Back when I was in the competitive telecom business, there was an entire industry based around selling solutions that would reduce the number of errors in the orders resulting in rejected orders between the competitive newcomer and the “Bell-co”.
The groups who sold this solution would stand up and say that every reject cost $20, comptel companies dealt with a huge number of rejects every day. Thus this expensive solution would pay for itself in a heartbeat!!
Thing is, before I moved into upper management, I had been responsible for auditing the bills that came from the Bell-cos. This was back in the 90s when sometimes it required reviewing paper invoices! Believe me, I knew carrier bills and charges like the back of my hand. In the thousands and thousands of invoices I had audited, in the millions of dollars of disputed bills I had processed, I had never seen a bill that had $20 for a reject, in fact, I had never seen a penny charged for a reject.
I began to sit on these sales pitches and ask if I could see a copy of one of these reject charge invoices. My name became known in the OSS vendor world because I had a standing promise that I would EAT a $20 bill if someone could produce an invoice for a reject.
After a couple of years, I found out that $20 figure came from a white paper where a consultant had calculated the cost in man-hours and lost revenue due to rejected orders.
That was when I stopped accepting “well, everyone knows this to be true” because sometimes if enough people repeat something it becomes accepted as true. Somebody has to ask to see the evidence.
I believe the National Marriage Project has done studies on cohabitation.
http://nationalmarriageproject.org/
The above linked article speaks of increased risk of divorce, not a definitive increase in divorces. The article gives theories for this risk:
Selection . This theory is simply that there are many factors associated with who cohabits when and why, and with whom, and that those factors are also associated with how marriages will turn out regardless of cohabiting experience. For example, it’s well known that those who are more economically disadvantaged are more likely to: live together outside of marriage, live together with more than one partner, have a child with a cohabiting partner prior to marrying, and struggle in marriage. Other factors are religiousness, traditionality, and family history (parental divorce, etc.). The selection explanation is that those who cohabit in riskier ways (e.g., before marriage, before engagement, with more than one partner) were already at greater risk. In the strongest view of selection, living together does not add to the risk at all because it’s all already baked in. There is a lot of evidence for selection playing an important role in this literature, and scholars in this area note this and address it in various ways.
. Is it tasty? Just kidding.