And is there any data on the scope of this caregiving imbalance?

Yeah, there was a great study by Diego Alburez-Gutierrez and his colleagues.

Diego is a social scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany.

He and his colleagues looked at how family sizes are changing and how that could affect the amount of support that a caregiver may have.

So the researchers looked at the average 65-year-old person, which is the typical retirement age in the U.S., and they asked how many relatives that person would have today versus in 1950 or in 2095.

Here's Diego.

So in the U.S., for example, we project that this 65-year-old person-you can think of, like, it's her birthday; she invites all of her relatives.

Whereas now there are going to be around 30 people around, if that same person, or a person of that age, towards the end of the century, she organizes a party, there are only going to be about 20 relatives that can attend that party.

And internationally, they found that a woman who turns 65 in the year 2095 will have just 25 living relatives, compared with 41 relatives in 1950 and 43 relatives in 2023.

Wow, that does seem like a stark change. So what are the implications of that?