Recognition World 2

[jamesq]

Watch with awe as James waves his hands so fast you don't actually notice that the numbers he's producing have been pulled out of his ass!

One of my premises is that on X-day, every adult who has a compatible partner and is sufficiently mature to maintain a permanent relationship, recognizes their life-mate. Just how many people is that? I initially imagined that it would be between 50% and 80% of the adult population. Can I justify that gut feeling?

Well they say that 50% of marriages fail. So we can assume that the 50% that succeed consist of adults who have found someone compatible enough and can maintain a relationship. The ones that fail, fail because either one or the other partner can't hack it, or they just don't work well with each other. A 70% success rate per partner yields a 50% success rate per pairing. This means that at least 70% of the adult population will recognize. Probably more because there the marriage failures fall into two categories: 1) not compatible 2) at least one partner is not ready for a relationship. Those that fall into category 1 would also recognize. Call it 75% total.

This ignores some outliers. Marriages that failed, but shouldn't have - one or both partners hit a rough patch and didn't do the work necessary to make a stronger union. Marriages that don't fail, but probably should have - the stereotypical trapped-in-an-abusive-relationship for example. I'm going to optimistically declare that these cancel each other out.

So that's married people. If we assume that there is nothing special about them (i.e. the non-married people are no more or less likely to have successful relationships - they just don't have them at this moment) we can extrapolate out to the total adult population, not just the married adult population.

Incidentally, I found 59% of the population was currently married (for the States, in 2002. I couldn't find the right numbers at StatsCan). Also, about 75% of the population is adult (20 or over according to this).

There's 32 million people in Canada. 24 million of those are adults. 18 million recognize. That's better then half the population!

Now who recognizes whom? I'm going to say that the Pareto Principle applies - 20% of the recognitions will require 80% of the effort. Or more specifically, 80% of the recognitions will occur in ones own social circle and 20% will not. Potentially 3.6 million people in Canada are going to be searching for their life-mates.

Is 3.6M a big disruption of the economy? As a percentage of the population it's equivalent to the number of soldiers we mustered for WWII and I think there's no question that that was the biggest disruption this country's ever experienced. X-day and it's aftermath would be bigger.

Canada's a very sparsely populated country. Multiple all those numbers by ten when considering the USA. Multiply them by 200 to get a ballpark figure for the world. 720,000,000 million people all with an urge to travel. Almost a billion. Whew!

Comments

[bungle-lord.livejournal.com]

Applying the Pareto Principle even further. Of the twenty percent who need to leave town to go searching, the majority will only need to go to a nearby town or city. Eighty percent of the twenty equals sixteen percent. So that leaves four percent who need to leave the region. Eighty percent of those four will probably stay on the same continent.

So we have point eight of a percent of the adult population heading overseas to find their partner. That means about six million people world-wide (144,000 Canadians) will need to go intercontinental.