Because 95 percent of all adults in the United States marry, we tend to view singlehood as a temporary stage of life. However, increasing numbers of people are choosing to live alone. Such decisions are pushing up the number of single-person households dramatically. In 1950, only one household in ten contained a single person. By 2020, this share had risen to 28 percent, a total of 36.2 million single adults (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022).

Government researchers tell us that 80 percent of adults in families with incomes over $100,000 rate their health as excellent or very good, but only 54 percent of adults in families earning less than $35,000 do the same. Conversely, just 4 percent of higher-income people describe their health as either fair or poor, compared with 18 percent of low-income people. Having a higher income and greater wealth boosts people’s health by improving their nutrition, lowering their incidence of obesity, enabling them to receive better health care, and allowing them to live in safer and less stressful surroundings (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2022a).

Standardized testing. Critics claim that the assessment tests widely used by schools reflect our society’s dominant culture, placing minority students at a disadvantage. The organizations that create standardized tests claim that bias has been all but eliminated because they carefully study response patterns and drop any question that favors one racial or ethnic category. But critics insist that some bias based on race, ethnicity, and class will always exist in formal testing. Because test questions will always reflect our society’s dominant culture, Black and other minority students are placed at a disadvantage, which is even greater if they come from low-income families. By defining advantaged students as smarter, standardized tests unfairly transform privilege into personal merit (Rosales & Walker, 2021).

In fact, just 34 percent of respondents endorsed the first statement, and 64 percent endorsed the second. As we have seen, the rate of marriage in the United States recently hit a fifty-year low, and people who do marry are now doing so considerably later in life.