UBI would also probably help. As a freelancer I've had some really slim months and depression hits hard when money is tight.
There's a very direct correlation between income security, insecurity, stress, depression, and suicidal thoughts.
[1] https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2011/02/us-vs-can...
* Global rate: 10.5 per 100,000 people * Canada rate: 10.4 per 100,000 people * US rate: 13.7 per 100,000 people
(the leader, not the car company; the brother of the crack smoking mayor, the white one)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States#/...
Solution: make this country slightly less "dog eat dog" and you'll solve a LOT of social issues almost overnight.
Another anomaly: Hispanic people have the second highest life expectancies in the United States (after Asians), significantly higher than non-Hispanic whites, despite on average having lower incomes and health insurance coeverage.
How are you supposed to study it, though? Not exactly a good situation for an exit poll.
Imaginably the government could be in a position to grant a gift, and help, to offer a moment of respite from whatever is causing the most distress -- that might help some people...
As the only candidate currently running on a UBI platform, Andrew Yang has argued that one of its benefits would be a reduction in economic anxiety, with ancillary benefits to health in the form of stress reduction and improved executive function, as well as lower rates of depression, suicide, and drug addiction.
I'm not sure that max wage algorithm creates a healthy incentive though. it would seem to encourage hiring more employees than necessary just to increase the executive's compensation. I think people can often tell when their job isn't really necessary and it probably doesn't feel very good.
I can't see a drawback, aside from someone at that ceiling simply wanting to raise their salary without raising those working for them.
If finances are a factor in suicidal ideation then it’s a secondary consideration in addition to more prominent concerns.
My most depressing times were when I was unemployed (not to be confused with "funemployed") and not making any money.
Moreover, price ceilings have a rich and long empirical and theoretical argument against their existence in the economics literature https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_ceiling
Finally, by what measure do you feel able to assert that no one is more productive than someone else based on some constant? How much more productive was the team of the Manhattan project than some other team of physicists?
Fast forward to the 1860s, and nail production is automated to the extent that wire nails can be produced by the tens of millions with almost no human intervention.
The worker who forges nails by hand and the inventor who automates their production are undoubtedly orders of magnitude apart in productivity.
Having met people causing net negative productivity, this is pretty hard to believe. Why do you expect this to be true?
Raising the floor without modifying how much or how quickly those at the top earn only makes those barely above the bottom relatively poorer.
Hmm, this seems suspiciously biased towards certain types of business (for example, tech CEOs would make way more than retail CEOs)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/opinion/suicide-young-peo...
I am being serious. Some things have to be the top causes of death for young people and the list definitionally can’t include the aspirational “old age.”
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
> The WHO statistics are based on the official reports from each respective country, therefore are no more accurate than the record-keeping in the specific country, and revisions (updates) are usually performed as well.
> In much of the world, suicide is stigmatized and condemned for religious or cultural reasons. In some countries, suicidal behaviour is a criminal offence punishable by law. Suicide is therefore often a secretive act surrounded by taboo, and may be unrecognized, misclassified or deliberately hidden in official records of death.[3]
It is very hard to compare rates of suicide across countries.
Many of the countries I think of as socialist healthcare (UK, Denmark, Canada, to name a few), they all come up below the US in suicides.
High historically high levels of income inequality have torn countries apart.
The "wealth tax" is a system that examines wealth and taxes wealth (not income). It's theorized that it's unconstitutional, and even if it isn't, the conservative US court might cause it problems anyway.
But if instead you examine wealth and tax income, maybe that gets around the issue. Higher income tax brackets for those with more wealth?
I read this as you thinking there's a problem with no more people getting rich. Can you expand on that?
For example: how many people need to get rich to balance the economic, social, and political power of the people who already are? Is this the best way to achieve that balance?
If you want to pay for these things, you need to bring your idea of who's gonna get taxed way, way down to earth.
Oooh, is the reason "because a lot of services are publicly delivered instead of privately", because I'll bet it is.
I pay $30k/year for private healthcare here in the US; a $2200/month premium and an annual out-of-pocket of $4k.
I'd happily accept a 10% tax hike to make that go away, and that doesn't even account for my kids' eventual college costs...
To get rid of these high levels of inequality we don't need to make it impossible to be rich, just make it very hard to be rich and let nature take its course.
Note that in my lifetime the top marginal tax bracket has been over 70% so it's not even that radical of a change.
You would have to strip income inequality, then reduce income mobility - but inevitably someone would become wealthy, further cementing their lead.
Could this have to do with the mounting inequality? It seems the standard indicators for the health of the economy are breaking because wealth just keeps pooling near the top. So what this study could be saying is, "make changes so that more people get the benefits of the booming economy."
[0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
I also think social media/internet is to blame for this though, because it makes the realities of economic inequality much more real than just tangentially hearing about celebrities in rags and trashtv.
This feels like the sort of thing that's really going to depend on the definition of mass shooting used. Inner city African American gang violence is the majority of "3+ killed by gun at once" incidents, and if your definition includes that then that's what you'll be measuring. And on the other hand if you use "2+ unrelated people killed or injured including shooter, not gang related" like some advocacy groups do you'll get different results, and if you use what most people would consider a mass shooting (3+ unrelated people killed in public place not including shooter excluding gang violence, or "something that shows up on national news") you'll have minimal data to go off of since those events happen <10x/yr.
Stop buying cheap, disposable stuff and buy durable things affording locals a living wage. Minimum wages are only slightly better. In my mind minimum wages are wages to minimally support a teenager or similar who has no other responsibilities. People with responsibilities need actually decent jobs.
Hollowing our decent paying blue collar jobs will drive some people to despair.
No one listened to the crazy Texan when he warned us.
Now their supposed to be happy having access to $5 T-shirts which last a week and should be mad that tariffs could push that up but could make s better paying job viable for an employer who no longer gets undersold.
Isn't that's just one half of the problem. Isn't the importing of labor the other half of the problem.
We've exported jobs and imported labor. That's a double whammy for workers and can't help but put downward pressure on wages. But it's great for the wealthy elites. Exploit cheap labor overseas and cheapen labor at home.
Can't be happy when you can't afford medicine for yourself and your kids, can't pay for food, can't pay the rent/mortgage, etc.
Money can't buy happiness, but lack of money causes a lot of unhappiness.
You don't need to look further than Maslow's hierarchy of needs to see why, when you don't have enough money to reliably fulfill some of the most fundamental needs like shelter and food, it's going to severely hinder your self actualization. Forget about moving on to the more psychological higher-level needs when you are worrying about where you are going to sleep tonight. It's easy to understand why happiness might be very hard to reach for individuals who don't have enough money to cover their basic needs
Or, money is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for happiness.
the lack of a psychological safety net is one of the most anxiety inducing things about American capitalism. we underestimate as a society how damaging it is because it's so hard to measure.
I'm not sure I agree with that. It has been known within public health for decades that poverty is an important predictor of life expectancy and quality of life.
The real problem in the US appears to be a deep cultural belief in self-sufficiency, and an accompanying unwillingness to vote for politicians who support implementation of said safety nets.
Food money is not the same as rent money and is not the same as money allotted for a fancy holiday.
House safety, food safety, personal safety are what humans worried about for thousands of years before money even existed.
New Zealand also has a terrible youth suicide rate. http://socialreport.msd.govt.nz/health/suicide.html "New Zealand’s youth (15–24 years) suicide rate was the highest among the 34 OECD countries, ahead of Finland for males and Korea for females."
It doesn’t take a genetic predisposition to get to a dark place when your life is falling apart.
For a second there I thought you we're being serious!
You can be damn sure if the cost of mobile phones suddenly doubled, a lot fewer phones would be purchased and companies would go out of business.
It doesn't. A good working environment does. £1/hr more is nothing if you're on minimum wage working for Amazon Fulfillment or Facebook Moderation, being treated like a slave.
Source: totally unscientific experience with factory work and workers.
I suspect raising that cutoff would increase suicides.
1) NO taxes till $40k-50k for a family 2) Free healthcare 3) Not so crazy tution fees
all these are doable.. just like raising minimum wage..
You're talking about quite literally like 80% of the entire tax revenue generated by the government. Income taxes we're devised because an industrial nation cannot collect property taxes on non land owning tax payers. As the cities grew, governments realized that they could only tax the wealthy and prominent land owners so much before they had to generate it in another way.
This is wrong.
$50k/yr is below median household income so we're talking about eliminating income taxes for the bottom half of taxpayers (less than that actually, but whatever). The bottom half pays roughly 3% of income taxes.
Now, that number gets somewhat bigger when you take into account payroll taxes but it's nowhere close to 80%.
Its actively harmful to pretend it is because it diverts from real research and actual solutions and
Assuming that's accurate, then shouldn't we mandate that these corporations pay their workers a livable wage? If they don't pay the workers a livable wage, guess who does? The taxpayers, in the form of food stamps, welfare, and increased prison population. I really don't see why the American public should be forced to subsidize Walmart (or any large megacorporation) just because they won't pay their employees enough.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#cite_note-104 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#cite_note-105
EDIT: Before anyone says it, I know forcing Walmart to pay more to their workers would increase the prices of their goods; that's still almost certainly cheaper than increasing welfare.
In my opinion, almost all of the actual past raises to minimum wage have been on the small side, and have not significantly affected unemployment. You're right about that.
But if my opinion is true, then there's a huge leap with no scientific basis to saying "therefore this specific large increase in minimum wage will not raise unemployment."
Unfortunately, there aren't any scientific studies of increasing the US minimum wage by 100% because it has not been done multiple times in the past. So no one really knows what would happen if we did it now.
These would have ripple effects up the chain. Malls and retail real estate are empty as it is, for one; any fewer and we legitimately might see problems.
Also unemployment should never happen, and if we simply declare how the economy should works, it will magically reorganize itself in a way that makes it so, and which doesn't do serious harm to anybody, and doesn't cripple our futures. And you are a monster for daring to entertain the notion that achieving goodness in the world is any more complicated than this, and you deserve to be shunned and hated.
I don't know if I've been brainwashed growing up by fake news but... isn't the idea "work hard for a living", not "do the minimum and be rewarded?" (aka minimum wage)
ask an instacart worker how that's worked out for them.
In the US, 434,000 make the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Another 1.3 million make wages below the federal minimum.
The article mentions raising the minimum wage by 10%, or 73 cents an hour, which would save 1230 lives per year (plus a 10% increase in federal EITC as well). Assuming a 2000 hr work year, this increase in minimum wage would cost $633.64 million nationally for those making exactly minimum wage, and some larger value at least 3x that, if we also bring those 1.3 million making below minimum wage up to minimum wage + 10%. (It's unclear who is making below minimum wage, it might be family farmworkers? $2.13/hr service employees who aren't getting tips? Students exempt from the minimum wage? All of the above?) In any case the cost per life saved using this method at a minimum comes to $1,745,921, but probably around twice that. That might be a good value. Or it might be that there are other methods of saving those lives that would be more effective at lower cost, allowing even more lives to be saved.
Retail is the land of the minimum wage jobs, and margins are fairly thin there as it is. Raising the minimum wage simply means some employees become former employees. If the unemployment is at historic lows as it is today, there's a good chance those former employees will be able to find another job, so I see how the conclusion of the paper could be plausible, although loss of a job is still a very stressful event regardless.
When the unemployment rate is high (as it was in the studied date range), however, the effective wage becomes whatever unemployment pays, which isn't very much, and then it goes away entirely at some point. I don't see how this would reduce suicide.
Seems to me like another study crafted to produce the outcome the author wanted. The hypothesis isn't really testable anyway.
I would try to commoditize housing,healthcare and food. It would be essential to make sure that these fundamental needs of people working for minimum wage are take care of.
We know sucides and death goes down the more money you get up to at least $120,000.
They don't seem to have quantified anything?
What's the cost per life saved here?
We often joked here in Eastern Europe that we would be better off leaving our current IT jobs and just go to the US to work at McDonalds.
The next big culprit is other drug addiction, like fentanyl and heroin. Stemming the flow of cheap fentanyl dumped into the United States by China and throwing doctors in jail who over prescribe these drugs would do wonders for people.
OK, and how's the "war on drugs" going thus far?
> Mental health professionals and managers at large drug companies need to start going to jail for over-prescribing psychiatric drugs.
Really? You want to put people into jail for trying to treat depression?
> throwing doctors in jail who over prescribe these drugs would do wonders for people.
And now you want to imprison doctors for treating pain and taking care of patients?
You can't be serious, I hope you are merely ignorant rather than that punitive.
BTW, prescriptions have nothing to do with illegal fentanyl overdoses, and virtually nobody prescribed painkillers becomes addicted to them. This is well studied but largely ignored by the political posturing, media hysteria, and moral panicking about an imaginary prescription crisis, data shows it does not exist.
"Overall 675,527 patients underwent urological surgery, of whom 0.09% were diagnosed with opioid dependence or overdose."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00225...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27400458
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3z98b/big-pharma-didnt-c...
Read facts and change your mind, or don't and remain ignorant. You have that freedom.
The case with fentanyl is not like heroin, well established factories make it in China. It is within the Chinese governments power to stop the flow, this is a foreign policy issue. The fact that its not at all in the news is disturbing.
> Really? You want to put people into jail for trying to treat depression?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Secondly, this isnt "trying to treat depression", its a profit driven industry. SSRIs commonly do not outperform their placebo. Most of the recent adolescent mass shooters were on SSRIs!
> throwing doctors in jail who over prescribe these drugs would do wonders for people.
If Boeing engineers design an unsafe plane to squeeze out more profits and then line their pockets, which results in airplane crashes, they should go to jail. The same is true for healthcare.
Claiming that prescription opiods are not fueling the heroin and fentanyl crisis is a radical opinion. There was a massive lawsuit against the big pharma companies making money off these drugs. I'm not going to google research, its plain and simple.
Criminal doctors have been prescribing these drugs and making money off them. This has caused mass deaths and suicides.
Look at the chart of opion consumption on this page:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2018/nov/...
The number of opiod prescriptions year by year looks like the price of bitcoin. I dont need some study to try and convince me otherwise.
Research from the past few years has been questioning if the brain will just adapt overtime while on medication to the point of becoming oversensitive when off the medication and where the normal state of the person gets worse. I've only read this about antipsychotics more so than antidepressants.
In any case much if not all research in the topic of mind altering medication is still in the infant years and should be read while being skeptic. Multiple unique life factors can make research very difficult to get right in this topic.
There are also many cases of drug companies going to court and losing over suicides and murder-suicides. Leaks during those trials have shown horrible cover ups such as Study 329.
The whole thing is really is too horrible to imagine. The idea that we could give drugs to people making them want to kill themselves, which I think is why so many people don't want to believe it could be true.
> studies showed that children and adolescents taking antidepressants were almost twice as likely to have suicidal thoughts or to attempt suicide, compared to patients taking a sugar pill.
http://www.center4research.org/antidepressants-increase-suic...
I was put off for so long because I had read so many people saying that antidepressants were evil or bad or whatever. I wish I asked my doctor about them earlier.
It's OK to take them. It's ok to not want to take them. I wish they were less stigmatized because they do help some people a lot.
edit: paper shared below!
https://jech.bmj.com/content/jech/early/2020/01/03/jech-2019...
If this result stands up, it'd be very interesting to drill in and figure out what's really happening. Quite challenging, though--apparently long study hasn't even settled the question of how minimum wage affects the job market.
In this case, one could imagine all sorts of confounders. For example, maybe communities that have higher minimum wages simply have them because they're wealthier as a whole, which could in turn lead to lower suicide rates. Or perhaps a higher minimum wage leads to the most marginal workers losing their jobs, and it turns out that they're happier for it somehow.
If you a see a piece of research that seems to contradict some elementary principle of economics, it's possible that the researchers somehow forgot all about it or never learned it and that the paper somehow passed out of peer review without anyone pointing out its glaring deficiencies, but it's more likely that that an elementary understanding of economics is insufficient to explain real world phenomena.
You can see a parallel to this in the climate science debate, where people object to scientific assertions on the grounds that the sun is very much hotter than burning fossil fuels or 'climate is always changing' and human activity is too nebulous to possibly have an impact. Often deliberately simplistic arguments are used to mislead the slightly-educated and discourage them from becoming better informed.
Seattle--a world-class tech nexus point--raising its minimum wage affected a relatively small percent of businesses compared to a "normal" city, as businesses in Seattle would have long since needed to offer higher wages in order to keep employees.
I'd be much more interested in seeing the effects of a $15 wage in Nowheresville, USA than in Seattle.
Globalization and protectionism also play a role here, and are a critical factor in the answer (think global minimum wage vs local minimum wage).
This time cost cannot be less than a factor directly proportionate to minimum wage (local minimum wage or global minimum wage depending on economic policy).
In a sense, minimum wage is the cost of (human) time itself. You’re saying “regardless of the labor involved or otherwise, the skill involved or otherwise, the care involved or otherwise, the social skills involved or otherwise, the know-how involved or otherwise, this is the lowest you can pay someone to do something on an hourly basis (with many caveats, such as allowing employers to deduct the cost of services they provide their employees from said wage, etc). You can’t raise that cost without the cost of everything else shifting upwards by some extent with it. No one that understand economics debates that. The question is just how big this shift is.
