Definitions: I've seen solitude as a voluntary, mind-clearing beneficial state ... and loneliness as a soul-sucking problem. So ironic with so many of us around nowadays. "Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink."
Story I retell: I remember a colleague/friend telling me about a conversation he had during family medicine training with an elder black man in a Pt. Arthur, TX neighborhood. He knew what was wrong with the world ... air conditioners and televisions ... because nobody sits out on their front porches anymore.
Paved the way for me to later read Putnam's "Bowling Alone."
Loneliness sucks, which makes people try to "solve" it. The cheapest/easiest ways to solve it are now paradoxically alone activities, rather than the bars/churchs/bowling allies of earlier generations. To your example, when its enjoyable to be inside alone, people dont sit on their porch and talk to their neighbors.
Hmm. I can agree with this as "a factor", but I wouldn't call it "THE factor"...
As a test, it is free and trivial to text some friends to come over and hang out. No Baumol factor there. But we don't. Why? Not perfectly clear, but I think the substitution value of so many personalized media options is a big factor. I can stay home and watch exactly what I want, instead of coordinating with a group.
Also being "loosely connected" to many people and everything happening in the world when I am on my phone or laptop, versus being narrowly (but closely) connected to just a small group when we are in person.
I started seeing this in return visits to college as an alum. In the 1990s there was not much to do in our rooms, so doors were generally open and people gathered in the common areas. But as the rooms got high-speed bandwidth, twenty years later I would visit and see most people retreating to their rooms in the evening. They just had so much more available to them in their personal space.
You've hit on the issue of "friction," which I also think plays a big role in driving loneliness. Put simply: people are more inclined to do things that are easy, and less the things that are hard. There's much less friction in staying home and watching what we want than there is in trying to organize a group hang. Marry cost disease with low friction and you end up with a lot of really lonely folks. The irony, of course, is that a lot of times it's the friction that makes an experience worth having! Esther Perel and Trevor Noah discussed this on his podcast a while ago; worth a listen if you're interested!
Friction is mentioned in the comments. Good point. Enough force can overcome that friction, however, i.e., existential threat against a group. I think of the classic image of bison facing off against a wolf pack. Or, the welding of the Great Generation by WWII, post 9/11 unity, and hurricane disaster recovery (personal experience here.)
Through exponential tool making (tools creating tools), humans have been highly effective at satisfying immediate wants and needs, including existential safety. It's been awhile since we've had to worry about becoming a predator's snack, or going hungry if we aren't successful in our own hunting. The need to band together for survival has reduced.
And with these fast evolving tools, we suddenly also have tech to pseudo-connect with like-minded people in a world vastly exceeding our Dunbar number. Now we stare at digital screens instead of the people next to us.
I think the underlying issue is that if you let capitalism "run wild", like an unkempt garden, it will go to some equilibrium that is pretty arbitrary vis-a-vis common notions of the common good / a life well lived. Exploitable quirks of human nature and cognitive functioning end up twisting society into bizarre shapes; winners from the previous iteration find ways to entrench themselves and become permanent fixtures, solidifying existing patterns for generations.
Which is all to say, this the danger of allowing capitalism too large a claim on society and human being: we become cogs in a pointless and capricious mechanism at best, and a party to truly demented scales of harm and cruelty at worst.
Ultimately people will have to decide how to break out of the grips of capitalism and become its master. I think sometimes this looks like "populism", sometimes it looks like "a religious awakening", sometimes it looks like a bunch of Leftists going full Luddite, and sometimes it even looks like a full embrace of some kind of modern Fascism. All of these movements share something in common, which is that they yearn to break free of and create a space away from the grim logic of modern capitalism and the modes of living that perpetuate it.
Psyched to see a post about Baumol's Cost Disease! It has been one of my favorite general purpose concepts for several years now.
I do think it explains quite a bit about the current state of affairs, as this post notes; even if not quite everything.
As for the proposed remedy, I do wonder where you think the line is between an effective version of counter-Baumol subsidization, and running into cost disease socialism problems?
We can (further) subsidize healthcare, childcare, etc. But without an increased supply of doctors, childcare workers, etc, it will just drive up prices roughly commensurately, right?
This article provided probably the best defense of cities spending public revenue on sports stadiums. They are subsidizing the cost of 1) actually going to the stadium for events, 2) the secondary hangouts when you have a local team to root for.
I think there's a fallacy here, though, that solitude is bad.
If you look at all countries and rank them from richest to poorest, the poorest countries have a lot more extended family with them. They have people with them all the time, bigger friend groups, big everything, but they report much higher levels of loneliness than Scandinavia or the United States does today.
As countries get richer, they spend less time with extended family and friends. It's a revealed preference, and I think it's because humans are annoying in anything but small doses.
I think you’re confusing correlation with causation. Poverty drives higher loneliness in poor countries (and among the poor within rich ones)—revealed preference does not show people want to spend more time alone. Europe: 49% of lowest earners lonely vs. 15% of highest, *despite equal socializing time.*
This is the same finding. Being poor forces you to live closer to other people and extended family, since you cant afford your own place.
But that (according to the data) makes people feel more lonely, not less. People reporting loneliness more when they live in more communal living situations.
Being rich allows more social interaction of your own choosing vs the low quality social interaction poor people are forced to endure.
It's not just cost, it's also convenience. Once a more convenient alternative has arisen, people usually can't go back to the less-convenient, often more-social, version. Consider DoorDash et al—people are paying more so they don't have to leave their house. Picking up your own food isn't any harder than it ever was, but a more convenient alternative made it unbearable for many. They will claim that they're so busy now, they don't have time to do it themselves, but shouldn't this technology result in more free time, not less?
You want to go real easy in relying on "Bowling Alone". Three big problems with Putnam's thinking:
(a) He didn't in fact document declines in Americans participating in traditional social clubs like bowling leagues. Putnam's sharp drop shows up only after he makes a big assumption: that given rising educational levels such participation _should_ have continued to _rise_. (All of his decline figures are relative to that expectation, they reflect a statistical adjustment based on it.) He offers no real discussion of that logic, just takes it as obvious. It's easy to think of reasons (starting with there being still only 7 days in a week no matter how educated you've become) to question that assumption in the real lives of real people across a large dynamic society.
(b) In focusing only on the familiar-to-midcentury-Americans forms of social mixing, Putnam wrote as if large societies are static. Of course they are not: 1990s let alone 2020s US society was quite different from the 1950s framework that Putnam was basing his analysis in. For just one example a majority-nonwhite society will naturally have a new range of social-mixing vectors, than the society that Putnam was basing his assumptions in.
(c) Putnam ignored a huge structural shift in US society and economy which is the rise, in both numbers and sizes, of not-for-profit organizations. Now something like 8 percent of all payroll jobs in the country, that sector has an enormous inherent social component to its operations. In scale that impact is today enormously different from the small hyperlocal "charity groups" of Putnam's idealized 1950s/60s.
"...my serious point is that if solitude has a social cost, it’s not crazy to think that local, state, and federal governments should be thinking about creative ways to make it cheaper to hang out."
The communitarians will then argue that social interaction is a human right and should therefore be subsidized and defended by government.
I see it from the opposite angle. A role of government is to protect its citizens from harm, such as drugs, crime, fraud and, until recently, gambling. This doesn't always mean making the harm illegal, but often translates to instituting limits to protect citizens from the worst effects. I would love to see the government treat anti-social technologies, such as social media, a bit like they treat Tabaco.
Our increasingly "meh" response as a society to the rampant erasure of culture through isolation is seemingly more and more baked into the business model, which is pretty scary. They see we are putting up less and less of a fight, that our growing complacence dovetails quite snugly with the ever-increasing insatiability of boards of directors for larger and larger profit margins.
Wow, this is a revelation that seems obvious now that you’ve written about it. I hope this promotes more discussion about how affordability is a root cause for our slide into social isolation.
Good piece, although I'm not clear on why exactly the cost disease steers us towards more anti-social behaviors. Jason Pargin made an argument that we have a generation that grew up in "cringe comedy" and learned that being "cringe" or being in awkward social situations, was a terrible thing. And so now they avoid it all costs. I don't think he was saying The Office made us anti-social, but perhaps its part of a larger trend where we are just exhausted by social interactions and have reached for the lower hanging fruit of online and parasocial or "artificial" relationships?
"like For All Mankind on Apple TV—why is no one talking about this show?!)"
YES! Seriously, why do I not even hear about it much from the prestige TV crowd?
"But if we want our rising living standards to include friendships and shared experiences—and not just a nation of couch potatoes scrolling on their phones for 10 hours a day—then we’ll need to choose our social future."
It seems as though our technological oligarchs have already made that choice. And as if to underscore that point, the solitude-inducing services they provide also have strong addictive qualities. Things that make you go, "hmmmm...."
Definitions: I've seen solitude as a voluntary, mind-clearing beneficial state ... and loneliness as a soul-sucking problem. So ironic with so many of us around nowadays. "Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink."
Story I retell: I remember a colleague/friend telling me about a conversation he had during family medicine training with an elder black man in a Pt. Arthur, TX neighborhood. He knew what was wrong with the world ... air conditioners and televisions ... because nobody sits out on their front porches anymore.
Paved the way for me to later read Putnam's "Bowling Alone."
Loneliness sucks, which makes people try to "solve" it. The cheapest/easiest ways to solve it are now paradoxically alone activities, rather than the bars/churchs/bowling allies of earlier generations. To your example, when its enjoyable to be inside alone, people dont sit on their porch and talk to their neighbors.
Hmm. I can agree with this as "a factor", but I wouldn't call it "THE factor"...
As a test, it is free and trivial to text some friends to come over and hang out. No Baumol factor there. But we don't. Why? Not perfectly clear, but I think the substitution value of so many personalized media options is a big factor. I can stay home and watch exactly what I want, instead of coordinating with a group.
Also being "loosely connected" to many people and everything happening in the world when I am on my phone or laptop, versus being narrowly (but closely) connected to just a small group when we are in person.
I started seeing this in return visits to college as an alum. In the 1990s there was not much to do in our rooms, so doors were generally open and people gathered in the common areas. But as the rooms got high-speed bandwidth, twenty years later I would visit and see most people retreating to their rooms in the evening. They just had so much more available to them in their personal space.
You've hit on the issue of "friction," which I also think plays a big role in driving loneliness. Put simply: people are more inclined to do things that are easy, and less the things that are hard. There's much less friction in staying home and watching what we want than there is in trying to organize a group hang. Marry cost disease with low friction and you end up with a lot of really lonely folks. The irony, of course, is that a lot of times it's the friction that makes an experience worth having! Esther Perel and Trevor Noah discussed this on his podcast a while ago; worth a listen if you're interested!
I DID hear their podcast! Good stuff.
Friction is mentioned in the comments. Good point. Enough force can overcome that friction, however, i.e., existential threat against a group. I think of the classic image of bison facing off against a wolf pack. Or, the welding of the Great Generation by WWII, post 9/11 unity, and hurricane disaster recovery (personal experience here.)
Through exponential tool making (tools creating tools), humans have been highly effective at satisfying immediate wants and needs, including existential safety. It's been awhile since we've had to worry about becoming a predator's snack, or going hungry if we aren't successful in our own hunting. The need to band together for survival has reduced.
And with these fast evolving tools, we suddenly also have tech to pseudo-connect with like-minded people in a world vastly exceeding our Dunbar number. Now we stare at digital screens instead of the people next to us.
I think the underlying issue is that if you let capitalism "run wild", like an unkempt garden, it will go to some equilibrium that is pretty arbitrary vis-a-vis common notions of the common good / a life well lived. Exploitable quirks of human nature and cognitive functioning end up twisting society into bizarre shapes; winners from the previous iteration find ways to entrench themselves and become permanent fixtures, solidifying existing patterns for generations.
Which is all to say, this the danger of allowing capitalism too large a claim on society and human being: we become cogs in a pointless and capricious mechanism at best, and a party to truly demented scales of harm and cruelty at worst.
Ultimately people will have to decide how to break out of the grips of capitalism and become its master. I think sometimes this looks like "populism", sometimes it looks like "a religious awakening", sometimes it looks like a bunch of Leftists going full Luddite, and sometimes it even looks like a full embrace of some kind of modern Fascism. All of these movements share something in common, which is that they yearn to break free of and create a space away from the grim logic of modern capitalism and the modes of living that perpetuate it.
Psyched to see a post about Baumol's Cost Disease! It has been one of my favorite general purpose concepts for several years now.
I do think it explains quite a bit about the current state of affairs, as this post notes; even if not quite everything.
As for the proposed remedy, I do wonder where you think the line is between an effective version of counter-Baumol subsidization, and running into cost disease socialism problems?
We can (further) subsidize healthcare, childcare, etc. But without an increased supply of doctors, childcare workers, etc, it will just drive up prices roughly commensurately, right?
This article provided probably the best defense of cities spending public revenue on sports stadiums. They are subsidizing the cost of 1) actually going to the stadium for events, 2) the secondary hangouts when you have a local team to root for.
Ha, interesting point. Our team won a championship and the city really came together for it in a way I hadn't seen in years.
I think there's a fallacy here, though, that solitude is bad.
If you look at all countries and rank them from richest to poorest, the poorest countries have a lot more extended family with them. They have people with them all the time, bigger friend groups, big everything, but they report much higher levels of loneliness than Scandinavia or the United States does today.
As countries get richer, they spend less time with extended family and friends. It's a revealed preference, and I think it's because humans are annoying in anything but small doses.
I think you’re confusing correlation with causation. Poverty drives higher loneliness in poor countries (and among the poor within rich ones)—revealed preference does not show people want to spend more time alone. Europe: 49% of lowest earners lonely vs. 15% of highest, *despite equal socializing time.*
https://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/article/almost-half-of-people-in-poverty-feel-lonely-compared-to-only-15-of-high-earners-and-it-coul
This is the same finding. Being poor forces you to live closer to other people and extended family, since you cant afford your own place.
But that (according to the data) makes people feel more lonely, not less. People reporting loneliness more when they live in more communal living situations.
Being rich allows more social interaction of your own choosing vs the low quality social interaction poor people are forced to endure.
It's not just cost, it's also convenience. Once a more convenient alternative has arisen, people usually can't go back to the less-convenient, often more-social, version. Consider DoorDash et al—people are paying more so they don't have to leave their house. Picking up your own food isn't any harder than it ever was, but a more convenient alternative made it unbearable for many. They will claim that they're so busy now, they don't have time to do it themselves, but shouldn't this technology result in more free time, not less?
You want to go real easy in relying on "Bowling Alone". Three big problems with Putnam's thinking:
(a) He didn't in fact document declines in Americans participating in traditional social clubs like bowling leagues. Putnam's sharp drop shows up only after he makes a big assumption: that given rising educational levels such participation _should_ have continued to _rise_. (All of his decline figures are relative to that expectation, they reflect a statistical adjustment based on it.) He offers no real discussion of that logic, just takes it as obvious. It's easy to think of reasons (starting with there being still only 7 days in a week no matter how educated you've become) to question that assumption in the real lives of real people across a large dynamic society.
(b) In focusing only on the familiar-to-midcentury-Americans forms of social mixing, Putnam wrote as if large societies are static. Of course they are not: 1990s let alone 2020s US society was quite different from the 1950s framework that Putnam was basing his analysis in. For just one example a majority-nonwhite society will naturally have a new range of social-mixing vectors, than the society that Putnam was basing his assumptions in.
(c) Putnam ignored a huge structural shift in US society and economy which is the rise, in both numbers and sizes, of not-for-profit organizations. Now something like 8 percent of all payroll jobs in the country, that sector has an enormous inherent social component to its operations. In scale that impact is today enormously different from the small hyperlocal "charity groups" of Putnam's idealized 1950s/60s.
"...my serious point is that if solitude has a social cost, it’s not crazy to think that local, state, and federal governments should be thinking about creative ways to make it cheaper to hang out."
The communitarians will then argue that social interaction is a human right and should therefore be subsidized and defended by government.
I see it from the opposite angle. A role of government is to protect its citizens from harm, such as drugs, crime, fraud and, until recently, gambling. This doesn't always mean making the harm illegal, but often translates to instituting limits to protect citizens from the worst effects. I would love to see the government treat anti-social technologies, such as social media, a bit like they treat Tabaco.
Our increasingly "meh" response as a society to the rampant erasure of culture through isolation is seemingly more and more baked into the business model, which is pretty scary. They see we are putting up less and less of a fight, that our growing complacence dovetails quite snugly with the ever-increasing insatiability of boards of directors for larger and larger profit margins.
Wow, this is a revelation that seems obvious now that you’ve written about it. I hope this promotes more discussion about how affordability is a root cause for our slide into social isolation.
I'm thinking the point of the article is to highlight one factor rather than to reduce the explanation to economic models.
Are European countries facing this same dilemma? If not, why not? What can we do to change the trajectory?
Good piece, although I'm not clear on why exactly the cost disease steers us towards more anti-social behaviors. Jason Pargin made an argument that we have a generation that grew up in "cringe comedy" and learned that being "cringe" or being in awkward social situations, was a terrible thing. And so now they avoid it all costs. I don't think he was saying The Office made us anti-social, but perhaps its part of a larger trend where we are just exhausted by social interactions and have reached for the lower hanging fruit of online and parasocial or "artificial" relationships?
"like For All Mankind on Apple TV—why is no one talking about this show?!)"
YES! Seriously, why do I not even hear about it much from the prestige TV crowd?
"But if we want our rising living standards to include friendships and shared experiences—and not just a nation of couch potatoes scrolling on their phones for 10 hours a day—then we’ll need to choose our social future."
It seems as though our technological oligarchs have already made that choice. And as if to underscore that point, the solitude-inducing services they provide also have strong addictive qualities. Things that make you go, "hmmmm...."
think robots playing the violin and serving the meals are on their way...
Robots to comfort nursing home patients are already here.
You mean subsidizing supply of those services, not demand for them, right?