The joint family is here to stay

In the end, Humaira Asghar Ali got a family funeral and burial.

The story of a young professional woman, living alone in an apartment in Karachi, and found dead having passed away perhaps as much as nine months ago, has been shocking to just about everyone in Pakistan, prompting the question: how did nobody notice for nine months that she was no longer alive?

The estrangement from family is something that press accounts have dwelled upon substantially, but perhaps more shocking than that was something else implicit in this account: she must have been incredibly lonely for at least the last year of her life. Indeed, lonely to a degree that is exceedingly uncommon in Pakistan and would be uncommon even in much more individualistic societies in Europe and North America.

The account of her passing – and exceedingly delayed discovery of it – has prompted us to ask the question: does this incident mark the arrival of the global disease of loneliness in Pakistan? Or is it an isolated incident that is not representative of broader trends?

After all, this was the second such case that occurred in Karachi in just the past few weeks. In late June, the actress Ayesha Khan’s body was found several days after having passed away.

Based on Profit’s analysis of recent demographic trends, our answer for the moment appears to be: these are both isolated incidents. Among countries for which data is available, Pakistanis appear to be far less likely to live alone, and somewhat more surprisingly, the trend does not appear to have increased over the past three decades for which data is available.

In this story, we examine what solo living is, and how common it is around the world. We then dive into why it has failed to take off in Pakistan, with hypotheses for both the economic and non-economic reasons. Finally, we look at what the economic effects of joint family living has been for Pakistan.