Poor people are often forced to have roommates, live with their parents, or otherwise maintain relationships for economic reasons. I wouldn't expect poor people to necessarily be more lonely.
Ah yes, nothing like being forced to live with strangers and parents to solve loneliness. Seriously?
If you care to look, there is actually a lot of research pointing that the pandemic affected the poor's ability to voluntarily socialize compared to the wealthy. If you think about it, it's incredibly obvious.
And yet these authors didn't mention the idea once. That's unconscionable, if unsurprising.
Roommates are not necessarily strangers. If you are arguing living with parents doesn't decrease loneliness over living alone... I'm going to argue that's a non intuitive argument. That doesn't mean you are wrong necessarily but it does mean I'm probably going to question it.
As far as I can tell this hasn't really been studied, at least this paper from 2019 on loneliness says "There
is virtually no literature that looks at socioeconomic status as the independent variable."
I'll say this again - it's completely absurd to ignore the issue of class / wealth inequality when considering access to social situations that decrease loneliness.
And it's dumb beyond words to write a fucking Harvard paper on loneliness and not mention wealth inequality once.
I don't believe these statements need to be backed up by science to be self-evident, and worthy of research. That's a tautology, and a dumb one.
If you care to look, there is actually a lot of research pointing that the pandemic affected the poor's ability to voluntarily socialize compared to the wealthy. If you think about it, it's incredibly obvious.
And yet these authors didn't mention the idea once. That's unconscionable, if unsurprising.