Loneliness, income, and unemployment in the time of COVID-19

When your public policy hammer of choice is a universal basic income, every social problem looks like a nail. At least, that's what I thought when I heard this story on Radio New Zealand this morning:

People on low incomes were more likely to suffer high levels of loneliness during lockdown.

The report 'Alone Together', published by the Helen Clark Foundation and consultancy firm WSP reveals the Covid-19 lockdown exacerbated the risks of loneliness, especially for those who had no work.

The report recommends everyone has access to a guaranteed minimum income, high speed internet and mental health support.

You could be forgiven for wondering, if loneliness is the problem, then a first order solution is not a guaranteed minimum income, but guaranteed minimum friends. Yes, the government should start an automatic match-making service to ensure that every person has many high-quality friends and therefore won't be lonely. There is no doubt a missed opportunity there.

On a more serious note, the report itself is available here, and indeed it does show that people on low incomes are lonelier. It finds this using data from the 2018 General Social Survey. However, it also says that:

It is striking how closely loneliness was linked to employment status and household income. The group most likely overall to report feeling lonely in 2018 were people who were unemployed.

If unemployment is a bigger issue than income (and it is: 7.2 percent of unemployed people report being lonely most or all of the time, compared with 6.1 percent of those in the lowest (under $30,000 per year) income bracket). So, based on that alone it would make more sense to advocate for a jobs guarantee, rather than a guaranteed minimum income. However, the report misses that obvious solution and doesn't mention it at all.

There are broader problems with the report though. Essentially the report assumes causal relationships, when all it is showing is correlation. People with low incomes may be lonelier, but that doesn't mean that raising their income will reduce loneliness. Maybe their income is low, and they are lonely, because they are unemployed. Even with a higher income, they would still be unemployed and lonely. Understanding the causal relationships is important in order to identify the appropriate policy (whether that be a guaranteed minimum income, a jobs guarantee, or something else).

Surprisingly, given that the report is subtitled "The risks of loneliness in Aotearoa New Zealand following Covid-19 and how public policy can help", the report mostly uses data from the 2018 General Social Survey. It does have a section where they report some survey data collected by Kate Prickett and others at Victoria University. In that section, they show that the survey data demonstrates higher levels of loneliness for the high-loneliness groups - for example:

...20 percent of those with household incomes under $30,000 reported feeling lonely most or all of the time, compared with 6.1 percent in 2018. Unemployment remained a risk factor, with 19.2 percent of those who lost their job as a result of Covid-19 reporting feeling lonely most or all of the time during the lockdown.

However, they don't report the equivalent changes in loneliness for other groups. So, we have no way of knowing whether the higher lockdown loneliness for the unemployed is greater than or less than that for the employed.

Finally, focusing additional resources on mental health was relegated to the sixth (and last) of the recommendations. I thought that was interesting. That would seem to me to be the most obvious solution, especially based on the data in this report.

Anyway, this report tells us which groups are lonely, but doesn't really help us to understand why. And without knowing why, it is difficult to identify the correct policies. At least with more resources devoted to mental health, you can feel like there will be improvements not just in loneliness, but in mental health and wellbeing more generally.