Comment by conjecTech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by conjecTech | Hacker News Reader

The article stretches to portray this as a cost imposed by society, but I think the bulk of it is far more innate than that. There simply are economies of scale to household size. A lot of housing costs are proportional to surface area, and the ratio of surface area to volume drops are structures get larger. Building larger units is more economical. It extends to selling as well - it's going to take less effort to sell/rent one 2-bedroom apartment than it would for two 1-bedrooms. The cost of user acquisition for things like paper towels is lower if the average customer is buying for multiple people too.

I totally get the desire to live alone, but I never have because having roommates/cohabitation always seemed like such an obvious economic decision compared to other ways to reduce living expenses.

The Onion put out a video[1] in 2009 about an economic recovery plan that amounted to boyfriends finally agreeing to move in together with their girlfriends. I've spent a lot of time researching the housing market and macroeconomic reasons for its current distortion from historical norms. That video often pops into my mind when I do. The overall housing stock in the US has more than kept pace with the growth in population, but the reduction of household size and related growth in housing space per person has created a huge amount of incremental demand.

I don't think those are purely bad trends. My parents' generation paired off young and quickly, and the long term effects are easy enough to pick out in divorce statistics. But I do have to wonder how much of the economic woes 20-40 year olds face right now might be alleviated if the pendulum swung back a little in that direction.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ADncN9HIa4

Yes. This is why I live in a place where housing costs are so low that surface area doesn't matter. On 12 acres of land.

Given the cost of marriage and divorce, it makes far more sense to live alone. I've been married twice and I learn this the hard way - twice too many times!

Additionally, the simple fact that is that woman are responsible for 80% of budget decisions which tend NOT be be things men would buy, so if you are a single man, NOT pairing off sudden save/raises your income by 5x if you don't marry.

I think divorce statistics are not related to age of pairing off, which if anything was younger farther in the past than it was even a generation or two ago. Divorce is simply not the social stigma that it used to be, and it's easier to get so it happens more now. Rather than working through their problems, people think it seems easier to just split up.

Divorce has steadily declined in cohorts married since 1980.

I would guess this is driven by the decline of marriage overall, with those forgoing marriage being those most likely to divorce

It often is easier to just split up. People grow and change, and often that growth and change between two people isn't compatible.

AFAIK, evidence is pretty clear that delaying marriage (up to a point!) reduces the likelihood of getting divorced.

https://ifstudies.org/blog/want-to-avoid-divorce-wait-to-get...

Of course you are correct that lowered social stigma associated with divorce is also important. This topic must be difficult to study over very long periods of time, because so many things are going on (changing age of first marriage, reduced social stigma associated with divorce, women's liberation, changing religiousity, etc. etc.).

> Rather than working through their problems, people think it seems easier to just split up.

For some problems, this is indeed the absolutely correct decision - but it simply wasn't culturally acceptable in the past.

It's easier for women to support themselves now too, so they don't have to stay married for financial reasons.

... and get a large payout through divorce, in some cases!

In very few cases these days. The majority of monies given out is for childcare, it is very difficult to have court ordered alimony for terms longer than 10 years even if the spouse was a stay-at-home parent for more than 10 years.

But in an economies of scale line of argumentation, shouldn’t the cost of building/selling houses for single people go down precisely because plenty enough people (and plenty more are projected to) live alone? It does seem that culture lag is to blame.

Pairing off will likely mean providing for your partner, and it will almost certainly mean providing for children. For the provider that’s a lot more expensive than living alone.

Musing out loud… I wonder how much TV has to do with the decline of shared households. Perhaps in the 1920s I would have happily lived in a boarding house with other unmarried workers. These days I’d have to really love someone to make myself subject to their choice of television programming, which is generally inescapable in a shared apartment.

I find somehow that the housing market is immoral. Well I guess that's because I'm not american, there even epipen are a cold quantified market .. but the negative effects on humans are so immense it should not be.

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