mathoda.com

Europe has about 3 million people living on the street, out of a population of about 460 million. So Europe has 1 street dweller for every 153 million people. The USA has about 750,000 people living on the street, out of a population of about 300 million. So America has 1 street dweller for every 400 million people.

(Sources of the data above: world-gazetteer.com for population figures; unicef.org for street dweller figures)

The USA is doing much better then Europe at having its population avoid living on the street.

What explains this difference? Is it that a freer form of market capitalism has allowed the USA to more productively generate wealth and provide housing to its people, allowing for less destitute people, despite (or because of?) a social safety net that isn’t as rigorous? Is it related to the density of people per square mile? If I can find data, comparing the ratio of street dwellers to population in affluent Western European countries seems like it would reveal something interesting…

Agrarian societies often have a practice of arranged marriages, probably because of cultural values that get established based upon economic forces, namely, the distribution of risk that happens when farming families are bonded together. Arranged marriage was practiced in America as well, when America had a more agrarian society.

As people have moved away from the risky business of farming, have grown more economically independent of the family unit at younger and younger ages, been offered financial products that hedge their most calamitous risks, and have embraced being catered to on an individual basis, such cultural habits have diminished.

Yet in China, where arranged marriage is still practiced with gusto, there is what I understand to be a unique form of arranged marriage: after death arranged marriages. As the NY Times reports,

“… in the parched canyons along the Yellow River known as the Loess Plateau, some parents with dead bachelor sons will go a step further. To ensure a son’s contentment in the afterlife, some grieving parents will search for a dead woman to be his bride and, once a corpse is obtained, bury the pair together as a married couple.

“The rural folk custom, startling to Western sensibilities, is known as minghun, or afterlife marriage. Scholars who have studied it say it is rooted in the Chinese form of ancestor worship, which holds that people continue to exist after death and that the living are obligated to tend to their wants” or risk the consequences. Traditional Chinese beliefs also hold that an unmarried life is incomplete, which is why some parents worry that an unmarried dead son may be an unhappy one.”

Curious what people believe, and curiouser still, how they will act in pursuing those beliefs.

Still, it’s somewhat sad that having such beliefs people seem to have such strong concerns for the experience their sons will have in the afterlife, and not so much for their daughters.

And how does one seek an afterlife divorce?