Derek Thompson@DKThomp
ICYMI: My latest is a long piece on the historic rise in social isolation in America.
Here are the 10 most important, depressing, or just mind-blowing statistics I found in my reporting.
ON SOCIAL ISOLATION
1. Men who watch television now spend 7 hours in front of the TV for every 1 hour they spend hanging out with somebody outside their home.
2. The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species.
3. From the late 1970s to the late 1990s, the frequency of hosting friends for parties, games, dinners, and so on declined by 45%, according to Robert Putnam. Then it got worse. Between the early 2000s and the latest data, the average amount of time that Americans spent hosting or attending social events declined another 32%.
ON ALONENESS AND HAPPINESS
4. A 5-percentage-point increase in alone time is associated with about the same decline in life satisfaction as was a 10% lower household income.
ON TV
5. From 1965 to 1995, the typical adult gained 6 weekly hours in leisure time. They funneled almost all of it into one activitiy: watching TV.
6. In 1970, just 6 percent of sixth graders had a TV set in their bedroom; in 1999, that proportion had grown to 77 percent.
ON TEENS
7. The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50 percent since the early 1990s.
ON 'HOMEBOUND' LIFE
8. According to Princeton's Patrick Sharkey, today's adults spend an additional 99 minutes inside their homes on any given day, compared with 2003.
9. The share of U.S. adults having dinner or drinks with friends outside the home on any given night has declined by more than 30% in the past 20 years.
ON RESTAURANTS
10. I think of restaurants as the ultimate "social" business. But today, just one-quarter of restaurant traffic is "on-premises"—that is, sitting, ordering, talking with people at a table. With the rise and rise of delivery 74% of all restaurant traffic now comes from “off premises” customers—takeout and delivery. And according to data gathered by OpenTable, solo dining has increased by 29% in just the past two years. The top reason given? The need for more “me time.”
*** All of these statistics were checked by our sensational fact-checking department. I provided evidence to them and am happy to provide evidence to others, on request, who have questions about the data or just want to go deeper. ***
