I hate to beat a dead horse. Well, maybe this horse I do want to beat, because it never actually gives up the ghost.
Over the last few years, I have complained about a meme propagated in the popular media, abetted by a few academics, that Americans are suffering an “epidemic” of loneliness. Repeatedly since at least 2011, if not earlier, I have argued that there is no reliable evidence for any real trend in loneliness–nor in social isolation (which is not the same thing)–over the last 40-plus years. But what can this little blog do when The New York Times and The Atlantic keep flogging the loneliness horse for all the clicks it can deliver?
Two comprehensive reports on the “loneliness epidemic” have just come out. Perhaps they will finally put down that nag. Probably not.
CQ
Journalist Christina Lyons recently compiled a thorough and accessible (even with 88 footnotes) overview on “Loneliness and Social Isolation: Do They Pose a Growing Health Epidemic?” for CQResearcher (formerly the Congressional Quarterly). Lyons lays out the claims, the evidence, and the opinions on both the affirmative and negative sides of the debate, drawing on many publications and interviews. (Disclosure: I was one of her sources.)
Despite Lyons’s and the editors’ efforts to be balanced, most reasonable readers of the report would conclude that, while loneliness and social isolation pose health problems, there is not much support for the notion of a “growing… epidemic.”
Joint Economic Committee
The staff of the Senate’s Joint Economic Committee (read: economist Scott Winship) added a piece to their continuing series of social science reports on so-called “social capital” (ugh!) with a review of whether there is a loneliness epidemic. The report covers the published research and includes some original data analysis. Importantly, the authors also track down the sources for the claims that loneliness has increased. Where, for example, did a former U.S. Surgeon General get the idea that “rates of loneliness have doubled since the 1980s”? The staff find misquotation, misinterpretation, and misunderstanding rampant. The conclusion: “In fact, despite the public discourse and media attention, we find that there is little evidence that loneliness has worsened.”
Take-Aways
Here’s what social scientists can say with some confidence:
* Being very socially isolated poses serious mental and physical health risks.
* Feeling very lonely poses serious mental and physical health risks.
* Also: Poor mental or physical health poses serious risks of both severe social isolation and severe loneliness.
* Levels of isolation and levels of loneliness among the general American population have varied within a narrow range in the last few decades with no trend. (Of course, they may have been substantially different many decades ago and they may be substantially different in the future.)
Will these two debunking reports be enough to still the loneliness epidemic meme? No.
As both reports point out, the loneliness story has been a perennial, going back centuries. Either Americans have always been getting lonelier and lonelier or this is a false but irresistible cultural motif. Like the mistaken belief that Americans are increasingly rootless and mobile, it fits into the widespread cultural frame that modern life is about disintegration and alienation. Like the ghostly steed of Sleepy Hollow’s “Headless Horseman,” this story will gallop on.
Update, Nov. 13, 2019
About 14 months after the Joint Economic Committee report (and about 11 months after a letter I wrote on the topic appeared in The New York Times), New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff wrote an essay titled “Let’s Wage a War on Loneliness,” repeating the claim of an epidemic. The headless story gallops on.
