Perspective: It’s time to face up to our social poverty problem

Over the past half-century, virtually all aspects of social life have deteriorated in America. We spend less time with fewer friends , form fewer families and have turned away from organized civic life and religious institutions. We trust less than we used to, and we provide each other less social support.

Rather than owning up to our glaring social poverty problem, policymakers have focused instead on relieving economic poverty. Cities across the country are engaged in pilots to provide a guaranteed basic income to residents. At the national level, Democrats and some Republicans in Congress have called for providing thousands of dollars more to low-income families through expansions of the Child Tax Credit. However, these efforts are coming in the midst of decades-long declines in economic poverty.

Why are policymakers focused on solving the problem that’s already getting better, rather than the one that’s getting worse?

Part of the reason is that the government collects troves of information on the incomes and employment of individuals, families, groups and regions — and can therefore say a lot about changes in income, inequality and material living standards. In contrast, we lack good data on individual social wellbeing, particularly regarding social capital — the strength and number of relationships with people and institutions that provide us value. It’s hard to solve a problem you can’t measure.

That’s not to say we know nothing about certain aspects of our worsening social poverty problem. Robert Putnam documented the decline of clubs and civic institutions, the Joint Economic Committee showed how social capital varied across states, Charles Murray contrasted the social outcomes of working- and upper-middle-class Americans, and Raj Chetty’s team at Opportunity Insights used Facebook data to measure the prevalence of friendships across socioeconomic lines. But without knowing who exactly suffers from social poverty, in what ways, and how this relates to material poverty, it is hard to design policy solutions targeted at the problem.

To help answer these questions, we assembled new data on Americans’ social wellbeing in combination with comprehensive data on economic wellbeing. Our social wellbeing measure is based on a comprehensive set of attributes: social connectedness, community engagement, family strength, religious involvement, social trust and work.

We found that the demographic groups that tend to face the most economic disadvantages also face the most social disadvantages. For example, on average, social wellbeing is higher for those in middle age than for the oldest and youngest Americans, higher for college graduates than those without a high school diploma and higher among white individuals than Black and Hispanic Americans. Social disadvantage also compounds across these lines — Black individuals without a high school diploma have the lowest levels of social capital, while white individuals with a college degree score the highest.

Our findings also shed new light on the relationship between income and social wellbeing. Americans with the lowest levels of income — those experiencing material poverty — also tend to be the most socially poor. As income increases, so too does social wellbeing, but only to a certain point. After about $85,000 of household income, the relationship between social wellbeing and additional income virtually disappears. In other words, the social wellbeing gap between poor and middle-income Americans is much larger than that between middle- and high-income Americans. The same pattern holds regardless of race and ethnicity, though at any given level of income, Black and Hispanic individuals have a lower level of social capital on average than white individuals.

Policymakers serious about addressing our social poverty problem will need to focus on some of the same populations that suffer from economic poverty and have undoubtedly been held back by some of the same historical disadvantages. But simply transferring more money is not the solution. While social wellbeing increases with earned income, we find that it decreases with income from government sources. Individuals who are dependent on the government for at least half of their income are the most likely to suffer from social poverty.

Tackling social poverty will require that we find ways to build and strengthen relationships — within families, communities and civic institutions.

Our social poverty problem is multifaceted and so requires a variety of solutions. Digging our way out will be difficult, certainly much harder than writing a check. Only by addressing the erosion of strong social ties can we help the disadvantaged flourish, rather than simply providing them an adequate standard of living.

Scott Winship is a senior fellow and the director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the American Enterprise Institute. Kevin Corinth is a senior fellow and deputy director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility. Thomas O’Rourke is a data analyst in the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility.