A Look at Single Male Populations

And some thoughts on the survey

I want to start by thanking those of you who took the survey and left comments. Your thoughts definitely helped me, and here are some of the changes I’ll work towards. My goal is to make the Tuesday data story posts more detailed and a little longer. The cost of that will be focusing on generally two posts a week, sacrificing some Saturday posts. The Thursday Quick Takes and Random Stuff posts have generally been popular, and responses favored variety. I’ll continue them. I’m not going to entirely abandon Saturday posts, but they will become less frequent, and I’m going to focus on two themes. The first will be some probability and statistical ideas. One example is the Normal Densities and Percentiles post. This may be more vanity than anything, but I like the challenge of trying to illustrate these ideas with a good graphic or two. The second will be classroom connections. I naturally see connections to the classroom in what I post and read, and I want to highlight them more. Education can use more data-based material, and maybe I can help with that (see my Sustainability Math site as an example).

More detailed Tuesday articles will be challenging for me, as I tend to be concise. So, I’ll consider this a work in progress for now. Today will be short, although I do have eight graphs, as I change my focus a bit. I was asked a question about the population of single men in other countries based on my W.E.I.R.D and the New Kinship post. The U.N. does have this data, although it isn’t very up-to-date for many countries. For now, I’m going to look at the counts for the 20–24 and 25–29 age groups. At some point, I should explore other age groups and percentages of the entire population, not just counts.

It isn’t clear if counts or percentages are more important. Generally, more young single men lead to more crime, but populations grow, so we should see more of them. Hence, we should also look at percentages. Consider this a first exploration. Note that I had to limit the number of countries due to limits on the size of downloads from the U.N. The countries are separated by size so that all countries are represented on the graphs. Here we go.

Ages 20 to 24

Overall, there are increases in single males in this population. This isn’t entirely surprising given the expectation of people getting married later, in general.

I have to figure that the China data isn’t accurate or China is experiencing a big change in both population size and marriage rates. The growth in India is large, likely larger than population growth overall.

Again, for generally large countries, there is growth and clearly a data point for the U.S. that is incorrect. Still, for the U.S., the stability from 1980 to 2000 was unexpected and curious.

For this group of medium-sized countries, there seems to be much more stability. Some of this is due to stable or shrining populations, for example, in Italy. The various corners must be a data collection issue.

For the smaller countries, we again have general increases but some odd trends. Sweden, for example, had gone up and down. Hungary is likely losing population. On the other hand, Ecuador has been increasing steadily.

Ages 25 to 29

For the 25-29 age group again, we see general increases in the number of single men. How much of this is population growth, and how much of this is cultural change? I don’t know yet. Still, this is interesting.

Again, something is up with China. I’m still going with a data issue. India has seen large increases, at least some of which are due to population growth.

For large countries, we see increases again, and here Brazil jumps out. Something seems to have changed in 2000. Also, a data issue for the U.S., but again, some stability for a decade before the population of single men ages 25–29 starts increasing.

For medium countries, what I see is Japan, a decrease that is mostly due to a decreasing population. The big jump for Saudi Arabia is also worth noting.

Lastly, a look at smaller countries Here, Iraq catches the eye. Some data issues with Sweden are hard to miss, along with some variability in the overall increase.

This was more of an exploratory data post. I’m not sure what to make of all of this, and this will be on my list. I’d be happy to hear your thoughts in the comments. How much of the increase or decrease are overall population changes? Are there relationships with crime? What about other age groups? I may need to focus on a few individual countries to help shed some light on these population changes.

The goal for next week is a long look at student loan debt. It isn’t as bad as it is made out to be.

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Thank you

In a crowded media market, it's hard to get people to read your work. I have a long way to go, and I want to say thank you to everyone who has helped me find and attract subscribers.

Disagreeing and using comments

I'd rather know the truth and understand the world than always be right. I'm not writing to upset or antagonize anyone on purpose, though I guess that could happen. I welcome dissent and disagreement in the comments. We all should be forced to articulate our viewpoints and change our minds when we need to, but we should also know that we can respectfully disagree and move on. So, if you think something said is wrong or misrepresented, then please share your viewpoint in the comments.