THE ECONOMICS OF LONELINESS

There is an apartment somewhere tonight with one light on.

One person is paying the rent.

One person is paying the electricity bill.

One refrigerator is running.

One internet connection is active.

One insurance policy must be paid.

One kitchen heats a meal for one.

One car may be carrying one passenger.

And when that person becomes sick, old or unable to cope, there may be nobody in the next room.

Economists have spent decades studying productivity, inflation, interest rates, wages, public debt and demographic decline.

We have measured almost everything.

But perhaps we have underestimated one of the most profound economic transformations taking place inside developed societies:

the disappearance of sharing.

Not sharing in the digital sense.

Sharing in the oldest economic sense imaginable.

Sharing a roof.

Sharing a kitchen.

Sharing heating.

Sharing bills.

Sharing food.

Sharing childcare.

Sharing care for elderly parents.

Sharing risk.

Sharing time.

Sharing life.

And when sharing disappears, something extraordinary happens.

The same society needs more resources simply to maintain the same number of people.

That is the economics of loneliness.

FIRST, AN IMPORTANT DISTINCTION

Living alone does not necessarily mean being lonely.

And being married, surrounded by colleagues or living in a large family certainly does not guarantee that someone is not lonely.

These are different phenomena.

Living alone is a household structure.

Social isolation describes an objective lack of social connections.

Loneliness is the subjective experience of insufficient or unsatisfying connection.

The distinction matters.

This article is not an argument against independence.

It is not nostalgia for traditional families.

And it certainly is not a claim that everyone living alone is unhappy.

Millions of people actively choose to live alone and value the privacy, autonomy and freedom it provides.

The economic question is different:

What happens when millions more people require an entire household infrastructure for one person instead of sharing it with others?

And what happens when, at the same time, social isolation and loneliness begin generating additional healthcare, employment and welfare costs?

Those two trends increasingly overlap.

THE ONE-PERSON HOUSEHOLD IS BECOMING NORMAL

The numbers are remarkable.

In the European Union, there were approximately 202 million households in 2024, with an average household size of only 2.3 people.

More strikingly, 35.4% of EU households consisted of a single adult without dependent children.

That was the largest individual household category.

Between 2015 and 2024, the share of these single-adult households increased by 2.6 percentage points. (European Commission⁠)

Think about what that means.

More than one household in three across the EU is now essentially organised around a single adult.

The United States is moving in the same direction.

In 2024, the U.S. Census Bureau counted approximately 38.5 million one-person households, representing about 29% of all American households.

Fifty years earlier, in 1974, the figure was only 19%. (Census.gov⁠)

That is an extraordinary structural change.

The economy has not merely added people.

It has multiplied households.

And households consume infrastructure.

ONE PERSON DOES NOT USE HALF A HOUSE

This is where the economics becomes fascinating.

Two people living together do not require twice the resources of one person living alone.

Economists call this household economies of scale.

A couple does not normally require two kitchens.

Two refrigerators.

Two heating systems.

Two internet connections.

Two living rooms.

Two washing machines.

Two sets of property taxes or building charges.

The OECD explicitly adjusts household income comparisons for this reason.

Under its modified equivalence scale, the first adult is assigned a consumption weight of 1, but a second adult only 0.5, precisely because many household resources are shared. (OECD⁠)

This gives us one of the most important insights in the entire discussion:

Loneliness can create diseconomies of scale at the household level.

A single person does not consume half a household.

In many categories, that person must finance almost the entire fixed infrastructure alone.

THE SINGLE-PERSON PENALTY

Imagine two adults earning exactly the same salary.

Person A lives alone.

Persons B and C live together.

Person A needs one apartment.

B and C need one apartment.

Person A needs heating.

B and C share heating.

Person A needs broadband.

B and C share broadband.

Person A pays an electricity connection.

B and C share one.

Person A buys furniture for an entire household.

B and C share furniture.

Person A pays rent from one income.

B and C can potentially divide it between two incomes.

This creates what could be called the:

SINGLE-PERSON PENALTY

It is not a formal tax.

No government sends the bill.

But economically it can behave like one.

The same standard of living requires disproportionately more income per person when many fixed household costs cannot be shared.

That is precisely why statistical agencies use equivalised rather than simple per-capita household income when measuring living standards.

HOUSING: THE LARGEST COST OF LIVING ALONE

Housing is where the mathematics becomes brutal.

A society of 10 million people arranged into households of four requires roughly 2.5 million homes.

The same population arranged into households averaging two people requires approximately 5 million homes.

This is deliberately simplified, but it demonstrates the mechanism.

Household fragmentation creates housing demand even without population growth.

That matters enormously in cities already struggling with housing shortages.

It means that a stable or even declining population does not automatically reduce pressure on housing.

If average household size continues falling, the number of homes required may remain elevated.

Europe is already experiencing this.

Average EU household size is just 2.3 people, falling to around 2.0 in Germany, Denmark and Sweden and about 1.9 in Finland and Lithuania. (European Commission⁠)

Meanwhile EU households already spend a substantial share of disposable income on housing.

Eurostat reported average housing costs equivalent to 19.7% of disposable income in 2023, with far higher pressures for many low-income households and residents of expensive cities. (European Commission⁠)

When one salary carries those costs instead of two, affordability changes radically.

THE STRANGE CASE OF THE EMPTY BEDROOM

Modern economies increasingly confront a paradox.

Housing can simultaneously be scarce and underused.

One older person may occupy a three-bedroom property after children leave and a spouse dies.

A younger single person may occupy a one-bedroom apartment.

Another divorced parent occupies another dwelling.

Children may alternate between two homes.

None of these arrangements is morally or socially wrong.

But economically they increase the amount of housing required per person.

Divorce, ageing, delayed marriage, lower fertility and longer life expectancy all interact with the housing market.

Demography does not merely determine how many people exist.

It determines how those people are distributed across buildings.

And buildings are expensive.

THEN THERE IS ENERGY

The same principle applies to energy consumption.

Heating one home for two people is generally more efficient per person than heating two separate homes.

A refrigerator does not use half the electricity because only one person opens it.

A boiler does not necessarily consume half as much because one person is taking showers instead of two.

A living room must still be heated.

Lights still illuminate common areas.

Routers remain switched on.

Appliances remain plugged in.

Again, household economies of scale matter.

OECD analysis explicitly notes that housing space and electricity needs do not rise proportionally with each additional household member. (OECD ONE⁠)

This introduces an environmental dimension that deserves much greater attention.

We often discuss carbon emissions through cars, factories, aviation and electricity generation.

But household fragmentation itself can reduce the efficiency with which housing and energy infrastructure are used.

One person.

One apartment.

One heating system.

Repeat millions of times.

THE ECONOMICS OF THE DINNER TABLE

Even food behaves differently.

Cooking for one can be less economically efficient than cooking for several people.

Packaging sizes may not shrink proportionally.

Bulk purchases favour larger households.

Food waste can rise when perishables are sold in quantities larger than one person can conveniently consume.

Delivery charges are spread over fewer meals.

Restaurant dining eliminates household food preparation entirely but can cost substantially more.

None of this means single people necessarily spend more on food — behaviour varies enormously.

But again the fundamental economic principle is identical:

sharing creates efficiencies that disappear when household consumption becomes atomised.

For generations, the family was not merely a social institution.

It was an economic cooperative.

THE FAMILY WAS AN INVISIBLE WELFARE STATE

This may be the most uncomfortable part of the discussion.

Before governments became large welfare providers, families performed an enormous amount of unpaid economic work.

Children were cared for.

Elderly relatives were supported.

Meals were prepared.

Illness was managed.

Emotional crises were absorbed.

Transportation was shared.

Housing was shared.

Money was lent informally.

Unemployment was cushioned.

Grandparents helped parents.

Parents helped children.

Partners cared for each other.

None of this appeared in GDP.

But it had enormous economic value.

We can think of the family as an enormous informal insurance system.

When families become smaller, geographically dispersed or absent, many of those functions do not disappear.

They migrate.

To markets.

To hospitals.

To professional carers.

To childcare providers.

To pension systems.

To local government.

To national welfare systems.

The service still has to be provided.

Someone simply begins charging for it.

WHEN LOVE DISAPPEARS FROM THE BALANCE SHEET, LABOUR APPEARS

Consider caring for an elderly parent.

A daughter may spend ten hours each week helping with shopping, meals, medication, transportation and household tasks.

Economically, those hours have value.

But national accounts largely do not record the activity as market production.

Now imagine that daughter lives 500 miles away.

The parent still needs those ten hours.

A professional caregiver must provide them.

Suddenly the same human need becomes measurable GDP.

There is an extraordinary paradox here.

A society can become statistically richer while becoming socially poorer.

When unpaid family care is replaced by commercial care, GDP can rise.

But the underlying reason may be the disappearance of a relationship that previously provided the service for free.

GDP cannot distinguish between those worlds particularly well.

AGEING MAKES THIS EXPLOSIVE

Now add population ageing.

Across OECD countries, the proportion of very old people is expected to increase dramatically.

The OECD estimates that close to one in four older people already have long-term-care needs, and demand for long-term care is projected to increase by around 30% by 2050. (OECD⁠)

The people requiring long-term care are disproportionately likely to be over 80, have lower incomes and live in single-person households. (OECD⁠)

At the same time, OECD analysis warns that the supply of informal carers is likely to weaken because families are becoming smaller, relatives live further apart and labour-force participation has changed. (OECD⁠)

This creates a fiscal equation that governments have barely begun to confront:

more elderly people + more people living alone + fewer family caregivers = much more paid care.

And paid care is expensive.

HOW EXPENSIVE?

Extremely.

The OECD’s 2025 Health at a Glance estimates that, across 22 countries and subnational areas examined, the cost of home care for an older person with severe needs would average around 292% of the median income of older people without sufficient public support.

Institutional care averaged around 211%. (OECD⁠)

In earlier OECD analysis covering a broader range of countries, formal long-term-care costs for people with severe needs could reach nearly seven times an older person’s median disposable income, depending on the country. (OECD⁠)

That is why public systems intervene.

But when families cannot provide informal care, governments increasingly become the payer of last resort.

The demographic economics of loneliness eventually becomes fiscal economics.

THE LONELY PATIENT

Then there is healthcare itself.

Loneliness is no longer treated seriously by major health organisations as merely an unpleasant emotion.

In 2025, the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection estimated that approximately one in six people worldwide experiences loneliness.

WHO linked loneliness to roughly 871,000 deaths annually — around 100 every hour. (World Health Organization⁠)

Social disconnection is associated with increased risks of cardiovascular disease, stroke, depression, anxiety, cognitive decline and premature death. (World Health Organization⁠)

Those health outcomes carry economic consequences.

Doctors.

Medication.

Hospital admissions.

Long-term care.

Lost employment.

Lower productivity.

Disability.

Public expenditure.

The emotion eventually enters the national accounts.

BILLIONS OF DOLLARS FOR SOMETHING WE CANNOT SEE

The WHO Commission compiled estimates from different studies — which it cautions are not directly comparable because methodologies differ — illustrating just how large the economic costs can become.

Among the examples:

Social isolation among older Americans has been associated with approximately $6.7 billion in additional annual Medicare spending.

Loneliness has been estimated to cost U.S. employers around $154 billion annually.

The estimated wider cost to the American economy in one cited analysis reached $406 billion annually.

A Spanish study estimated annual costs of around €14 billion when health, productivity and well-being effects were considered.

A UK estimate placed the cost to employers at roughly £2.5 billion per year. (Iris⁠)

These figures should not be casually added together.

They use different definitions and methodologies.

But collectively they destroy one comforting illusion:

Loneliness is economically free.

It is not.

THE COMPANY PAYS TOO

A lonely employee does not leave loneliness at the office entrance.

WHO reports that loneliness can affect an individual’s ability to find or maintain employment and may reduce earnings over time.

Social connection, by contrast, is associated with stronger educational outcomes, resilience and economic performance. (World Health Organization⁠)

There are obvious mechanisms.

Absenteeism.

Lower concentration.

Depression.

Burnout.

Reduced engagement.

Job turnover.

Poorer collaboration.

The extraordinary irony is that companies spend billions designing collaboration software while sometimes building working environments in which employees hardly know each other.

We became technologically connected and socially disconnected at extraordinary speed.

THE HOME OFFICE PARADOX

Remote work demonstrates the complexity perfectly.

For millions of people it has been liberating.

No commute.

More flexibility.

More time with family.

Greater geographic choice.

Better integration of work and personal life.

But consider the person who lives alone.

The office once supplied something employers rarely placed on the payslip:

human contact.

Coffee.

Conversation.

Lunch.

A joke.

A disagreement.

A birthday.

Someone noticing that you seemed unwell.

Remote work can remove those interactions.

Again, this does not make remote work bad.

It means economists should stop treating human interaction as though it were economically irrelevant.

Social infrastructure is infrastructure too.

THE CITY OF ONE MILLION PRIVATE WORLDS

Walk through a modern wealthy city at night.

Thousands of illuminated windows.

Inside each one:

one television,

one heating system,

one broadband connection,

one refrigerator,

one subscription ecosystem,

one person.

From the outside, the city looks crowded.

From the inside, millions of people may live remarkably separate lives.

We have built extraordinarily efficient telecommunications networks while potentially creating increasingly inefficient human networks.

That contradiction may define the modern metropolis.

WOMEN, LONGEVITY AND THE ECONOMICS OF BEING LEFT ALONE

There is also a gender dimension.

Women generally live longer than men.

They are therefore disproportionately likely to spend later years living alone after the death of a partner.

They also historically provided a substantial share of unpaid caregiving within families.

As societies age, this creates a double vulnerability.

Some women spend decades supplying unpaid care.

Then they may reach old age themselves with lower lifetime earnings, smaller pension entitlements in some systems and nobody at home to care for them.

Longevity is one of humanity’s greatest achievements.

But longevity without social infrastructure creates new economic obligations.

THE PENSION SYSTEM WAS BUILT FOR A DIFFERENT FAMILY

Much of the twentieth-century welfare state evolved around assumptions that are becoming less reliable.

Marriage.

Children.

Multiple generations.

Stable employment.

Informal family care.

Relatively predictable retirement periods.

Now combine:

lower fertility,

later marriage,

more divorce,

smaller families,

greater geographic mobility,

more one-person households,

longer life expectancy.

The mathematics changes.

Pension systems must support people for longer.

Health systems treat older populations.

Care systems replace shrinking informal networks.

Housing must accommodate more households.

And fewer children eventually become fewer workers financing those systems.

The loneliness economy is therefore inseparable from the fertility crisis.

FEWER CHILDREN MEANS FEWER FUTURE CAREGIVERS

When economists discuss falling fertility, they usually talk about worker shortages and pension sustainability.

There is another issue.

Children are not merely future taxpayers.

Historically they have also been part of the care infrastructure of old age.

This should never become an argument that children exist to care for parents.

But economically the relationship matters.

One elderly couple with four adult children potentially has a larger informal support network than an elderly person with no children or one child living abroad.

As fertility falls for multiple generations, the number of possible informal carers per older person declines.

The state does not automatically replace a son, daughter, sibling, spouse or neighbour.

It must hire somebody.

THE ECONOMICS OF ONE EMERGENCY

There is another form of capital that economists rarely measure:

someone you can call.

A flat tyre.

A fever.

A broken hip.

A lost job.

A child who must be collected.

A parent who needs help.

A financial emergency.

A terrible day.

For people embedded in strong networks, many small shocks are absorbed privately.

A friend drives you.

A relative lends money.

A partner stays home.

A neighbour checks in.

For somebody without that network, the same event may require:

a taxi,

a professional caregiver,

a hotel,

a delivery service,

paid childcare,

emergency credit,

or government assistance.

Social capital has a shadow price.

We notice it only when it disappears.

PERHAPS POVERTY IS NOT ONLY ABOUT MONEY

Economics usually defines poverty through income and assets.

That is necessary.

But imagine two pensioners receiving exactly the same monthly income.

One has children nearby, neighbours who visit, friends, a spouse and a community organisation.

The other has nobody.

Their bank accounts may look identical.

Their economic security is not.

One possesses something extraordinarily valuable:

a network of people capable of converting affection into practical assistance.

The other must purchase that assistance from the market.

Perhaps social capital should be considered part of household resilience.

Not because friendship should be priced.

But because the absence of friendship already is.

THE MOST EXPENSIVE PERSON IN SOCIETY MAY BE THE PERSON NOBODY SEES

Consider an older person living alone.

No relative notices that medication is being taken incorrectly.

No partner notices cognitive decline.

No one sees the refrigerator becoming empty.

No one notices the fall immediately.

No one helps with a medical appointment.

Problems that might have been addressed early become emergencies.

An ambulance arrives.

Hospitalisation follows.

Discharge becomes difficult because the home environment is unsafe.

Professional care begins.

The public sector pays.

The tragedy is human first.

But eventually it becomes financial.

WE BUILT A MARKET FOR EVERYTHING WE STOPPED DOING FOR EACH OTHER

Look at some of the fastest-growing services in modern economies.

Food delivery.

Childcare.

Elder care.

Pet care.

Cleaning.

Transportation.

Home assistance.

Therapy.

Digital companionship.

Meal preparation.

Personal shopping.

These services provide enormous value and often improve lives.

But some also monetise activities once embedded within households and communities.

Modern capitalism is remarkably good at creating markets when informal systems disappear.

That is neither automatically good nor bad.

It is simply economically significant.

Every social function that leaves the household becomes a potential commercial industry.

GDP MAY EVEN BENEFIT FROM LONELINESS

Here lies one of the strangest paradoxes in economics.

Imagine two elderly neighbours.

Every day they cook together.

Check on each other.

Share groceries.

Drive each other to appointments.

Much of that activity contributes almost nothing directly to measured GDP.

Now suppose they stop speaking.

Each orders meals separately.

Each pays for transportation.

Each hires occasional home assistance.

Each buys more individual services.

Measured economic activity increases.

Human welfare may decline.

This is an extreme simplification.

But it reveals a fundamental weakness in GDP.

GDP measures transactions.

It does not measure whether transactions replaced relationships.

A SOCIETY CAN BECOME MORE EXPENSIVE WITHOUT BECOMING BETTER

This may be the central macroeconomic insight.

A country can require:

more homes,

more energy,

more professional care,

more healthcare spending,

more childcare,

more transport,

more welfare services,

more commercial support,

simply because fewer resources are shared informally.

GDP rises because economic activity rises.

But resources per person are being used less efficiently.

That means:

economic growth and social efficiency are not necessarily the same thing.

Sometimes additional GDP represents progress.

Sometimes it represents the market replacing something society lost.

THE LONELINESS MULTIPLIER

We can therefore introduce another concept:

THE LONELINESS MULTIPLIER

The additional amount of market and public expenditure required when household and social functions that were previously shared must be provided individually.

It can appear through:

housing,

energy,

transport,

healthcare,

long-term care,

mental health,

food,

childcare,

domestic services,

welfare,

and lost productivity.

The loneliness multiplier does not imply that people should be forced into families or relationships.

It simply recognises something basic:

fragmentation has a cost.

THEN THERE IS THE COST THAT CANNOT BE MEASURED

Economists are comfortable when something has a price.

Hospital treatment has a price.

Care workers have wages.

Housing has rent.

Electricity has tariffs.

Lost productivity can be estimated.

But there are things for which national accounts have no adequate column.

The dinner nobody shares.

The birthday nobody remembers.

The elderly person who waits all week for a five-minute conversation with a cashier.

The young professional surrounded by thousands of social-media connections who has nobody to call at midnight.

The person who dies and is not discovered immediately.

Those events do not need economic valuation to matter.

But the fact that they are difficult to price should not fool us into believing they have no economic consequences.

ONE IN SIX

The WHO’s estimate that roughly one in six people worldwide experiences loneliness should be read slowly. (World Health Organization⁠)

Not one in six elderly people.

One in six people.

And among adolescents and young adults, rates are particularly high.

This destroys another stereotype.

Loneliness is not simply an old person sitting beside a window.

It can be a 19-year-old with 3,000 followers.

A 31-year-old working remotely.

A 45-year-old after divorce.

A migrant living thousands of kilometres from family.

A widow at 78.

A CEO surrounded by employees.

A student in a new city.

Loneliness is democratic.

Its consequences are not.

People with money can purchase substitutes.

Those without money often cannot.

THE POOR PAY MORE FOR LONELINESS TOO

A wealthy person living alone can purchase:

larger housing,

private transport,

restaurants,

cleaning,

therapy,

care,

travel,

social memberships,

concierge services.

A low-income person living alone faces the same absence of household economies of scale without the resources to compensate.

That person still needs a refrigerator.

Still needs heating.

Still needs rent.

Still needs broadband.

Still faces emergencies.

But every fixed cost consumes a larger proportion of income.

Loneliness therefore intersects with inequality.

The economic penalty of living alone is not evenly distributed.

THE POLICY RESPONSE CANNOT BE “GET MARRIED”

Governments cannot solve this through nostalgia.

Societies have changed.

People have gained enormous freedoms.

Women have economic independence.

Divorce is possible.

People move internationally.

Marriage occurs later.

Individuals can leave abusive relationships.

People can choose lifestyles that previous generations could not.

These are achievements.

The objective cannot be to reverse modernity.

The challenge is to redesign institutions for the society we actually have.

That means treating social connection as infrastructure.

SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE

We understand physical infrastructure.

Roads.

Railways.

Airports.

Electric grids.

Telecommunications.

But societies also depend on places that generate repeated human interaction.

Libraries.

Parks.

Community centres.

Public squares.

Sports clubs.

Markets.

Cafés.

Schools.

Walkable neighbourhoods.

Public transport.

Volunteer organisations.

The WHO’s 2025 recommendations explicitly point toward strengthening community and social infrastructure as part of the response to loneliness and isolation. (World Health Organization⁠)

Perhaps governments should evaluate these investments not simply as amenities.

Maybe they are preventive healthcare.

Maybe they are productivity infrastructure.

Maybe they are long-term-care policy.

Maybe they are economic policy.

THE CHEAPEST CARE WORKER MAY BE A GOOD NEIGHBOUR

That sentence sounds almost absurd.

It is not.

A neighbour who notices an elderly person has not opened the curtains for two days may prevent a tragedy.

A friend who encourages someone to visit a doctor may accelerate diagnosis.

A community group may keep somebody active.

A relative may reduce the number of professional care hours required.

None of this eliminates the need for formal healthcare or care systems.

But social connection can complement them.

The cheapest intervention can sometimes be human attention.

And human attention is increasingly scarce.

WE HAVE OPTIMISED EVERYTHING EXCEPT BELONGING

Modern economies have become extraordinarily good at optimisation.

We optimise logistics.

Inventories.

Taxes.

Portfolios.

Delivery routes.

Advertising.

Algorithms.

Labour schedules.

Cloud capacity.

Transportation.

But perhaps we built environments that optimised individuals while neglecting relationships.

One-person apartments.

One-person cars.

One-person meals.

Remote workstations.

Home delivery.

Streaming.

Online shopping.

Digital banking.

Automated customer service.

Almost everything can now be accomplished without speaking to another human being.

It is technologically magnificent.

And socially unprecedented.

CONVENIENCE CAN HAVE AN EXTERNALITY

Economists use the word externality when an economic activity creates costs or benefits that are not fully reflected in its market price.

Perhaps hyper-individualisation creates a social externality.

Each decision is rational:

Live alone.

Work from home.

Order food.

Shop online.

Stream entertainment.

Bank digitally.

Exercise at home.

Communicate through apps.

No single decision creates loneliness.

Yet millions of individually rational choices can collectively create a world with fewer accidental human encounters.

The café conversation.

The colleague.

The shopkeeper.

The neighbour.

The stranger on the train.

The social fabric is partly composed of interactions nobody schedules.

Efficiency can eliminate them.

THE FUTURE ECONOMY MAY HAVE TO PRICE CONNECTION

Insurance companies already price risk.

Employers measure engagement.

Health systems increasingly recognise social determinants of health.

Governments measure well-being.

The WHO now treats social connection as a global public-health priority. (World Health Organization⁠)

The next step may be economic.

We need better measures of:

the cost of household fragmentation,

the value of informal care,

the fiscal impact of living alone in old age,

the productivity effects of social isolation,

the housing impact of declining household size,

and the economic return on social infrastructure.

What gets measured eventually gets noticed.

A DIFFERENT DEFINITION OF WEALTH

Perhaps we also need a broader definition of personal wealth.

Financial wealth matters.

A home matters.

Savings matter.

A pension matters.

But imagine reaching 80 with:

a paid-off house,

a large investment portfolio,

excellent insurance,

and nobody you want to call.

Are you wealthy?

Economics cannot answer that question.

It was never designed to.

But public policy eventually encounters the consequences.

Because money can purchase assistance.

It cannot always purchase belonging.

THE FINAL PARADOX

We are living through an extraordinary era.

Our homes are larger.

Our technology is better.

Our communications are instantaneous.

Our supermarkets overflow.

Our entertainment is unlimited.

Our life expectancy has increased.

Our individual freedoms have expanded.

We can speak to almost anyone on Earth in seconds.

And yet the World Health Organization says roughly one person in six feels lonely. (World Health Organization⁠)

There is something deeply uncomfortable about that combination.

Perhaps progress has solved some forms of scarcity while creating another.

We have more communication.

Less connection.

More housing space.

Smaller households.

More services.

Less informal care.

More individual freedom.

More individual cost.

CONCLUSION: THE BILL FOR LIVING APART

Loneliness begins as silence.

Economics sees it later.

It sees another apartment that must be built.

Another heating system running.

Another rent paid from one salary.

Another elderly person requiring professional care.

Another hospital admission.

Another day absent from work.

Another public service replacing something a family or community once provided informally.

Another person paying alone for what two people once shared.

The financial system does not invoice us for loneliness directly.

The invoice is fragmented.

It arrives as:

housing costs,

energy bills,

healthcare expenditure,

long-term care,

lower productivity,

pension pressure,

and public spending.

Perhaps that is why we have failed to see it.

There is no single line in a national budget called:

The Cost of Being Alone.

But the cost is there.

And it is growing.

We should be careful not to romanticise the past.

Families could be oppressive.

Communities could exclude.

Independence is valuable.

Privacy is valuable.

Freedom is valuable.

But human beings also created families, neighbourhoods, friendships and communities for reasons older than economics.

They made life emotionally richer.

They also made life economically possible.

They distributed risk.

Shared fixed costs.

Provided unpaid care.

Protected children.

Supported the elderly.

Helped during unemployment.

Absorbed emergencies.

They were, in ways national accounts never adequately measured, part of our economic infrastructure.

And perhaps the greatest mistake of modern economics was assuming that because love, friendship and family had no market price, they had no economic value.

They do.

We are beginning to discover that value now.

Not because we finally learned how to price human connection.

But because we are beginning to pay for its absence.

The true economic cost of loneliness is not what companionship costs.

It is what society must spend when nobody is there.

SOURCES & DATA REFERENCES

World Health Organization — Commission on Social Connection, 2025
From Loneliness to Social Connection: Charting a Path to Healthier Societies. Global prevalence, health outcomes, mortality estimates and economic consequences of loneliness and social isolation. (World Health Organization⁠)

World Health Organization — Social Connection and Health, June 2025
WHO estimates that approximately one in six people globally experience loneliness and reports around 871,000 associated deaths annually. (World Health Organization⁠)

WHO Commission on Social Connection — Economic Cost Evidence
Examples covering Medicare expenditure, U.S. employers, the broader U.S. economy, Spain, Britain and Australia. WHO notes that estimates are based on different methodologies and should not be treated as directly comparable. (Iris⁠)

Eurostat — Key Figures on European Living Conditions 2025
202 million EU households in 2024; average household size 2.3; 35.4% single-adult households without dependent children. (European Commission⁠)

Eurostat — Housing in Europe 2025
Household-size variation across EU member states and broader European housing indicators. (European Commission⁠)

Eurostat — Housing in Europe 2024
Housing costs, prices, rents and housing affordability across the European Union. (European Commission⁠)

U.S. Census Bureau — Families and Living Arrangements 2024
Approximately 38.5 million one-person households, representing 29% of U.S. households, compared with 19% in 1974. (Census.gov⁠)

OECD — Household Distributional Accounts Methodology
Household economies of scale and the OECD-modified equivalence scale used to account for shared housing and consumption costs. (OECD⁠)

OECD — Is Care Affordable for Older People?
Long-term-care needs, ageing, single-person households, informal caregiving and affordability of formal care. (OECD⁠)

OECD — Health at a Glance 2025
Long-term-care spending and estimated costs of home and institutional care relative to older people’s income. (OECD⁠)

Roberto Balbino — CEO, Fintech SCB
Independent analyst of finance, economics, geopolitics and global markets.