Aging causes secular loneliness? :•)

Since infants do not immigrate in any numbers, and Australia is a high-immigration nation, the average age is going to go up because of immigration.

Immigrants have children in far higher numbers than natives and are young to begin with--they always lower age numbers.

Last week I saw an article claiming roughly 25% of Americans live alone--twice the rate of 25ish years ago.

All three factoids are effects, none causes.

The primary causes are: Industrialization, widespread prosperity, and improvements in transportation and communication technology.

I should add that, IMO, a primary reason that birthrates decline below replacement, in industrialized countries, is personal greed. I've often read about the great "cost" of children, but my upbringing, as well as the examples of my siblings' and -in laws' children,
handily refute that.

Are people in nursing homes, or assisted care communities, considered living together, or separately ?

Michael:

I think if you asked them, too many might say they were living alone.

Michael, the drop in birth rate is just as pronounced in some peasant societies. There is a good study, whose author I cannot recall just now, about Muslim villages in Punjab.

Good sanitation drives down the birth rate.

Peter:

Good point.

Harry:

Interesting. Why, then, the winnowing of the species ?
For surely, humans shall not die out, but instead, eventually be composed of the descendants of those who liked larger families than the norm.