Not Enough Family
to Go Around

Fewer marriages and fewer children will make for millions of lonely, isolated Baby Boomers in 20 years. A massive market opportunity awaits anyone creative enough to solve the coming caregiver crisis.
 
By Matt Thornhill 

Dan Quayle (remember him, the boomer who was Bush 41's VP?) once attempted to quip, "The future is ahead of us." Not exactly Bartlett's material, but, well, true. So true.
 
While there are bolder predictions to make about what life will be like "ahead of us," some demographic realities aren't based on crystal balls but Census data. Like, for example, we can tell you with certainty that today's baby boomers, ages 44 to 62 in 2008, will be ages 64-82 in the year 2028. The nation's largest demographic cohort will grow twenty years older over the next twenty years. Guaranteed.
 
Maybe this ranks right up there with Quayle's insight, but then again, maybe it is far more telling. If you pay attention to the numbers you'll learn much about the future. Fire up the left side of your brain and let's take a look. Read more

by Matt Thornhill

•  Full-page ad by DeBeers on the back page of the front section with the headline "Here's to Less." The short copy is all about our misguided interest in possessions that "we do not treasure." Enter the diamond, something that can be "passed down for generations."
• Article about the dramatic fall-off in luxury car sales in October and the first half of November. The reasons given are the recession, as well as a lack of desire by those with enough money to buy a luxury car to be so showy these days. Maybe this is a trickle-up mindset the very rich are learning from the rest of us. Read more.

by James A. Bacon

It's a women's world. Alpha males may dominate the rarefied heights of the power/money hierarchy in the United States, but increasingly women -- make that Boomer women -- are running the rest of society.

The facts below come by way of Meredith Barnhill at NoLa.com, who got them from the She.conomy marketing blog, which is a bit roundabout, so we can't vouch for chain of transmission. But the numbers seem pretty plausible -- and pretty darned scary if you're a beta male far from the apex of the power/money pyramid.

• High-net-worth women account for 39% of the country's top wealth earners; 2.5 million of them have combined assets of $4.2 trillion.
• More than 1.3 million women professionals and executives earn in excess of $100,000 annually.
• 43% of Americans with more than $500,000 in assets are female. Read more.

by James A. Bacon

There was an old Woody Allen sketch (we forget the name of the movie) that went like this: Woody's got marital problems, and the psychoanalyst asks him how often he has sex. "Hardly ever. Only three times a week."

That scene came to mind when reading statistics from an AARP study, "Retired Spouses," that found that retirees have sex less often than before they were retired. Among the many, many findings in the study (yes, we confess, we're focusing on the most salacious) is that 22 percent of retirees report having sex less often. Somehow, retired women don't report the same problem.

The rest of the study is more prosaic. We find out, for instance, that three out of four retired couples are happier being retired together than when one of them was still working. Eighty-four percent report spending more time together. There is a dark side, however: Nineteen percent confessed to experiencing more tension now that the grumpier half was home full time, and 13 percent said they'd wished their spouse had worked longer.