It is the poor who are lonely (on average)

Lower-income people are more lonely

Jiska Cohen-Mansfield did a literature review with Haim Hazan, Yaffa Lerman, and Vera Shalom of the statistical correlates of loneliness in older adults and found that being low-income is a strong correlate of loneliness. You see the same thing in surveys of middle-aged and elderly Portuguese people, in the Nova Scotia Quality of Life Survey, and in Eastern Europe.

Michelle Lim, Robert Eres, Shradha Vasan have the interesting finding that low income predicts loneliness not only on the individual level but also that “living in poorer neighborhoods” is associated with loneliness.

Sometimes scholarly literatures feature big disputes, or at least nuanced disputes, but in this case there seems to be no dispute at all: loneliness is associated with lower income and thus probably not caused by big houses or lack of huts. I also think it’s notable that at least among rich countries, loneliness seems higher in the poorer (or perhaps “less rich”) ones like Greece and Italy than in the United States and Switzerland.

The low rates of loneliness in egalitarian Sweden and Denmark, in particular, suggest that having more money pretty literally leads to less loneliness. Note as well that while the United States has a somewhat threadbare welfare state, this is data for senior citizens who do enjoy universal health care in the United States and a basic income via Social Security.

It may be, in other words, that being able to afford to do more leisure activities is a significant protector against loneliness. You go do more stuff and you make more friends. Or you have more opportunity to maintain your relationship with friends because you can afford to hang out and do stuff. I don’t think the exact nature of the causal relationship is clear from the studies that I’ve seen, but it bears more examination, especially because a lot of people seem to intuitively spin out to “paradoxical” accounts of loneliness that don’t seem well-supported.

That is from Matt Yglesias ($).