Understanding America’s Fragility Problem

A society is only as strong as its social connectedness, something COVID-19 vividly revealed.

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While COVID-19 was devastating communities across the United States, a different destructive uptick in deaths went unnoticed. A new study from the National Institutes of Health shows that more adults between the ages of 18 and 65 perished from alcohol-related causes in 2020 than from COVID-19. This parallels earlier data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that showed a large increase in the number of drug overdose deaths in the 12 months leading up to May 2020; the total was the highest ever recorded. In other words, it appears that the isolation caused by extended lockdowns led to an approximately 25 percent jump in alcohol-related deaths and a 38 percent jump in drug-related deaths. 

These revelations follow a series of recent studies that show how communities and countries with higher levels of social trust, social capital, and social and emotional support fared better during the pandemic than those that did not. These social dynamics help explain why the United States did much worse than might be expected given its relatively strong pandemic preparedness. Our attempts to prepare for the next pandemic, including those plans emanating from the White House, are incomplete without a strategy to address America’s social fragility. A society is only as strong as its social connectedness, something COVID-19 vividly revealed. Places with a weak social fabric and low levels of interpersonal trust among citizens were not able to act collectively when necessary. Further, they could not provide the support people needed to withstand the negative side effects from pandemic measures such as lockdowns.

Such grim statistics remind us that the United States is unique in its mixture of material wealth and social decay. While many countries in Europe and Asia have income levels similar to us, they have far less social breakdown. Why? The relationships that bind us to one another are weaker in America than elsewhere—and weakening, even disintegrating. 

Data support the uniqueness of our social situation. Whereas almost nine of every 10 children under 5 live with two parents (some of these cohabitating) in the European Union, only seven in 10 in our country do. The gap means that, accounting for their percentage of the American population, 5 million more young children live with only one parent or neither parent. Whereas suicide rates are declining almost everywhere in the world, they have been climbing in the U.S. for two decades. America has a slew of social indicators—from maternal mortality to drug overdose death rates to gun violence—that are in a class by themselves, far higher than other countries, especially in the developed world. As Anne Case, who with fellow Princeton University professor Angus Deaton sounded the alarm on rising deaths of despair, asks, “Why are people killing themselves in these ways in the United States, but not in other rich countries, which have also seen globalization and automation?”

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    Ben Connelly

    Hmm. I have mixed feeling about this article. There’s some good in it, but a bit too much of the “the problem is individualism” and a bit too much of lamenting about community and place and some anti-dynamism and even anti-market sentiment.

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    Emilyasbenson

    This piece is an uncanny compilation of ideas I've been reading and discussing in a variety of contexts over the last decade. Jay Kim's "Analog Church" and Rosaria Butterfield's "The Gospel Comes With A House Key," for instance, enter this conversation from a theological angle. The closing reference to Chuck Mahron of the Strong Towns organization was particularly appropriate.

    This would be a fantastic theme for a Dispatch event/symposium in the Midwest. Invite Charles Marohn, fly in Yuval Levin, maybe connect with a few of the Front Porch Republic guys, and discuss what it takes to rebuild the civic fabric and institutions of a town or small city one neighborhood at a time. Hold it in Lansing and have the 100+ year-old City Rescue Mission talk about what they are seeing as they work to to help those falling through social cracks into addiction, unemployment, and homelessness.

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    PC Albright

    The article as a whole is interesting but where oh where were the Dispatch fact checkers on that first paragraph? If you open the JAMA article it says nothing like what the author claims. Nor does the opioid article. Putting aside the fact that what would be relevant would be the *change* in numbers of deaths due to alcohol or drug use during the pandemic, the *total* numbers from each cause are small relative to the number of COVID deaths.

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    Dan

    It's a good article and a good argument. My counter is that we should actually accelerate social dissolution, tolerate greater rates of deaths of despair and suicide, and push through the chaos to new emergent social groups. Society is changing due to our needs and how we evolve as individuals and due to the pressures of technology. Trying to bring back the Rotary Club or bowling leagues or the Protestant/Catholic clubs doesn't make sense in this brave new world. Instead, lean into the new and start embracing virtual communities and new forms of in-person networking that can be facilitated with mass transit.

    Finally--this is written from personal perspective as I am estranged from my family. I am widowed, divorced, infertile, and childless, and as such I do not fit in at all anymore with my socially-conservative relatives and family. If they had their way, I would give up all I have, move home to take care of my aging parents, and live a solemn lonely life of celibacy, as sex and intimate relationships are reserved only for fertile cisgendered couples. That is the traditional way of thinking--and that is a miserable life for me (and a lot of other people who increasingly find themselves on the outside of the circle of traditional social mores). We can't go back to traditional family values--so we turn and accelerate into the new.

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      Ben Connelly

      “My counter is that we should actually accelerate social dissolution, tolerate greater rates of deaths of despair and suicide, and push through the chaos to new emergent social groups.”

      I think you probably misspoke here. Pushing through the chaos shouldn’t mean tolerating greater numbers of suicides and ODs, but rather doing what we can to mitigate those while we endure the dissolution until we can arrive at the new emergent social groups.

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      Dave T

      You're doubtless correct that the new social groups that emerge will not be identical with the old. That's already happened to some degree and will continue to do so (as one random example that I'm thinking about because of someone I encountered yesterday, think of the vibrant and burgeoning "cosplay" community -- people who gather together around their love of dressing up like fictional characters. This is an extremely socially positive group, driven by high levels of artistry, expertise, and often even physical fitness at the top end, but by its nature welcoming and drawing in anyone who is interested, and more or less requiring in-person meetings to exist).

      But I disagree strongly that "we can't go back to traditional family values," because I think you're construing those values much too narrowly. If we actually step back historically, large family and local networks included numbers of people -- even large numbers of people -- who were single and celibate, yet were tightly integrated into community life. Think of the "Anne of Green Gables" model of community, in which single people (like the character Marilla) as well as couples were bound up together into family and local-community networks. Even in the past, there were plenty of single people, and they did not automatically find themselves living "lonely lives." Church, extended family, and extended community are frankly *designed* to integrate these people.

      That's the sort of reconstruction that the author is envisioning, I think. The idea that "intimate relationships are reserved only for fertile cisgendered couples" is a kind of accidental revisionist concept of the past that transfers current categories wholesale into contexts where they don't necessarily belong.

      (Sex, obviously, is something different. But past societies placed a much lower value on sexual activity and a much higher value on friendship)

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  10. P Satter

    Interesting article, and much sounds correct, but "Why are Americans killing themselves in these ways in the United States, but not in other rich countries..." is not completely clear to me.
    https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/suicide-rate-by-country
    It would appear that a number of countries, including in Europe, have similar rates of suicide to our own. This, in spite of the fact our easier gun ownership makes our own citizens' suicide attempts sadly much more successful than elsewhere.

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