Thanks very much for writing this up! I thought it was very interesting, and appreciate all the work you did.
Loneliness seems to be experienced more often in later age, particularly after 65
This seems like a pretty common view, and I’ve come across other pieces of evidence about the adverse impacts of retirement on a lot of people. I wonder if a positive step would be to raise the retirement age? Clearly this is a massive policy change, so would do poorly on tractability, except that it’s one that a lot of people support for other reasons (e.g. improving dependency ratios, GDP growth).
The other thing that seems like it could help here is encouraging and removing barriers to people having more children. Anecdotally, children and grandchildren seem to form an increasing fraction of people’s social network as they age because they attrition much slower than friends or colleagues (assuming you’re not a terrible parent); I think a lot of young people underestimate how big of a difference 3 children + 9 grandchildren would make vs 1 child and 1 grandchild. Like the above, it’s a massive policy issue, but one where there are many other reasons to support it, which could improve the marginal tractability.
I wonder if a positive step would be to raise the retirement age?
This sounds plausible. I wonder if people’s attitudes towards retirement is a huge affective forecasting error where they think it’ll be sublime, but it ends up isolating and boring (like school breaks were for me as a kid).
Anecdotally, children and grandchildren seem to form an increasing fraction of people’s social network as they age because they attrition much slower than friends or colleagues (assuming you’re not a terrible parent)
But I wonder if that attrition isn’t related to parenthood. I haven’t had kids yet but my friends seem to drop off the map socially as they become parents. It’s sort of concerning. Having children also seems pretty isolating to many living in environments that cater to nuclear families.
Surely there’s evidence for this question as it pertains to loneliness. I know that having grandchildren is clearly good for subjective wellbeing, but the evidence for the effects of parenthood, in general, are much more mixed/ambiguous.
If raising the retirement age is not feasible, another option might be to create more and better opportunities for retired people to engage with and contribute to society in part-time paid or volunteer work?
My impression is that here in Germany, it seems like the potential of retired people might still be underused (based on very anecdotal evidence, I didn’t research this).
In Sweden, at least among the middle classes, it’s not unusual to hire seniors for odd jobs (it’s cheaper, you pay less taxes), e.g. via services like this one. It’s kind of a win-win situation: one party gets to hire someone for pretty cheap to get something done (e.g. some garden work or handiwork—I’m guessing quite often things they wouldn’t have paid anyone to do otherwise), and the other gets some extra money, human interactions and the satisfaction of non-backbreaking manual labour.
Thanks very much for writing this up! I thought it was very interesting, and appreciate all the work you did.
This seems like a pretty common view, and I’ve come across other pieces of evidence about the adverse impacts of retirement on a lot of people. I wonder if a positive step would be to raise the retirement age? Clearly this is a massive policy change, so would do poorly on tractability, except that it’s one that a lot of people support for other reasons (e.g. improving dependency ratios, GDP growth).
The other thing that seems like it could help here is encouraging and removing barriers to people having more children. Anecdotally, children and grandchildren seem to form an increasing fraction of people’s social network as they age because they attrition much slower than friends or colleagues (assuming you’re not a terrible parent); I think a lot of young people underestimate how big of a difference 3 children + 9 grandchildren would make vs 1 child and 1 grandchild. Like the above, it’s a massive policy issue, but one where there are many other reasons to support it, which could improve the marginal tractability.
This sounds plausible. I wonder if people’s attitudes towards retirement is a huge affective forecasting error where they think it’ll be sublime, but it ends up isolating and boring (like school breaks were for me as a kid).
But I wonder if that attrition isn’t related to parenthood. I haven’t had kids yet but my friends seem to drop off the map socially as they become parents. It’s sort of concerning. Having children also seems pretty isolating to many living in environments that cater to nuclear families.
Surely there’s evidence for this question as it pertains to loneliness. I know that having grandchildren is clearly good for subjective wellbeing, but the evidence for the effects of parenthood, in general, are much more mixed/ambiguous.
If raising the retirement age is not feasible, another option might be to create more and better opportunities for retired people to engage with and contribute to society in part-time paid or volunteer work?
My impression is that here in Germany, it seems like the potential of retired people might still be underused (based on very anecdotal evidence, I didn’t research this).
In Sweden, at least among the middle classes, it’s not unusual to hire seniors for odd jobs (it’s cheaper, you pay less taxes), e.g. via services like this one. It’s kind of a win-win situation: one party gets to hire someone for pretty cheap to get something done (e.g. some garden work or handiwork—I’m guessing quite often things they wouldn’t have paid anyone to do otherwise), and the other gets some extra money, human interactions and the satisfaction of non-backbreaking manual labour.