Stranded Assets, Part I

(Since I’m on break for the holidays and have more time to read and write, this post is a bit woolier than usual. But all posts on The Bristlecone are free, so I apologize for nothing. This is Part I of a two-part series; you can read Part II here.)

For decades, social scientists have been warning us about the dire consequences of deepening isolation and social atomization in American life. Those warnings have been getting some more attention over the past couple of years, as the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated longstanding trends toward more pervasive loneliness. Just in time for the holidays—always a fun time of year for chronically lonely people—a couple of new pieces have dropped that consider loneliness as a political phenomenon.

The first of these, written by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) and published in the center-right publication The Bulwark, is called, appropriately enough, “The Politics of Loneliness.” The second, written by political theorist Anton Jäger and published in Jacobin, is an extended meditation on Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone called “From Bowling Alone to Posting Alone.” Given the differing perspectives of the two authors and their chosen venues, it may comes as a mild surprise to discover their diagnoses overlap in key ways.

Although Murphy does not mention Putnam by name, each essay takes the Putnam-esque starting position and argues that social connections between Americans—what Putnam describes as “social capital”—have frayed. Both attribute at least some of the blame to the global market economy of the neoliberal era. And both of them suggest that social media has failed as a substitute for the richer universe of in-person connections that characterized an earlier age.

They’re both interesting pieces in their own right. Murphy’s is more or less the executive summary of a policy brief: sketching out the problem and then proposing ways in which Congress could address it. Jäger’s essay is denser and richer in its diagnosis, although I found much of its second half—another intervention into the seemingly endless fascism debate—unpersuasive.

For a more informed retort to Jäger on the fascism question than I could ever deliver, you can read John Ganz. For the purpose of this post, I’m less interested in puzzling out the exact Bonapartism-to-fascism ratio in the MAGA movement than I am in trying to answer the question posed by the first half of both Jäger and Murphy’s essays: how did we get here?

Putnam’s own answer is not especially satisfying. Here’s how Ganz characterizes it:

Not quite. I think this is probably a good summary of how Putnam’s argument is remembered, but not of its actual content. In fact, Putnam thinks that suburbanization only accounts for “10 percent of the problem” and television another 25 percent. The biggest driver is generational change, with Boomers succeeding the more civically minded Greatest Generation. Bowling Alone includes this rather odd pie chart of the “guesstimated” impact that each of the above social trends had on civic engagement.

This is a weird mental model, not least because it involves so many made-up numbers. It also depicts an uncanny, unrealistic version of social change, where major trends don’t act on one another—the one exception being “TV” and “Generational Change,” which overlap to become “TV Generation.” And as Jäger notes, it’s an oddly depoliticized story:

It’s a shame that Skocpol’s work doesn’t merit a more sustained discussion in Jäger’s piece, because her book Diminished Democracy engages with the first two of these three points—the structural transformation of civic society and the political uses of social capital—at length. Much of that book is also a direct (and to my mind highly convincing) response to Putnam. Here’s Skocpol on the type of civic associations that predominated during the high social capital era:

And here is Skocpol on what Jäger calls the structural transformation of civil society:

Skocpol lists a few reasons for this transformation, the most consequential of which is, according to her, the rise of the professional class—or what has been called in another context the professional-managerial class. Perhaps because her book was written before modern inequality discourse, she does not devote much attention to how other market forces might have affected her subject.

Here is where Jäger—and, to an extent, Murphy—hit on something that I don’t think Skocpol gives enough attention, which is the role of capital. Murphy assigns a share of the blame to globalization, saying that it “drained local economies and diminished the local cultures that facilitate connection, identity, and meaning.” Jäger has a more explicitly Marxist formulation of the problem: “individualization was an imperative for capital, and collective life had to be diminished in order for the market to find new avenues for accumulation.”

My own view is heavily reliant on the work of Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings in their book The Asset Economy, which I’ve written about at length previously. In their telling, the transition for the New Deal era to the neoliberal era was marked by a concomitant restructuring in the class system: “The key element shaping inequality is no longer the employment relationship, but rather whether one is able to buy assets that appreciate at a faster rate than both inflation and wages.”

Homeownership is central to this class system, because a home is typically the largest asset owned by a given family. And while today’s homeowners are also quite frequently workers, homeownership implies a whole different set of economic incentives.

For one thing, it changes your relationship to place. A worker’s earnings are connected in part to her proximity to high-wage employers; the size of a homeowner’s wealth has far more to do with owning a home in a “good” neighborhood. These two things may be connected—see the Bay Area for an extreme example of industry booms fueling rapid home value appreciation—but they aren’t necessarily connected. A home in a “good” neighborhood may be one that is far removed from the nearest commercial center and surrounded for miles by only similarly expensive homes. You can begin to see how the asset economy has helped to incentivize sprawl, which in turn has contributed to social atomization—contra Putnam, I’d say its contribution has been greater than 10 percent.

Asset-based class membership also changes the meaning of solidarity. In Diminished Democracy, Skocpol repeatedly emphasizes the importance of civic associations in building cross-class coalitions; under the New Deal order, these coalitions were premised in part on the nation that a more productive economy created more wealth for everyone. But what happens when your wealth is fundamentally linked to the scarcity of a particular asset? As the great Jerusalem Demsas put it in a recent piece on homeownership:

Here we should distinguish between differences in degree so extreme that they become differences in kind. For generations, American homeowners could generally expect some modest year-over-year appreciation in their home values. But it was only in the post-war era that returns to homeownership began to drastically outstrip returns to labor, or even returns to other types of assets typically owned by middle-class households, such as government bonds. For perspective, here’s what home price appreciation has looked like over the past 120 years:

Making the line continue to go up at such spectacular rates means making sure housing remains a scarce—and trending scarcer—resource. Which in turn necessitates a sort of class warfare against renters and prospective future homeowners.

To the extent that the original theorists of the asset economy have succeeded in making everyone into an investor of one kind or another, I would suggest that this has contributed nontrivially to the loneliness epidemic. It has fueled the sprawl that has physically isolated people from one another and it has encouraged a sort of paranoid defensiveness of property values at the expense of social integration and solidarity. And as inequality gets worse, the losers have found themselves increasingly shut out of “legitimate” social institutions while the winners, fearing an angry backlash, have become increasingly insecure and susceptible to the appeal of extreme political movements.

There’s a lot more to say about this, but this post has already gone on for too long. In Part II, I’d like to discuss how nepo babies fit into all of this.

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