Loneliness has been linked to health outcomes comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It is associated with significantly elevated risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression, and all-cause mortality. Despite this, it receives a fraction of the public health attention and funding directed at comparable risk factors. This proposal would quantify the economic burden of chronic loneliness - healthcare utilization, productivity loss, early mortality costs - across OECD member states, drawing on existing longitudinal datasets where available and identifying gaps requiring primary data collection. The goal is not merely to describe the problem but to produce the kind of cost-benefit analysis that makes the case for systemic, policy-level intervention rather than individual behavioral nudges.
It's a deliberate choice. The evidence on loneliness as a health risk has existed for decades without producing systemic intervention. The cost-benefit framing is an attempt to speak a language that policy makers actually respond to.
The "equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes" figure comes from Holt-Lunstad's meta-analysis and it gets cited everywhere. What gets cited less is that the effect sizes vary enormously by population and measurement approach. A proper cost analysis would need to grapple with that heterogeneity.
The heterogeneity point is important. Loneliness in elderly populations, in young adults post-pandemic, and in structurally isolated communities (rural, migrant) probably have different mechanisms and different cost profiles. A single number obscures that.
The framing as an economic cost rather than a human one is interesting. I understand why, it's the language that produces policy, but it feels uncomfortable to price human connection.