David Weakliem, public opinion scholar extraordinaire, has had a series of blog posts looking at how, and the extent to which, deaths of despair among the white working class are preceded by lives of despair.

He has convincingly shown that there has been a divergence in happiness between white Americans with a college degree or more, and with less than a college degree (I’ll look at happiness in a followup post).

One of the pillars of a rich, meaningful life, from what I understand, is thick set of social connections with others. Weirdly (very weirdly) the General Social Survey (GSS) doesn’t have that great consistent information about people’s friendships, whether they have someone to talk to, etc. These are typically in a single wave, and many of these kinds of questions, such as organizational involvement, have stopped being asked consistently after the mid-2000s.

One consistent set of questions asks respondents how often they spent an evening: (i) with relatives (ii) with friends outside the neighborhood (iii) with someone in their neighborhood, and (iv) at a bar. Answer choices ranged from from never to nearly everyday.

Below I looked at the frequency of white folks aged 23-75 with and without a college degree. First, let’s look at the mean number of days per week these groups spend an evening in each category:

Hmm…there’s no decline among the white working class (WWC) that immediately jumps out to me. A few things I notice:

The WWC are going to bars less frequently than in the past. The decline has happened in the 2000s. Perhaps this is a consequence of declining economic fortunes?
The WWC is getting together less with neighbors. While the decline is fairly modest, from about 1.25 to .75 times per week, it’s been consistent across the time period.
People are getting together with relatives more frequently, both those with college degrees and those in the WWC.

If we’re talking about lives of despair, we probably want to focus specifically on loneliness and isolation, right? Below are the percent of folks who selected none for each category over time:

More people, with and without college degrees, are never getting together with their neighbors. This group has grown from .2 to about .35 for college educated folks, and from about .3 to .45 for the WWC.
Fewer college educated folks are never going to bars.
While there is no trend, we see that the WWC consistently has a higher percentage of folks who never meet with friends.
I see no trend, and no difference across groups, for never getting together with relatives.

Of course, loneliness might emerge from the combination of types of isolation. There may be a difference between a person who loves their family and friends but never goes to a bar from a person who is isolated from all forms of social contacts.

. Below is a set of graphs showing the percent of folks who say either none or once a year (so infrequent it’s very similar to none, in my opinion) for some number of categories:

These figures show the percent of college and WWC folks who never do some number of the four activities. So, the “0 categories” in the top left indicates folks who at least occasionally get together with friends, family, neighbors, and go to bars. The “4 categories” is the percentage of folks who never do any of these things. Of course, the y-axis matters. Its top value and range are much greater among the zero and 1 categories than the 3 or 4 categories. But I allow the y-axes to change across categories so we can see trends.

I notice a separation between college and WWC for those who “do it all.” Especially since 2000, college educated folks appear to be increasingly diversified in their social activities, doing all the social activities at least more than once a year. The fully social WWC remained pretty flat over time, and is always lower than the college educated folks.
For 2 and 3 “none” categories, we see a consistent higher WWC rate than college rate. That is, we see higher rates of WWC folks who are social in only one or two aspects, compared to college educated folks.
For completely isolated folks, or the “4 categories” panel, we see that the percent WWC folks in this category has grown by about two or so percentage points, with the growth mostly concentrated in the 2000s. The rate of total isolation among college folks has grown too…maybe…in the last few waves, but we’ll need a few more waves to make any definitive claim.
I looked a bit at modeling these groups, and there is a significant and diverging gap between college and WWC groups over time. It looks like there’s a growing probability that college educated folks are connected, relative to the WWC, and that the WWC are increasingly isolated compared to college educated folks.

There’s definitely a growing portion of the WWC that has become very socially isolated, with this isolation mostly increasing in the 2000s. Insofar as social connections provide a path to an enriching life, it seems like more WWC are potentially living a social “life of despair.” Further, a rich and diverse social life appears to be increasingly the domain of the college educated. This seems pretty perverse to me, that a good social life is potentially increasingly bundled with cultural and economic class. I’m not totally surprised given my understanding of the stratification literature and the recent trends in precarious work and job quality. This is a topic for me to revisit later.

In the next post, I’m going to look at how social connections relate to happiness, and how these vary across class lines.