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Doesn't surprise me unfortunately.

While in theory anyone in the US can make it with sufficient effort, the reality is that some people get economically shat on through no fault of their own. Our national mythology/culture doesn't take this into account, and as a result we're incredibly vicious towards those who struggle.

As more and more capital needs less and less labor to be profitable and create value, we're going to need to find more effective ways to make sure everyone's needed, or things have a potential to get much worse before they get better.

EDIT: As others have noted, we also severely undervalue social capital, so we by and large firesale it to accumulate more material value. We work more instead of spending time with friends and family, thereby dangerously isolating ourselves. Thank you all for pointing this out.

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It might very well be because of other factors, as said in the article:

> "She calculated that in 2005, unmarried middle-aged men were 3.5 times more likely than married men to die from suicide, and their female counterparts were as much as 2.8 times more likely to kill themselves. The divorce rate has doubled for middle-aged and older adults since the 1990s, she said."

There has been huge changes in our societies concerning the role of men and women, their relations, when/if they have children, the type of jobs available (which many are soul-wrecking pointless work), the food we eat, the move towards atheism, the increase in material wealth, the Internet...

There is a myriad of possible factors and we need some serious studies before we can reach a conclusion. You can't just say "it's because capitalism" and be done with it.

I agree with you that capitalism alone doesn't increase suicide, but needing to sell all of your time/energy to keep a roof over your head and food in your mouth and still being told you're not good enough is depressing as all hell.

We severely undervalue social value for material value, and we're suffering horribly for it.

> needing to sell all of your time/energy to keep a roof over your head and food in your mouth and still being told you're not good enough is depressing as all hell.

This is how it's always been. So that doesn't hold water.

I think the problem is, and you touched on this in your original comment, is that some people don't get a chance to "sell their time/energy".

The unemployment numbers being quoted everywhere are a joke. Those numbers exclude discouraged workers who exit the economy and those people are the likeliest to off themselves.

That's not how it's always been. Americans work unusually hard. In fact, medieval peasants often got more vacation time than Americans did: http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/08/29/why-a-medie...

The U-4 (unemployed + discouraged workers) for March was 5.3% as opposed to the U-3 (unemployed) of 5% [1].

1. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

Tyler Cowen writes: "You sometimes hear there is no evidence of automation putting people out of work, but arguably the automation of manufacturing, plus IT-enabled foreign competition, are significant factors behind this trend."

See the graph here:

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/02/the...

Male participation in the wage economy peaked right before the recession of 1958. We have now seen 57 years of decline. Women's participation in the economy peaked in the late 90s. How many decades of decline would you need to see before you feel you seeing a crisis?

Hm, I wonder how they hack these numbers together. I just made up my own unemployment metric, absolute unemployment. A-U = Population - Employees. For US. A-U = 308 mil. - 140 mil.(1) which suggests there is about 55% of the population who are not currently employed. So, A-U - U-4 = the approximately 50% of the population who don't need jobs I guess.

1.http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001

Population in that case includes children and the retired.

Albeit, I hate using the phrase "retired" here. Retired for most simply means the equivalent of someone being born into wealth retiring at age 0.

Anyway, there are around 75 million kids, so real figures are something like 40% unemployed. But a lot of people are working under the table, no longer in classical employment, etc.

Though hopefully the kids are also doing something as well besides just factory public schooling. Figure 1 in 4 is 14-18 and they might have some part time job, albeit unlikely.

There is a fundamental shift to consider, though. A hundred years ago regardless of employment figures most people were farming and by farming that meant the whole family worked together to eat and provide shelter for themselves, and raise enough money to buy that which they cannot provide to themselves.

>a lot of people are working under the table, no longer in classical employment

I suspect this isn't a choice but a result of labor saturating the traditional market.

I upvoted both of you but you seem to contradict each other.. now I start to question my clarity.

I think capitalism became very good at optimizing for profit and it pushes aside faster than ever anything that stays in it's path (and now that's more and more people).

>We severely undervalue social value for material value

Unfortunately the market has spoken: material value.

> Unfortunately the market has spoken: material value.

Society is what we make of it. We still have a choice.

Also, kudos to everyone up the chain in this subthread; this is the discourse I expect when coming to HN.

> the market has spoken:

The extent that the market is a free market is much debated.

I should have used quotes (") around market but I already used my quota of quotes today..

"Underlying social value" is oh so much harder to measure. whose social; whose value?

I have had the privilege of working with someone who grew up very poor. But he had a fully intact, loving, extended family, and as a result, he always knew who he was. His family was also relatively high status and that afforded him opportunities for seeing leadership up close.

Contrast this to people of affluence I've known who've stopped even having a reflection in the mirror. Their identity just disappeared.

>We severely undervalue social value for material value, and we're suffering horribly for it.

I don't think there's wide agreement on just what constitutes social value once you get down to the detail level.

It's surprisingly hard.

I just don't understand "selling all your time and energy." I just don't see that happening. Maybe it's because I've been in all-consuming projects before and a regular 9-5 just seems simple to me now. But even when it was all-consuming, there was plenty of slack time.

This. The root of the problem isn't economic - the culture is broken.

It can also be both economic & cultural... Like a lot of things, it's much more subtle and complicated. If it wasn't, we'd have solved it by now.

I don't think there's much of an economic component. If you look at the numbers, people aren't doing badly by historical standards.

Relative poverty is what is at issue, and it's associated with suicide:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1556-4029.12998/a...

Economic turmoil in general is linked to suicide:

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-27796628

>> "I don't think there's much of an economic component. If you look at the numbers, people aren't doing badly by historical standards."

What numbers are you looking at though? If you look at income inequality there has been a significant increase in the last few decades.

Income inequality is a political problem. Nobody shoots himself because a person he doesn't know makes a lot more money.

But he will shoot himself when his wife divorces him and takes his children.

It depends how the income equality comes about. If wages of the rich are increasing but wages of the poor are staying steady or falling (I don't have numbers but that seems more likely to me given the recession/unemployment etc.) life becomes more and more unaffordable for the poor.

Why would life become more unaffordable for the poor even though their wages are steady (which is the case)?

Immigrants and their children now make up more than 25% of the US population. How many poor people can you expect an economy to absorb before wages drop on the low end?

If wages remain steady, then they aren't being adjusted for inflation, and then life starts to become more and more unaffordable.

Immigrants have about as much correlation with poor people as a cloudy sky has with flooding.

We're talking constant dollars. If you want to talk unadjusted we're all in fat city.

You're wrong about the immigrant thing. If you add a third again as many poor people to your population your statistics are gonna show a lot of poor people.

The way I look at it is if you were to walk into a store or restaurant and all you see are immigrants, and you were to somehow get rid of them they wouldn't magically be replaced by citizens. The store or restaurant just wouldn't exist or it would just be mostly empty. I don't think we should be trying to make far fetched correlations between suicide rates and immigration...

You're missing the point. Let's say you have a country with a million middle class people (only). Over a ten year period a million poor people with a sixth grade education and no ability to speak the language immigrate to your country (legally, illegally, doesn't matter).

If you look at the poverty statistics, you've had an enormous increase in poverty and your average wage is much lower. But that's just... math.

Also, those people will push down wages on the lower end. Wages are a function of supply and demand. When you add a whole bunch of people to the supply without increasing demand, the clearing price will be lower just like the price of cars would drop if you doubled production and dumped them on the market. If you're a native born person you're not going to get a raise for a long, long time.

If you really believe suicides are in part driven by income inequality, you can't pretend immigration isn't part of the problem.

So instead of a wall that will cost billions to build and billions more to maintain, we use that money to invest in education, decrease taxes and raise the minimum wage.

Were you not able to make the connection that he wasn't talking about income inequality causing suicides? He was talking about people having less money than before, financial problems, stagnating wages.

But people don't have less money than before. "Stagnating" doesn't mean "going down".

  > "Stagnating" doesn't mean "going down"

inflation means that today's $1 can buy less than yesterday's $1. If your wages are not increasing at least at the rate of inflation then you are steadily getting poorer. After all, 50 years ago you could buy a house in my neighbourhood for about $60k, now it's at about $500k (without any significant changes to demographic/gentrification pushing prices up).

Okay now, let's all get on the same page here. Wages are flat in constant dollars.

Yes, we all know how inflation works.

"It's more complicated than just one factor."

Uses absolute statements based on pure conjecture to defend their points.

American culture is defined by our economy.

The entire genesis of America was directly related to the economy.

No, that's not true at all. The economy was no more important to early Americans than it is anywhere else.

But that is the stuff of Adam Curtis' sad, hollow laughter in his films. It is like Harlan Ellison's favorite trope; we've killed all the old gods and can't remember how to make new ones.

Capitalism literally defines America.

In every comment thread about this news I see capitalism referred to as the probable cause.

You can look all you'd like if you want to be thorough, but I feel like you will discover what everyone already knows.

Almost 0% interest rate is not capitalism. In capitalism you need capital that you have from your hard work to start a successful company. With the current climate you just need better banking connections then your competitor.

Crony capitalism is the status of modern capitalism.

> the move towards atheism

Care to explain that? Atheism may be growing--in fact, Wikipedia gives an upper bound of the US atheist population at ten percent[0]--but I've never seen anything resembling what I would call an actual cultural movement towards atheism.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism#United...

I'll bite.

The dominant non-commercial social organ for most people in their local community is their church. Atheists are by definition cut off from this.

There are exceptions of course, Unitarian churches etc, but I would posit that most atheists don't find a comparable social grouping.

Growing up in a mid-sized town, there was a rule about starting your own small business: Join a church.

Once you joined a church (it didn't really matter which one), you gained a lot of social connections that turned into business connections. I don't know if there was any statistical truth to that, but it was definitely accepted in my family's social circle as a rule.

The dominant non-commercial social organ for religious people is their church. There are plenty of Christians that don't go to church.

So...how is this evidence for a social movement towards atheism? Honest question.

I don't think that is the question being answered by the parent. The question is (imo): why is atheism making people worse off?

> why is atheism making people worse off?

Care to put forth any evidence that this might possibly be the case?

http://allendowney.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-retreat-from-rel... This blogger has been covering the phenomenon among college freshmen since 2008. Notably the most recent results segregate none, atheist, and agnostic whereas before it was just 'none', but the effects are the same regardless of which label you want to associate with / avoid.

Personally I think the actual cultural movement towards 'atheism' is simple Leftism. Most people may still believe in the belief of God and thus differ from atheists on the ontological question, but their beliefs about the world in general are vastly different from those of their (for some religions, even still living) ancestors of the same declared denomination and those beliefs are in conflict with classic doctrine.

I think so too. I think a lot of people in the US may believe in God but feel conflicted by the association with Christianity here. Certainly I would. Gay marriage is a really good example of something I support, but if I was in a church part of my tithe would probably go toward challenging it in court.

Many equate "falling religiosity" (which is happening) with Atheism. It's overbroad use of terminology, but the trend is real.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/03/5-key-findin...

http://www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise/

"None" is the fastest growing religious affiliation in the US. It's the movement without a "movement" -- no central organization required.

There are plenty of people who don't affiliate with any religion but who are not, in fact, atheists. Not that it wouldn't surprise me if atheists, as a group, were growing.

...And plenty of atheists who go to church. I know several, and occasionally darken the door of one myself.

Why would an atheist do that?

Actually believing in god the way American Christians understand those words has not been a major part for many religious through history. Religious are about a lot more than just a bearded father figure in the sky.

Social activity.

Basically what Dan said. Community.

You still can't admit to atheism in many (most?) areas of the country without pretty severe social penalty.

Hopefully this is changing, but I think it's less that is atheism growing and more that people are becoming comfortable admitting what they really think.

How can you not affiliate with any god and not be an athiest?

Surely (not athiest) => theist => (believes in a god) => (has a religion)

This is going to sound really dumb, but it's how culture works so bear with me.

I'm nonreligious, I don't care to discuss it or think about religion as a part of my life, but it's okay if others want to be religious themselves.

Why don't I want to be labeled atheist? It's looked down upon and many hardcore atheists are exclusionary.

You know how when someone insists on it being GNU/Linux, but most people don't care? That's why I'm nonreligious (but technically atheist).

I used to tell people that I was an atheist, and my wife told me I was more of a "fundamentalist atheist" because I wanted everyone else to be too.

Now I call myself a "Reformed Fundamentalist Atheist" because it captures that I don't care anymore (reformed), and it sounds enough like a real religion that people seem to accept it as one.

In the spirit of many of the good things on the internet, the Reformed Fundamentalist Atheist church (RFA) is of course an open source religion, under the MIT license :)

Lol, sounds legit.

I have known several people who did not subscribe to any particular religion - actively shunned some - but described themselves as "spiritual". Others are self-described agnostics. Being an atheist is usually considered an active choice, not a passive one.

I think it's more like: made a decision about god? if yes and believe there is one then theist else if believe there isn't one then atheist.

A lot of people I think don't care to form a belief one way or another. I'm not sure what that's called.

This also implies that atheists are more likely to commit suicide. Is there evidence to support that?

Yes, in fact.

This statement as such is still just about correlation, not causation (compare ice cream sales and drowning deaths).

But it has been studied.

* CONCLUSIONS: Religious affiliation is associated with less suicidal behavior in depressed inpatients. After other factors were controlled, it was found that greater moral objections to suicide and lower aggression level in religiously affiliated subjects may function as protective factors against suicide attempts. Further study about the influence of religious affiliation on aggressive behavior and how moral objections can reduce the probability of acting on suicidal thoughts may offer new therapeutic strategies in suicide prevention.*

http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/appi.ajp.161...

It makes sense to me.

A religious person in pain without hope looks at suicide as an option and thinks, "I've got it bad now, but it's only going to get worse if I do this..."

Whereas a non-religious person is thinking, "I've got it bad now, but if I do this I won't have to feel anything ever again"

Also: religions usually set up a system of support. You have a "club" of people you hang out with all the time, and it's not unusual to ask for help from the club if your having a hard time. It's also not unusual to get the help you asked for.

Yes. Also, religions/churches often have pastors, imams, etc who act as therapists. Just having someone to talk to may help.

Also because, suicide is forbidden in the majority of religious. God doesn't like it.

I don't know; I just listed major societal changes.

I honestly just assumed it was the case. I don't mind if anyone proves me wrong on this one.

For the discussion I also didn't really make a distinction between a true atheist and someone who believes in a higher power but doesn't go to Church. I should probably have used "secularism".

I've seen this a lot in the software industry. A few of my smartest friends, hardest working and most dedicated friends who came from poor / low class families had an extremely poor time getting into the software industry. One was turned down five times in a row for "culture fit".

It's hard to fit in with rich whites / asians who have a boat from their parents and wear designer clothes when you spent your whole childhood playing with cards and worrying about money.

> It's hard to fit in with rich whites / asians who have a boat from their parents and wear designer clothes when you spent your whole childhood playing with cards and worrying about money

As a rich white/Asian, I agree. Now what? We will all go back to coding in atom/vim/etc and continue our lives, forgetting we ever had this whole conversation.

You're gesturing here at a general lack of engagement in solving these difficult social problems, then coming to the nihilistic conclusion that, since nobody else (that you can perceive) is engaging with them, it's a lost cause.

I don't say this in anger, but it's a lost cause entirely because you (and many others, past versions of myself included) choose to believe it's a lost cause. Us all going back to our editors and forgetting this conversation in defeat is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it's particularly insidious to publicly acknowledge your privilege and then make this gesture, because it sets an example for others of your level of privilege. It's isomorphic with the problem of white people who support the BLM movement in spirit, but think they can't become proactive allies to black America because they don't know how - but it's not a matter of knowing, it's a matter of taking actions, often difficult and uncomfortable ones.

I don't know about your local tech industry, but in west coast tech companies I've worked at, and among my friends, people of all backgrounds have thrived.

If anything, I see very FEW people who were born with the proverbial silver spoon on their mouths.

thrived once on board, yes. It's the filter at the top of the funnel that's screwing them.

As an Asian I disagree. I have never seen a rich Asian kid in technology. most of them arrived in the country and got richer. Asians are kicking ass taking benefit of free market economy in this country. Many of us could not even speak proper English before we came here. If an Indian whose family's net worth < $10K can come here and succeed I think those who cant have nothing but themselves to blame.

Doesn't that disregard the fact that most Indians who might want to come to the US and succeed can't? You're looking at a relative handful of successes and disregarding all the people who didn't make it.

I was never depressed when I was poor, only when I was pulling in lots of money and spending all week at the office.

I think the main factor is sustainability and stability. I was not very happy when I was hovering around ramen profitability because it was not sustainable.

On the contrary, I've been most depressed when my life was at a complete stable standstill.

I had money. I had sustainability and stability. But I was not happy.

In fact its pretty silly to think either of those things create happiness or are even the precursors to it.

I have never been depressed when I was poor either, but now that I am not I worry about not being able to pay for the fancy schools and activities I send my kids to.

I'll take your money if that will help you with your dire situation.

Agreed, and this is I think why we need to start implementing a Basic Income right away, especially as we're automating away so many low-skilled jobs. There's tons of low-skilled people who just can't make ends meet on whatever low-paying job they have (today's huge housing prices have a lot to do with this), and just aren't going to be able to get themselves a higher-paying job, and they're in great danger of losing their jobs to increasing automation. They still have a lot to contribute to society, just not economically. With the abundance of resources we have, it should be possible for people like this to have a decent home (maybe not in a high-demand high-rent district though) and live a peaceful, enjoyable life without having to slave away at two jobs trying to make ends meet.

I think it's very simplistic to say income is the driving force in these numbers. And I would be careful about explaining phenomena like this with your own personal beliefs about society.

Heres the very first study I found when googling income inequality and suicide [0]:

> Our results indicate that there is a statistically insignificant positive effect of inequality on the incidence of suicide.

0: https://ideas.repec.org/p/adv/wpaper/200613.html

>I think it's very simplistic to say income is the driving force in these numbers.

For some groups of people (farmers, vets, construction workers) the correlations between the economy and suicide is very clear. There's pretty good correlation between economic downturn and increased rate of death by suicide.

It is simplistic to just say "it's the economy", but the economy is pretty clearly one important factor.

And yet that study is across 40 countries. It would have been nice if before putting that forth as evidence to the contrary, you'd read the second sentence of the abstract upon which you'd have found it's not relevant (at least, it's not relevant in the way that you cherry picked that quote).

Having said that, your first paragraph is spot on.

Isn't part of the problem you are identifying thinking about it in terms of people being needed? I think people generally want to have purpose, but I'm not sure fulfillment has to be achieved by answering some external need.

Well I don't know that it's the economy by itself. The data shows the suicide rate declining for black men, but their unemployment rate doubled during the recession. Let's be careful not to peg a complex social phenomenon on the economy alone.

Edit:

Citation: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/suicide/rates_1999_2014....

Figure 2

Other countries where it is harder to make it financially have lower suicide rates

Here is my take: It is not just about religion. Having been born in a third world country but now in the US, I'm struck, by looking at those less fortunate, how much more (socially) devastating being poor here is.

People often talk about how the poor in the US still live better than the poor in the third world, but the poor in third world countries are not excluded from renting relatively decent places because of bad credit, they don't give away their class by their bad teeth, they (mostly) do not have to sleep under bridges (unless they have serious mental issues), their mobility is not restricted by the need to have a car (which all the attendant on-going costs), and so on.

I could be dirt poor in a third world country and people will not avoid me like I am some sort of defective, repugnant, morally challenged person; I am still normal.

I can verify this, having been poor in a very affluent part of the world, and having spent a huge amount of time in very inaffluent parts of the world.

Thanks for the insightful comment.

> I could be dirt poor in a third world country and people will not avoid me like I am some sort of defective, repugnant, morally challenged person; I am still normal.

Very good point. I have been living in a lower-middle class neighborhood in one of the world's poorest countries for around 3 years now, but I'm originally from the US. There are fewer inherent indications of wealth vs. poverty here, whereas in the US you can often tell at a single glance. Even if you literally strip away social indicators like clothing, I think I could gauge someone's economic status from their naked body (sadly), and if not that, then definitely from their dialect.

Poorer countries are on average more religious and more religious countries have lower suicide rates http://www.gallup.com/poll/108625/more-religious-countries-l...

More religious countries may have lower incidents of suicide but they don't seem to be enjoying the life they do have as much as the less religious countries. None of the top 10 countries according to the World Happiness Report[1] are religious. On the other hand, of the top 10 religious countries, according to your link, the highest ranked for happiness is Thailand at 34. This shouldn't be terribly surprising since it is a deadly sin to commit suicide in most of the Abrahamic religions and the more devout you are the more likely you are to adhere to this particular tenet.

[1] http://worldhappiness.report/ed/2015/

Or all the unhappy people in the happiest countries killed themselves.

80% of the US is affiliated with a religion.

Self identification, affiliation, and membership are not synonyms.

Any analysis blaming the US suicide rate on individualism has to somehow cope with the fact that in (relatively) collectivist countries with similar incomes (UK, France, Japan) the suicide rate is much higher.

UK suicide rate is about half that of the US, according to Wikipedia (6.2 vs 12.1 per 100k per year).

Violence is structural.

Would you mind elaborating on this? I'm afraid I don't know what you mean.

Not the commenter, but I came across this term in the book Fields of Blood by Karen Armstrong. Essentially society requires violence to function. In the beginning, someone had to coerce farmers to produce a surplus, with this surplus the first states and militaries were built. As societies evolved, the violence became less overt and more implied, embedded within the structures of the state. At some point, in order to have a society and not anarchy, you have to have people telling other people what to do, and these people can't take no for an answer. All you can do is reshuffle it so it's less and less onerous over time.

It's a thread that runs throughout the book, in order to explain religion and nationalism and war were deeply entwined all throughout recorded history and well into prehistory for as long as we've had the mental capacity to think about matters larger than we are.

Society and anarchy are not mutually exclusive.

Depends on how you define the terms.

The most common definitions of political anarchy (if you will, as opposed to simplistic "anarchy = chaos" definitions) indicate that it's a form of society. Typical tenets include free association and mutual aid, which are inherently social concepts.

Can you give me any real-world examples of an anarchic society?

Violence was always structural. That doesn't explain an increase in suicides.

Perhaps now that the rising tide that floats all boats that America had going from the 40s-80s (or something like that) has peaked, suicide rates are just going back to normal.

It's pretty rare throughout history that your kids will almost surely be better off than you were. We enjoyed a brief spurt of that here in the US. It's probably over. Welcome back to the old normal.

Is war as old as gravity?

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