It’s well known that an increasing percentage of young American adults are living with their parents, as the Pew Research Center has documented. Paul Ryan riffed on that in his acceptance speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention: “College graduates should not have to live out their 20s in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going in life.” Ryan’s remark is based on the assumption, shared by the Pew Research analysts, that young adults are constrained from moving out on their own by economic factors.
But cultural factors may also be at work. Consider the wide variance in percentage of young adults 25-34 living with their parents in different European nations, as shown in this map, which I found on a tweet linked to by the indefatigable Tyler Cowen.
The variation in percentages is enormous, far greater than you find on most socioeconomic variables: only 2 percent of young adults in Denmark are living with their parents, while 57 percent of those in Slovakia are. (I’ve rounded off the percentages throughout this blogpost, in line with my belief that tenths of a percent are usually meaningless and distracting.)
By way of comparison, the map says that 14 percent of young adults 25-34 in the U.S. live with their parents (Pew Research says that 36 percent of young adults were living with their parents in 2012). This 14 percent is hugely higher than in Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway (between 2 and 4 percent), a bit higher than in France (!) and the Netherlands (11 percent) and, rounded off, identical to the 14 percent in the United Kingdom and Switzerland.
The highest figures, over 50 percent, are in economically less affluent Slovakia, Bulgaria and Greece. So economics explains the difference. But I note a tendency for higher figures in traditionally Catholic countries, on both sides of the 1946-89 Iron Curtain. It’s between 43 and 47 percent in Italy, Portugal, Slovenia, Poland and Hungary. Differences between nearby countries with similar economic levels may also be explainable by the differences between Catholic and Protestant heritages: Ireland has a slightly higher percentage (23 percent) than the U.K. (14 percent); Belgium is slightly higher (16 percent) than the Netherlands (11 percent); Lithuania is higher (33 percent) than Estonia (20 percent), though almost the same as the less Catholic and geographically closer Latvia (34 percent).
I leave it to others to provide further explanations of these sharp differences — and look forward to learning from them.
