Loneliness and social isolation is a growing epidemic of sorts in the 21^st century world, with 1 in 3 American adults experiencing it, and over 1 million British workers experience the same. Loneliness in fact has its fair share of economic implications, with a large opportunity cost being present between “productive” use (debatable definition, but mostly capital and economic value generating expenditure) and the cost of caretaking, as depression, dementia and other psychological issues arising out of loneliness has resulted in a whopping expenditure of 220 million pounds. Even more grave is the cost to society arising out of lower worker productivity, as this has cost over 650 million pounds to firms in lost productivity, and 1.62 billion pounds in voluntary staff turnover, a total of 2.5 billion pounds per year as economic cost of loneliness! Yet there is a reason why loneliness, albeit widely recognized as something to be eliminated, is not looked at from an economic perspective. This is because the social and psychological upliftment in the form of better mental and spiritual satisfaction and thus well-being is far greater than economic benefits. This is no less capital generating, but just another and oft overlooked kind of capital is generated; social capital.

Now, social capital is almost synonymous with harmony, allowing people in a society to function together, thus elevating collective well-being, at least that’s the gist of it. The same can be said of protests. The BLM protests and the current protests in my city Kolkata against the RG Kar rape and murder case have strong economic implications in the form of disastrous decrease and disturbance in economic activity. In fact, there have been counter protests by hawkers whose businesses have been hurt. However, loneliness is desired to be eliminated while protests continue without regards or even despite economic considerations. And why? Social capital, and its three major purposes: bonding (unity through shared interest, such as of the medical community or ethnic minorities with the previous examples of protests), bridging (binding of different communities) and linking (unity of socio-economic groups, enabling upward mobility over the long term), all serving to foster to harmony.

We have here, thus a trade-off, an opportunity cost between bad economic and mostly positive societal effects. Why do we, then prioritize the latter? Its because of our so-called hierarchy of needs, as we prioritize societal dignity and spiritual satisfaction the most, right after the basic need for food, shelter and clothing. This is because of the potentially high amount of social capital generated to fulfil that need, that we forget about something seemingly as insignificant as economic capital.

It is important, thus, to shed light on this new form of capital, to a kind of social economics, which is just so, so important. I mean to talk about more than just society with a fancy tagline of “social economics”, but instead, think of social costs and benefits from a quantitative standpoint. Just treating social capital as money may have the effect of making it more appealing to the level headed and number obsessed among us, and by giving it a quantitative nature, social capital is made more tangible, and maybe even attaching more legitimacy to an important issue. And why not? One of the most important objectives of economics which is to maximize efficiency in way that scarce resources are used for best possible outcomes, of which well-being, and equity are integral.