particularly wide. Around half of young Korean men think they are discriminated against (other than having to do military service, they are not). Some 60% complain that feminism demeans them. They also tend to be terrible slouches when it comes to housework. Little wonder, then, that ambitious young women are far less keen on marriage than they are.
A similar pattern of singlehood pertains in America and Europe, despite their less ingrained gender roles. Until roughly the middle of the 20th century, far more men went to university than women. As a result there were far more couples in which the man was better educated than the other way round. More recently, however, women have surpassed men in studiousness. Across the oecd on average 51% of women aged 25-34 had a university degree in 2019, compared with 39% of men. That makes the old pattern impossible to sustain. “Highly educated women who still want to marry up won’t find enough candidates,” says Albert Esteve, the director of the Centre for Demographic Studies in Barcelona. “So the question is, are they going to start marrying down?”
If mathematics were the only driving force, rather than cultural norms, there would have been a big rise in the share of couples where the woman is better educated. Yet the expectation that women should marry up is hard to dispel. Researchers in Germany, for example, found that highly educated women over the age of 30 were more likely to remain single than settle for a man with less education.
[Suite en dessous]
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Après en soit c'est ce qui se dit depuis dens années sur les forums
ouais mais moins dans "l'extrême" quoi
sur les forums c'est jamais trop objectif
sur les forums c'est jamais trop objectif
Un suisse pas trop laid, ça passe, non ?
1m80 et 80K€ annuel ?
j'ai un compte sur The Economist et ça me permet d'avoir quelques articles gratuits
Je suis tombé sur cette article très intéressant de The Economist qui parle de l'épidémie de célibat mondial
Ça parle de tout, de déséquilibre démographique jusqu'à l'émancipation des femmes en passant par la sur-sélectivité permise par les applications et pleins d'autres choses
En vrai si vous avez le temps, prenez le temps de tout lire parce que c'est très intérressant et ils ont une approche nuancée sans tomber dans un extrême ou l'autre
Pour les non anglophones traduction en FR de @Trapvador page 3
https://www.economist.com[...]7/2025&utm_id=2120234
Social media, dating apps and political polarisation all play a part
"I don’t date conservative or moderate men,” says Nancy Anteby, a 30-year-old New Yorker who works in social media. “I only date liberal men.” Politics is not her only concern. She is also looking for someone ambitious, with a stable career, who is Jewish and, perhaps most important, shares her desire to start a family. Finding dates who tick all of these boxes is not easy. “Very often a man will disappoint you,” she laments. Then again, she recently realised, “I don’t need to rely on a man to have the life that I dream of.”
Ms Anteby is far from unusual. Across America 41% of women and 50% of men in her age band (25-34) were single in 2023, a share that has doubled over the past five decades. Nor is America exceptional in this regard. Between 2010 and 2022 the share of people living alone (an admittedly imperfect measure of singlehood, but one for which data are more widely available) rose in 26 of the 30 members of the oecd, a club mostly of rich countries. Marriage rates are falling across much of Asia, including in China and India and especially Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. And singlehood is accelerating across different age cohorts. In Europe each new generation is less likely to be married or living with a partner than previous ones at the same age.
This relationship recession is hitting not just those wanting to marry or move in with a steady partner, but also those looking for a date or casual sex. Younger people are socialising less, dating less and starting to have sex later in life than previous generations. They are also having less sex in general (as, alas, are most of us).
Michael Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Stanford University, has found that the reduction in dating owing to the covid-19 pandemic produced 13.7m more singles in America in 2022 than if the singlehood rate (conservatively defined) had stayed at the level of 2017. To generate an estimate of the global increase in plus-nones, The Economist extrapolated from his data, while also taking into account sharp falls in marriage rates in a number of Asian countries, which predate the pandemic. We calculate that over the past decade such effects have swollen the ranks of single people around the world by at least 100m.
Two’s a crowd
Dating, sex, marriage and divorce are all intensely personal choices, and their effects are felt most directly by those making them. The fact that more people feel able to choose to be single now than in the past, when there was far greater social and economic pressure to marry, could be considered one of the great emancipations of the past half century. Untold numbers have been liberated from unhappy unions.
But not all those who remain single have chosen to do so. A study of singles in 14 countries found that only 40% said they were “not interested in being in a relationship”. A smaller survey of single Americans by the Pew Research Centre in 2019 did find that 50% were not interested in dating. Yet only 27% said they were not dating because they enjoyed being single. The rest gave reasons including being too busy, too old, or because no one would want to date them. No less than 34% of singles in the 14-country study said they did not want to be alone but found it “difficult to attract a mate”, with 26% describing themselves as “between relationships”. In short, there are growing numbers of lonely hearts, pining for a partner but unable to secure one.
Don’t want a ring on it
There is an alarming mismatch in this regard between women and men. In the Pew survey, 62% of single women did not want to date, whereas only 37% of single men felt the same way. America and South Korea, among other countries, have big, vocal movements of young men who feel they have been unfairly deprived of romantic opportunities. All over the world, a high proportion of unmarried young men is strongly associated with elevated levels of violence and crime.
Even relatively small shifts in coupling rates, when multiplied across a whole population, can have far-reaching effects on society as a whole. The biggest impact will be on fertility rates, since married women tend to have more children than single ones. This will be especially marked in East Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea, where only 2-4% of babies are born to unmarried mothers. All the world over, however, the rise of singlehood will be a further drag on already slowing birth rates. The effects will also be felt in property markets (more demand for housing, since more people will be living alone) and government finances (less public spending on maternity wards and schools and, in time, more on care homes).
The fact that a large proportion of single people would rather be in a relationship (whether they are still looking for one or have given up hope) suggests that either there is some sort of dating-market failure that is preventing compatible people from finding one another, or that society is changing in ways that are making large numbers of singles incompatible. In practice, it seems to be a bit of both.
In Asia, where singlehood is growing fastest, a mix of structural and cultural changes is increasing incompatibility. Start with demography. China’s one-child policy has created a huge imbalance in the ratio of men to women. When it comes to those of peak marriageable age, the country will have 119 men for every 100 women by 2027. In all, there may be 30m-50m “excess men” in China, reckons Xiaoling Shu of the University of California, Davis. Singlehood in China, like most places, is not evenly distributed. Instead, it is disproportionately concentrated among men who are poorer and poorly educated, and thus less attractive as mates, and among highly educated women (of which more later).
China’s one-child policy makes it an outlier, but heterosexual men in other countries with a strong cultural preference for sons will also struggle to find partners. Sex-selective abortions resulted in 111 boys being born in India in 2011 for every 100 girls, according to census data. The natural ratio is about 105. Although the distortion has since become less extreme, we calculate that around 20m more boys than girls were born in India in 2000-15.
Improved opportunities for women to go to university and enter the workplace are also fuelling the growth in singlehood in East Asia, argues Wei-Jun Jean Yeung of the National University of Singapore. As women gain financial independence, they no longer need a husband to support them. They also have more to lose by getting married. “There’s still a culture of patriarchy in Asia where women carry most of the responsibilities of caring for children and domestic housework,” says Dr Yeung. “The opportunity cost of getting married may be high: women think that if they get married they may have to give up working to take care of their in-laws, parents and children, plus do housework.”
One result of this is that well-educated women are also disproportionately likely to be single in a number of Asian countries. “The best-educated, urban, college-educated women are becoming more egalitarian in their gender attitudes,” says Dr Shu of women in China. “Many college-educated men are hostile towards feminist ideas or even feminists…[they] think these women are hurting their prospects and interests at a personal level.”
In South Korea the gap between women’s opportunities and men’s sexist expectations is particularly wide. Around half of young Korean men think they are discriminated against (other than having to do military service, they are not). Some 60% complain that feminism demeans them. They also tend to be terrible slouches when it comes to housework. Little wonder, then, that ambitious young women are far less keen on marriage than they are.
A similar pattern of singlehood pertains in America and Europe, despite their less ingrained gender roles. Until roughly the middle of the 20th century, far more men went to university than women. As a result there were far more couples in which the man was better educated than the other way round. More recently, however, women have surpassed men in studiousness. Across the oecd on average 51% of women aged 25-34 had a university degree in 2019, compared with 39% of men. That makes the old pattern impossible to sustain. “Highly educated women who still want to marry up won’t find enough candidates,” says Albert Esteve, the director of the Centre for Demographic Studies in Barcelona. “So the question is, are they going to start marrying down?”
If mathematics were the only driving force, rather than cultural norms, there would have been a big rise in the share of couples where the woman is better educated. Yet the expectation that women should marry up is hard to dispel. Researchers in Germany, for example, found that highly educated women over the age of 30 were more likely to remain single than settle for a man with less education.
[Suite en dessous]
Ça parle de tout, de déséquilibre démographique jusqu'à l'émancipation des femmes en passant par la sur-sélectivité permise par les applications et pleins d'autres choses
En vrai si vous avez le temps, prenez le temps de tout lire parce que c'est très intérressant et ils ont une approche nuancée sans tomber dans un extrême ou l'autre
Pour les non anglophones traduction en FR de @Trapvador page 3
All over the rich world, fewer people are hooking up and shacking up
Social media, dating apps and political polarisation all play a part
"I don’t date conservative or moderate men,” says Nancy Anteby, a 30-year-old New Yorker who works in social media. “I only date liberal men.” Politics is not her only concern. She is also looking for someone ambitious, with a stable career, who is Jewish and, perhaps most important, shares her desire to start a family. Finding dates who tick all of these boxes is not easy. “Very often a man will disappoint you,” she laments. Then again, she recently realised, “I don’t need to rely on a man to have the life that I dream of.”
Ms Anteby is far from unusual. Across America 41% of women and 50% of men in her age band (25-34) were single in 2023, a share that has doubled over the past five decades. Nor is America exceptional in this regard. Between 2010 and 2022 the share of people living alone (an admittedly imperfect measure of singlehood, but one for which data are more widely available) rose in 26 of the 30 members of the oecd, a club mostly of rich countries. Marriage rates are falling across much of Asia, including in China and India and especially Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. And singlehood is accelerating across different age cohorts. In Europe each new generation is less likely to be married or living with a partner than previous ones at the same age.
This relationship recession is hitting not just those wanting to marry or move in with a steady partner, but also those looking for a date or casual sex. Younger people are socialising less, dating less and starting to have sex later in life than previous generations. They are also having less sex in general (as, alas, are most of us).
Michael Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Stanford University, has found that the reduction in dating owing to the covid-19 pandemic produced 13.7m more singles in America in 2022 than if the singlehood rate (conservatively defined) had stayed at the level of 2017. To generate an estimate of the global increase in plus-nones, The Economist extrapolated from his data, while also taking into account sharp falls in marriage rates in a number of Asian countries, which predate the pandemic. We calculate that over the past decade such effects have swollen the ranks of single people around the world by at least 100m.
Two’s a crowd
Dating, sex, marriage and divorce are all intensely personal choices, and their effects are felt most directly by those making them. The fact that more people feel able to choose to be single now than in the past, when there was far greater social and economic pressure to marry, could be considered one of the great emancipations of the past half century. Untold numbers have been liberated from unhappy unions.
But not all those who remain single have chosen to do so. A study of singles in 14 countries found that only 40% said they were “not interested in being in a relationship”. A smaller survey of single Americans by the Pew Research Centre in 2019 did find that 50% were not interested in dating. Yet only 27% said they were not dating because they enjoyed being single. The rest gave reasons including being too busy, too old, or because no one would want to date them. No less than 34% of singles in the 14-country study said they did not want to be alone but found it “difficult to attract a mate”, with 26% describing themselves as “between relationships”. In short, there are growing numbers of lonely hearts, pining for a partner but unable to secure one.
Don’t want a ring on it
There is an alarming mismatch in this regard between women and men. In the Pew survey, 62% of single women did not want to date, whereas only 37% of single men felt the same way. America and South Korea, among other countries, have big, vocal movements of young men who feel they have been unfairly deprived of romantic opportunities. All over the world, a high proportion of unmarried young men is strongly associated with elevated levels of violence and crime.
Even relatively small shifts in coupling rates, when multiplied across a whole population, can have far-reaching effects on society as a whole. The biggest impact will be on fertility rates, since married women tend to have more children than single ones. This will be especially marked in East Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea, where only 2-4% of babies are born to unmarried mothers. All the world over, however, the rise of singlehood will be a further drag on already slowing birth rates. The effects will also be felt in property markets (more demand for housing, since more people will be living alone) and government finances (less public spending on maternity wards and schools and, in time, more on care homes).
The fact that a large proportion of single people would rather be in a relationship (whether they are still looking for one or have given up hope) suggests that either there is some sort of dating-market failure that is preventing compatible people from finding one another, or that society is changing in ways that are making large numbers of singles incompatible. In practice, it seems to be a bit of both.
In Asia, where singlehood is growing fastest, a mix of structural and cultural changes is increasing incompatibility. Start with demography. China’s one-child policy has created a huge imbalance in the ratio of men to women. When it comes to those of peak marriageable age, the country will have 119 men for every 100 women by 2027. In all, there may be 30m-50m “excess men” in China, reckons Xiaoling Shu of the University of California, Davis. Singlehood in China, like most places, is not evenly distributed. Instead, it is disproportionately concentrated among men who are poorer and poorly educated, and thus less attractive as mates, and among highly educated women (of which more later).
China’s one-child policy makes it an outlier, but heterosexual men in other countries with a strong cultural preference for sons will also struggle to find partners. Sex-selective abortions resulted in 111 boys being born in India in 2011 for every 100 girls, according to census data. The natural ratio is about 105. Although the distortion has since become less extreme, we calculate that around 20m more boys than girls were born in India in 2000-15.
Improved opportunities for women to go to university and enter the workplace are also fuelling the growth in singlehood in East Asia, argues Wei-Jun Jean Yeung of the National University of Singapore. As women gain financial independence, they no longer need a husband to support them. They also have more to lose by getting married. “There’s still a culture of patriarchy in Asia where women carry most of the responsibilities of caring for children and domestic housework,” says Dr Yeung. “The opportunity cost of getting married may be high: women think that if they get married they may have to give up working to take care of their in-laws, parents and children, plus do housework.”
One result of this is that well-educated women are also disproportionately likely to be single in a number of Asian countries. “The best-educated, urban, college-educated women are becoming more egalitarian in their gender attitudes,” says Dr Shu of women in China. “Many college-educated men are hostile towards feminist ideas or even feminists…[they] think these women are hurting their prospects and interests at a personal level.”
In South Korea the gap between women’s opportunities and men’s sexist expectations is particularly wide. Around half of young Korean men think they are discriminated against (other than having to do military service, they are not). Some 60% complain that feminism demeans them. They also tend to be terrible slouches when it comes to housework. Little wonder, then, that ambitious young women are far less keen on marriage than they are.
A similar pattern of singlehood pertains in America and Europe, despite their less ingrained gender roles. Until roughly the middle of the 20th century, far more men went to university than women. As a result there were far more couples in which the man was better educated than the other way round. More recently, however, women have surpassed men in studiousness. Across the oecd on average 51% of women aged 25-34 had a university degree in 2019, compared with 39% of men. That makes the old pattern impossible to sustain. “Highly educated women who still want to marry up won’t find enough candidates,” says Albert Esteve, the director of the Centre for Demographic Studies in Barcelona. “So the question is, are they going to start marrying down?”
If mathematics were the only driving force, rather than cultural norms, there would have been a big rise in the share of couples where the woman is better educated. Yet the expectation that women should marry up is hard to dispel. Researchers in Germany, for example, found that highly educated women over the age of 30 were more likely to remain single than settle for a man with less education.
[Suite en dessous]
Vite @sah-brina, mettons-nous en couple pour inverser la tendance
Enlève moi 2cm mais le salaire j'y suis large
Wayoooo vraiment en salaire ???
si les appli style tinder ne son pas une PSYOP du NWO alors qu'est que c'est ?
Oui
Putain moi je suis péniblement à 32K€ super net
Et je suis pas trop à plaindre
Et je suis pas trop à plaindre
Enlève moi 2cm mais le salaire j'y suis large
80k en suisse c'est la moyenne basse non ?
