Is Capitalism Making Us Lonely?

And yet, the reason why markets have been expanding into personal life is that markets provide a certain convenience. Instead of having to deal with a community, which will often have somewhat inconvenient (or downright oppressive) rules, you can now try to do things on your own, increasingly in virtual space, by finding willing partners who share your views and preferred terms of interaction. In the process, however, you as an individual may be losing something important, a sense of meaning that only genuine community can bring. The cost of choosing this market convenience is loneliness and losing a more profound sense of happiness that can only come from belonging. And because so many people get temped by this convenience, the argument goes, we are now experiencing an “epidemic of loneliness”.

This sounds plausible, but I want to offer a different, simpler and, I think, better, explanation for this kind of phenomenon. The explanation that I have in mind is better equipped to understand how far reaching the issue is, and to explain the problem without abandoning the value of individualism, and without undermining our ability to be critical of the oppressiveness of many communities. This explanation is based on how improvements in our technologies for search lead to an over-optimistic increase in our standards of quality. Better search can, paradoxically, lead to the subjective perception that the search results are worse.

How Do People Find Partners?

Consider the problem of finding a partner in the 1950s. You would search for a partner within a very small group, your immediate geographical and cultural community. Undoubtedly, there would be many substantially better partners for you even in the slightly larger surrounding area, but your ability to search for them was severely limited. The technology of search, and by “technology” here I mean the entire social environment that facilitates the search, was just not very capable. The technology of search was limited to word of mouth and very short chains (1-2 people) of in-person interactions. Maybe your gregarious sister played matchmaker and found you a wife or husband, but surely there was a wider selection of partners out there that she just didn’t know about.

Nonetheless, despite this bad search process, it would often work out just fine. You would choose a partner and have a family. You would be less likely to be lonely than you are today—or at least less likely to admit it in a survey. And yet, you would choose that partner because your field of selection and quality standards would be very low (by our contemporary standards). And often it wouldn’t work out so well at all. Many women in the 1950s would end up with bad husbands and yet not divorce them. Husbands who would get drunk and rape them, occasionally beating them and their children. Husbands who would not do much to help around the house or help raising the children.

In the even earlier years of the 20th century the problem of drunken and deadbeat husbands was so widely recognized that factories like Ford adopted heavily paternalistic policies and established a “Sociological Department” which monitored workers’ alcohol consumption and required abstinence as a condition for receiving the famous $5-per-day wage (Snow 2017). This included unannounced visits to evaluate workers’ home conditions. adopted the practice of refusing to give the paychecks to the men working in the factory, and instead handed the money to their wives. When they were handing the money to the husbands, too many of them would immediately drink it away, with severe consequences for their families — and, even more importantly from Ford’s perspective, causing disruptions to the factory production. This is just one example of the paternalistic efforts of early capitalist enterprises. The factory sirenssignals (whistles and bells), calling the workers to show up to work, are a more famous example. The sirenfactory signals wereas needed because the men, previously used to working in agriculture, which did not have such strict time requirements, had to be taught the importance of showing up on time (Thompson 1967). As Thompson (1967) notes, the introduction of public clocks, designed to create a shared concept of exact time, as well as public schooling, operating under a strict schedule, were similarly designed to instill the importance of a precise schedule. By the mid-20th century such severe paternalism waned, as the capitalist enterprises had succeeded in domesticating the men to some extent.

Today, most people find their partners online, using dating websites or apps. (See Figure 1.) In many regards, these tools have the exact opposite issues compared to dating in the 1950s. These apps show you a huge pool of potential partners, and, while very far from perfect, they do a better job at matching compared to picking up a random stranger in a bar. These apps are also substantially cheaper than a bar, both in terms of money and time. Going to a bar to pick up someone is not cheap. It takes up a lot of time and has low guarantees of a relevant match. By contrast, with an online dating app, you might spend an hour a day sending messages, which results in many more dates, with higher probability of relevance. In my own case, I found my wife in about one year, during which time I’ve had many more dates than without the app.

The opportunity cost of going to a bar is also much larger today than in the past—going to a bar means giving up on playing video games or enjoying a personalized service like Netflix. The only exception where the social environment of a bar is still (perhaps) better than private home entertaining is watching sports. The bottom line here is that modern search technology is far better than in the past (although far from perfect) and better adapted to the opportunity costs raised by modern home entertainment.

Now, here is where the Marxist critique omits something important. One key consequence of this better search technology is that people’s quality standards go up. Few women today would take the kind of abuse that 1950s women regularly experienced. Why not? Because women have better search and better exit options. It’s not just a change in culture occurring due to persuasion and argument, due to feminism and liberalism. It’s also the result of better technology and of women starting working—in markets! Surely many people in the 1950s already understood that marital and child abuse were bad, but the ability to actually do something meaningful about it was lacking. It was the better search and better exit options that capitalism has brought that truly made a difference. The fact that women became more financially independent thanks to their more widespread participation in the labor market did more for women’s liberation than anything else. Husbands who would’ve been abusive in the past think twice today, because they know their wives have realistic exit options.

And here is where my alternative explanation comes in. The “epidemic of loneliness” can be understood as being caused by standards increasing faster than the actual capabilities of our search technologies. The following is a common observation about the problems associated with dating apps: These apps give people, and especially women, the illusion that they have far more options than they actually have. These days, dating apps can feel like an avalanche of options and overtures, much of which is garbage, but people also receive a fair number of legitimate messages. All this can create the impression of an abundance of potential partners.

This perceived, but partially illusory, abundance causes many partner seekers to raise their standards to unrealistic levels. This leads to a failure to actually find someone in a reasonable period of time, and to a disillusion with the existing search technologies themselves. When standards outpace search, the lost trust in the existing search technologies understandably leads to a sense of despair and the belief that loneliness is inescapable.

Can Search and Standards Be Sync’d?

This is a very far-reaching idea: Better search, and, consequently, better exit options, lead to higher standards, but what is the mechanism that makes sure that the standards increase perfectly in-sync with the actual capabilities of the improved search? If better search creates an illusion of abundance, standards will increase too much, and, hence, matching will actually often fail. Paradoxically, better search can lead to worse search results, because people who think the search result is never good enough will continue searching indefinitely, and never settle.

The same logic applies to job searches. Online job postings create the illusion of a huge pool of potential workers. As a consequence, the standards have increased. As the joke goes, job ads today look like they want to hire an entire department, not just a single person. Similarly, seeing hundreds of opportunities on LinkedIn creates the illusion of an abundance of available jobs. The disillusion with the results of this search process leads some to drop off entirely off the job market or leads people to be highly dissatisfied with the jobs they have, because they (wrongly) imagine that much better opportunities exist right behind the corner, although they somehow never get them. This kind of divergence between expectations and reality can be very frustrating. It’s not surprising that many employees think they have meaningless jobs.

Is Traditional Community Overrated Anyway?

It is not an accident that when people are given the choice between individualism and market relations on one hand, and community, on the other hand, most people choose individualism and privacy. We should take revealed preferences seriously. The replacement of traditional communities with opportunistic, fleeting, and overlapping communities based on common interests is good. I don’t want my search options to be restricted to “my community.” I want them as broad as possible, and I want to be able to be part of many different groups at the same time, each group organized based on its own independent reasons. We tend to romanticize traditional communities. But maybe the sense of belonging they provided was a type of Stockholm syndrome, in which you were supposed to love the random community you happened to be born in, although no such community could possibly do a good job satisfying all individuals. Instead, these communities asked for and required their members to downplay and abandon their individual preferences in the name of stability and communal cohesion. This problem with traditional communities should not be downplayed. Furthermore, the fact that all attempts to design “intentional communities” have ended in dismal failures, often characterized by abuse and cult-like problems, is not an accident (Clay 2017). Individualism wins because it is genuinely better, and nostalgia for communitarianism should be viewed with suspicion.

To summarize, the argument I’m making here is twofold:

(1) The modern search technologies are in fact superior to past communal methods. The nostalgia for the past communities is misguided, and ignores the huge problems those past communities have always had, and the problems that new communities would have today. Whatever one thinks of the claim that capitalism has made people more lonely, the classic individualist critique of traditional communities still stands strong and needs to be grappled with.

(2) Modern search technologies are so good that they create the illusion they are far better than they actually are. This illusion induces many people to increase their standards to unrealistic levels, for everything from romantic partners to jobs, which is the actual cause of the “loneliness epidemic” and of people’s discontent with “capitalism” and with otherwise fine jobs. The more readily available information about successful people showing off on social media, and not mentioning their failures, makes the problem worse, increasing the illusion that unusual success is readily available.

What Is the Solution to This Problem?

On one hand, people will eventually adjust to more realistic expectations. Illusion cannot last indefinitely, although it may last far longer than we would like. As the apocryphal quote from John Maynard Keynes goesput it, “markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent” (Zweig 2011). Dating apps may improve slower than you will lower your expectations to more realistic levels.

Moreover, even if error is corrected on average, the distribution of error will always be somewhat spread out, with some people being overly pessimistic (settling too early for too little) while others being overly optimistic (waiting too long to find the ideal partner and job). The nature of this distribution of errors is also unknown, and it need not be a bell curve. If the distribution of errors is a power law, with a long tail of people thinking search is better than it actually is, the social problem we’re facing is even more serious.

On the other hand, the other type of solution is to actually make search better. If we’re putting our economists’ hats on, this is the main reason to be optimistic about the future: Economists are usually worried when no one can make money by solving a problem, but, in this case, there are enormous potential profits to be had by inventing better search-and-match algorithms. This means we should expect search to get even better. The profit incentive is actually in place here to mitigate rather than accentuate this problem.

So, as people’s expectations temper somewhat, because of their experiences with the downsides of today’s search technologies (in areas like dating, job hunting, etc.), new search will improve. This should bring expectations and reality closer together, diminishing both the loneliness epidemic and the job dissatisfaction problems. Again, the time frame over which this will happen may be disappointingly long, but the trend is still here.

We can see this far-reaching issue unfolding before our eyes. In my view, one of the reasons why AI companies have such high market valuations is that search problems are pervasive, and AI is expected to significantly improve search across many domains. People worry about the fake solutions AI might provide to the loneliness epidemic and the labor market issues, i.e., AI partners substituting real people and real relationships, and AI taking over all our jobs. The more optimistic alternative is that AI will greatly improve the available search algorithms, greatly improving both dating and job hunting.

References

Clay, Alexa. 2017. “Utopia Inc”, Aeon Magazine (Feb 28). https://aeon.co/essays/like-start-ups-most-intentional-communities-fail-why.

Rosenfeld, Michael J., Reuben J. Thomas, and Maja Falcon. 2018. How Couples Meet and Stay Together, Waves 1, 2, and 3: Public version 3.04, plus wave 4 supplement version 1.02 and wave 5 supplement version 1.0 and wave 6 supplement ver 1.0 [Computer files]. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Libraries. Available online at: https://data.stanford.edu/hcmst

Snow, Richard. 2017. I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford. Scribner.

Thompson, E.P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past & Present, No. 38 (Dec. 1967), pp. 56-97

Zweig, Jason. 2011. “Keynes: He Didn’t Say Half of What He Said. Or Did He?” Wall Street Journal (Feb 11, 2011.)