Although India is one of the poorest forty countries in the world (as measured by per capita income), the demographic trends in its big metros and in the prosperous south are already similar to that developed Western countries. Specifically, the proportion of young people not marrying is rising fast, the age at which educated women are getting married is rising even faster and fertility rates are now well below replacement rates (see our blog for more details)
Such changes it appears are not restricted to India. Judging by the article in Asia Times, across Asia young people are choosing to stay single and this has profound investment implications. The rise of the one-person household across East Asia is usually told as one of two stories. One is demographic doom – fewer people, smaller markets, decline. The other is the retailer’s – never mind the birth rate, the consumer is still spending. In a sharp piece for Asia Times, Y. Tony Yang argues that both readings “miss the point,”and offers a more useful frame. For most of modern history, he writes, the household was a bundle: “Under one roof, families pooled rent and meals, raised children, cared for parents, kept each other company and insured one another against bad luck. Nobody itemized it, and national accounts barely noticed.”
Now it is coming apart, and “one line item after another has turned into something you pay for. The loneliness economy is the usual name for the result; the unbundling of the family household is the more accurate one.”
The scale is real. Single-person households are 36% of the total in South Korea, the largest category; Japan was at 38% in 2020 and heads for 44% by 2050, with Tokyo already past half. China’s 2020 census found “125 million people living alone, equal to one in four households.” The money has followed: one research firm puts spending by singles in China at “more than US$1 trillion in 2025, up about 50% in two years,” and Pop Mart, the toymaker behind Labubu, booked $5.4 billion in revenue last year, up 185%.
Here is where Mr Yang is less optimistic. Much of the growth, he warns, “is a transfer rather than new activity. When a family cooks dinner, GDP records nothing. When one person orders a single-serving meal, streams a drama instead of talking to a spouse and hires a sightseeing companion for the weekend, the same functions show up as transactions. Output rises partly because the boundary of what gets counted has moved.” Some of the spending is not discretionary at all, but “a premium the solo consumer cannot avoid: one rent, one refrigerator, one electricity bill and nobody to share them.”
What markets cannot supply is the part families did best. “Markets are good at unbundling meals, entertainment and paid company. They are bad at unbundling the two things families did best: insurance against catastrophe and the last mile of care.”His example lands: “You can buy a single-serving hotpot. You cannot buy someone who notices that you did not wake up.” Hence the check-in app bluntly named “Are You Dead?”, which topped China’s paid app charts in January – miss two daily check-ins and it alerts an emergency contact.
The gap is sharpest in hospitals, where serious illness still “assumes a next of kin: someone to consent for a patient who cannot sign a discharge, answer the phone at three in the morning.” Japan expects 10.8 million people over 65 to be living alone by 2050, and its care systems, Mr Yang notes, are “being built around a relative who, for a growing share of patients, will not exist.”
His closing thought is that the region’s most consequential export may be neither the karaoke booth nor the check-in app but the rulebook for synthetic companionship, as China, the United States and the European Union have all, within a year of one another, begun “treating engineered intimacy as a regulated product.”
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