Economics Has a Name for the Costs of Loneliness

I keep thinking about the opening of E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel, “Ragtime,” in which he describes the convivial America of the early 20th century. “The population customarily gathered in great numbers,” he wrote. They flocked to parades, concerts, fish fries, regattas, fireworks displays, operas and balls. “There seemed to be no entertainment that did not involve great swarms of people.”

Today, Americans are more likely than ever to spend time alone, as Derek Thompson regretfully documented in The Atlantic. They order takeout instead of eating in restaurants. They watch TV at home instead of going to the movies. In 2023, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.”

When I was young, the people who populated Doctorow’s happy crowds were still walking the earth. One of them was my grandfather Robert C. Brewster, born in 1901, who was a pillar of Manchester, Vt. He was a big fish in a small river — that being the Batten Kill, the trout-fishing stream that runs through town. He was at different times the president of the Chamber of Commerce, the president of the local independent high school, a co-founder of Equinox Country Club and a winner of the Boy Scouts’ Silver Beaver Award for leadership. He ran an ambulance service, a funeral service and a furniture store. He was also the board chairman of Factory Point National Bank (which gave me my first credit card) and the executive secretary of the Manchester Sports Club, which was instrumental in getting the area’s ski industry going. Among other things.

My grandfather was a joiner, and he thought his grandchildren should be, too. He wanted me to join the marching band in college so I could go to football games free. I did not. When I was out of college, he said I should join the Rotary Club. I did not. He didn’t just belong to the Rotary Club; he was the founding president (in 1937) of the Manchester chapter, which built and operated a swimming pool in town.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about my great-grandfather Charles Orson Brewster, a builder, and his experiences when the Great Depression struck Vermont. That man was my grandfather’s father. He also seemed to know everybody in town, judging from the calendars he kept.

I know I’m not breaking ground when I write that people used to do things together more than they do now. That reality has been made plain by Thompson, Doctorow and many others, including Robert Putnam (“Bowling Alone”), my colleague David Brooks and, of course, Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote, “In no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used, or more unsparingly applied to a multitude of different objects, than in America.”