20/20 foresight: looking to the future
As we move further into the 21st century, it's natural to wonder what
the future will bring: In what kinds of houses and communities will
Americans be living in 2020? What kind of jobs will people hold? Will
fewer of us be married? Writers Kim Campbell, Clayton Collins, Marilyn
Gardner, and Elizabeth Lund sought answers to these questions - and
more - from eight experts whose jobs require them to predict what our
lives will be like in 15 years. Read excerpts from those interviews in
this section.
Will the single population continue to
grow? If so, what impact will that have on society?
Right now, as we enter
2005, half of all households are headed by unmarried adults, and based
on the historical trend [since 1950], by 2020 probably 55 percent of
households will be headed by unmarried adults.
The number of solo
singles will increase to well over 30 percent of all households by
2020 - some of which will be due to people who are aging and are
living alone. If the economy holds up, more people will be able to
afford to live alone.
There will be more rights
for unmarried people, more flexibility in benefits plans, and there
will be a need for more independent living places that provide shared
common areas and services such as common meals in dining areas and
[on-site] hair salons. By 2020, you'll see more workplaces offering
long-term care plans as an option, and a lot of single people will
choose that, especially if they're middle-aged and have no kids to
take care of them.
We'll be moving closer to
universal healthcare (if we do not have it by then), which is good for
singles since unmarried people are twice as likely to be lacking
health coverage as married people.
More people will choose
to remain single throughout life, but marriage won't go out of style.
Many more people [will delay] their first marriage until their late
20s or mid-30s, [and] those marriages are more likely to last.
By 2020, the "old-maid
stigma" will be just a historical footnote, since significant numbers
[of people] will choose to remain single or cohabit, and a lot of
these people will be very successful in their lives.
Taxation may change by
that point, too, as more unmarried people will question the fairness
of the tax scheme. Marital status may be removed from the tax codes as
not being fair.
Social Security may be
partially privatized by then, and a lot of single people may provide
support for that type of a structural change because the rate of
return on Social Security is very, very low, and you can get more than
that by putting money in the bank. If [Social Security] can be
structured in a way that people currently in the system are not hurt
too much in the shift, singles will go for this.
[Under the current plan]
if a single dies a month before starting to collect, everything is
forfeited, since you can't name a beneficiary.
Thomas
Coleman is executive director of Unmarried America.
In 2020, will we be marrying more or
less often? How might marriage evolve? And how far along will we be in
the search for the formula for a happy marriage?
I think we'll be marrying
less often, but marriage will still be a common and highly valued way
to run a family. [It] will have to compete with other family forms,
such as civil unions, which I think will be increasingly important for
heterosexuals as well as homosexuals. It seems likely that many states
will legally recognize civil unions as a way to provide same-sex
couples with many of the rights of marriage. But the experiences of
other countries that have done so, such as France, show that civil
unions soon become attractive to heterosexual couples, who want an
alternative to marriage. And over time, the number of opposite-sex
civil unions can greatly exceed the number of same-sex ones. [In
general, I see] three possibilities [for marriage]: One is a
resurgence of marriage so that it comes to be as dominant as it was in
the mid-20th century. I think the chances of that are very low. A
second [possibility] is that marriage remains very common and highly
valued, but is no longer the only way to have a successful adult
family life. I think that's the most likely. But a third is that
marriage fades away and just becomes one of many lifestyles, no more
common or highly regarded than living with someone. That could happen,
because we've seen marriage's dominance fade somewhat over the past
several decades. But I think that, in the US, marriage is still strong
enough that it will remain distinctive, but not as dominant as it once
was.
[In the future] we may
have a formula for making marriage more democratic and egalitarian
between men and women. But that formula will probably leave us with a
less stable kind of marriage than we once had because ... [it's] based
on voluntary commitment. People get to choose not only whether they
marry, but whether they stay married on the basis of how satisfied
they are.
So the trick is to
develop marriages that are fulfilling, but at the same time have a
good chance of lasting a long time. I think we might be on the verge
of a new kind of relationship.
Andrew
J. Cherlin is the Benjamin H. Griswold III Professor of Public Policy
at Johns Hopkins University. He writes books about marriage and
families.
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