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
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Canada#Among_Indige...
Curious to see how Michigan would compare with Ontario or Alaska or Northern Washington would compare with British Columbia
That's not how economics works. The prices most stores charge is limited by competition. The only areas you might see an effect are in ones where supply is highly, and likely artificially, constrained.
There would be no much change in competition, as everybody that sells anything of low-medium value will benefit from the increased spending capacity UBI receivers. The increased demand across all competitors will raise prices.
"Supply and demand" is an absolute economic law. Anyone trying to distort that (say, redistributing taxes so all get $1000/month) finds out the hard way. If S&D is not directly addressed in your pet socioeconomic proposal, implementation will fail.
As I said, the actual economics around this are more complicated, but the paraphrase/summary is that if nobody has to work for $1000/mo and everybody gets $1000/mo then $1000/mo will be worth practically nothing, with staples & necessities rising to consume that.
If we exclude rent from consideration, and apply the economics of UBI to just food: the average price of 1 Calorie (of which you need ~2000/day) rises $0.016, or $32/day. For a baseline reference, I regularly make healthy meals at $1/plate. Congrats, you've just increased the cost of food to at least $35 per day - precisely because "everyone now has $1000/month, free".
If we then roughly combine that with housing (as primary costs): I figure a normal baseline poverty minimum of $10/day for living space & utilities plus $3/day food, but then you're adding $32/day available which those necessities will instantly absorb (supply-and-demand) ... ergo you've just increased poverty-level living costs by 3.5x!
Unintended consequence: giving everyone $1000/month increases the cost of a $1 hamburger to $3.50. Now the beggar with $0 has to find/panhandle close to four times as much to afford something barely considered a complete meal. This is not what you had in mind.
You would if you're homeless and can't pay the rent because you need food to survive.
'Trading' is a complex little signalling display where the seller shows how hard it is to produce a good (represented in price) and the buyer signals that they have previously contributed enough of some sort of resource to justify the production of the good (represented by having the money to pay the price).
UBI messes with that by allowing everyone to signal they contributed economically even if they did not. This effectively redistributes resources contributed by someone who is economically productive to someone who is not.
The impacts of that are hard to nail down. It might cause some prices to rise and other prices to fall. It will likely cause less resources to be allocated to the future; because economically unproductive folks tend not to invest in the future. However it is much more efficient than the bureaucratic complexity of a modern welfare state and easier to reason about.
This sounds like a dystopian nightmare.
Yes. Having every man, woman and child line up for government potatoes, government bread, and government cheese at some government office is unequivocally a dystopian nightmare.
There's also no reason that distribution has to work that way. How about an EBT card mailed to every home, which can be used for potatoes, cheese, and bread at any grocery store?
It's also a strawman because not everyone would be lining up for potatoes in this instance, presumably some people can afford to eat in this free suds world. Maybe we'll even have a post-potato society eventually, when everyone decides they hate potatoes after they all get jobs (probably not).
Have free 'bootcamps'. Want to change careers and be a mechanic or welder? Take an intense 6 month course. That's what happened in WWII, people stuck in crappy depression era towns all of a sudden got retrained in a few months.
You can't push money around; it's tougher than you, and will push back. But you can push a sack or potatoes. If a domestic potato farmer tries to raise prices, a foreign farmer will be all too happy to undercut them to get back to the commodity price.
Instead of taking money from some and giving to others, it has to be invested in actual production, and the output granted to the recipients directly. If there are any middlemen involved at all, they will certainly reduce the efficiency of the entitlement program.
(the leader, not the car company; the brother of the crack smoking mayor, the white one)
UK – 11.2 per 100,000 people – in 2018 (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/sep/03/suicides-rat... & https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...). I think the UK's Office of National Statistics is a better source of information that Wikipedia.
UBI is a great idea. Unfortunately, minimum wage now usually means "in work" poverty, that's not a good thing.
edit: @0000011111, I think income inequality could certainly be a driver.
I agree that the ONS is a better source of information than Wikipedia.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
Here's the old definition:
> The previous National Statistics definition of suicide includes deaths from intentional self-harm (where a coroner has given a suicide conclusion or made it clear in the narrative conclusion that the deceased intended to kill themselves) and events of undetermined intent (mainly deaths where a coroner has given an open conclusion) in people aged 15 and over.
It's this "events of undetermined intent" part that is different. In the US (and I guess many other places" those deaths are not counted as suicide.
The US uses this definition:
> Death caused by self-directed injurious behavior with an intent to die as a result of the behavior
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide...
But your correct that we should probably go by the individual countries’ statistics, where the UK is slightly above the average compared to other developed countries and the US a good amount above it.
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.
I call this the "loser" class (obviously, I don't personally see them as losers, just in terms of societal expectations). You're supposed to go make money or you're a loser. Hopefully, you're "in charge of people" too, because managers and executives are the only people that contribute to society. Do-ers just cost money. You buy a house and become a homeowner to be a "real American" and not be a loser. You better get a big car and attractive partner too. I think there's a talking heads song about this.
Worse, we think that all failures should be permanent. Once you become a member of this class, especially as you age, it becomes difficult to get out. What have you been doing all these years? Did you not want to sit in a cage for your entire adult life? No degree? Have you ever been fired? Have you had any issues with the law? Well, you're done. No longer a member of the "successful American" class, you're now a loser. A despised and ridiculed lesser class within society.
We'll let a few losers out, and rise to the level of good American, but generally, they stay there. Don't forget that you deserve this, and it's your fault because you're a bad person. I'm not surprised by the suicide rate at all.
That's not necessarily a contradiction, since churches double as social clubs and Christian charity means supporting your neighbour who is in trouble. So if you are active in a church you belong to a circle that is a little less dog-eat-dog. Same thing with immigrant communities.
That would imply that life in the US ~300 years ago, when pretty much everyone belonged to a church, was less dog-eat-dog.
If anything, I would say it was the opposite. People would often shoot someone—someone who is just as likely as themselves to be a "good Christian"—just for being an interloper on their farmland, i.e. for having the opportunity (whether they took it or not) to make off with some of their turnips.
Contrast that with the modern luxurious miracle of the $1 hamburger: with just 9 minutes of minimum-wage commodity labor, one can obtain a fresh complete meal (bread, meat, veggies, cheese) any time all year.
When you’re living the latter, the gravity of the former is hard to grasp.
When society says your white privilege means you have no excuse for failure, that is a hard dead end.
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.
I suspect that the larger and more cohesive one's support network is, the less likely you are to commit suicide, and that the more socially isolated one is, the poorer one is, and the sicker one is, the more likely one is to feel hopeless and see suicide as the only way out.
Other important factors are things like how many recent traumatic events (such as relationship breakups, serious illness, bereavement, rape, witnessing or being a victim of violence, etc) one has suffered, recent alcohol and drug use/abuse, and then very hard to quantify things like how good one is at coping with such events.
You can't really boil all this down to any one factor, and there's no one solution to any of these issues. But, yes, reducing misery (whether economic or social) should help.
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...
apparently google and facebook already have some kind of tech that estimates if people are vulnerable to suicidal ideation based on searches ("hey google, how do I kill myself painlessly?" gives the national suicide prevention hotline -- good)
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.
Housing is a more complicated story; there's certainly a theory that landlords will simply raise rents in proportion to their tenants new ability to pay more. On the other hand, a stable income boost might make the housing market more fluid, giving renters more options to move when the rent goes up. I personally favor LVT to discourage rent-seeking, and there's a lot that could be done by removing zoning and building restrictions (multi-family conversions, etc) to make housing more competitive.
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.
maybe I misread this and GP meant increasing the fraction of US employees?
If you have 10 workers average pay 100k and you last off your lowest paid worker the average goes up, and you're paying less out of pocket.
By having bonuses showing that you're not trying to game the system by laying people off it encourages job growth.
That and the idea of pay cap is to ensure business growth over CEO enrichment. How does it hurt the companies bottom line if the CEO can only earn 10 Mill not 50m? When it gives 40 surplus for new devs or r and d people to grow new products and income opportunities.
If finances are a factor in suicidal ideation then it’s a secondary consideration in addition to more prominent concerns.
> Data analysis from a 2013 study published in the journal Clinical Psychology Review shows that those who died by suicide were eight times more likely to be in debt.
Correlation does not imply causation. To illustrate the silliness when the related items are transposed the statement becomes absurdly false even though the logic remains identical: persons in debt are 8 times more likely to be suicidal. Nobody is claiming that because it’s preposterous and there is no such data.
Stress is not a mental health illness. Having debt is also not a mental health illness.
I was discharged from a mental health ward 3 weeks ago after an unsuccessful suicide attempt. My brother was murdered a year ago and I've been struggling with depression since.
I lose my job a few months ago and money has been tight in my household, to the point where I began to see myself as nothing buta financial anchor weighing down my partner.
Freeing her from having to manage my debts was the primary justification for my suicide attempt. My mental health illness (mixed anxiety and Depressive disorder) is not caused by debt, but the affective symptoms (in this case suicidal ideation) were.
Or to put it another way: the easy way out of debt allows people to rationalize an an otherwise irrational decision. (°)
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/society/201...
NatCen analysed detailed NHS data about adults’ mental health undertaken for the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute. It found that 13% of people in problem debt – about 420,000 a year – think about suicide and 4% of them – more than 100,000 people – try to end their life.
Having debt certainly isn't a mental illness, but we can't ignore the effect having debt has on people with mental illnesses.
Edit: sorry for any typos or grammatical errors, my medication causes difficulties typing and recognising errors
(°) Of course, it may actually be rational, since her financial security would be significantly improved by the removal of debt and the extra mouth to feed - but rationality does not necessarily imply correctness.
Teenage homosexuality is another high suicide pattern. Nobody is suggesting treating juvenile sexual orientation.
Since suicide is the result of mental health illness and mental health illnesses are a medical problem would you agree that it’s safe to say it is something that demands medical attention? Medical doctors treating that condition don’t throw the patient into a finance class to hear about managing debt or give the patient money to relieve the financial distress. The subject of financial crisis isn’t treated at all.
Many things can have an effect on persons with illnesses. The goal of a doctor is to treat the illness and lower the pain. They do this through a combination of observation, medication, and counseling.
Ignoring the medicine and medical aspect of suicide to focus purely on financial management, as so many in this thread suggest, will likely result in a sharp increase in suicidal completion.
If advocating against such harm and ignorance costs me all my HN karma I am ok with that. I am not afraid of being stuck in an echo chamber.
You have to treat the entire patient, it's the difference between the nightingale and peplau schools of nursing: the patient is not just their symptoms, they are a complete human who has to be treated to prevent recidivism in to a dangerous mental state.
Without the stresses of financial debt I'm not suicidal, I'm depressed and have anxieties and impulses, but one of those impulses isn't suicidal ideation.
In this instance, the diagnosis is an anxiety disorder, not suicidal ideation, but the addition of a second aspect - the debt - can severely increase the chances of the symptom of suicidal ideation occuring.
Again: people with mental health illnesses should be treated for those illnesses, but we also can't ignore the family practicioner and governments role in ensuring that people in financial hardship have the support that they need.
As they say, a small amount of prevention is worth a lot of cure: I imagine the cost on the government to help with the debt is lower than the cost on the government to deal with the mental health issues exacerbated by the debt.
There is no discussion of eliminating those jobs to save people from mental health illnesses.
Edit: again, sorry if I don't make sense in some areas, I'm trying very hard :)
This is not supported by anyone working within suicide prevention. Indeed, focussing on the medical model is rejected by any organisation working in suicide prevention, and they talk about the full range of bio-psycho-social factors involved in suicide.
It is simply incorrect to say that suicide is caused only by mental illness.
Why do you think this is absurd? How are you defining "suicidal"?
There's good reasons why reputable organisations involved in suicide prevention recognise financial difficulty as a risk factor (one of many) for suicide.
http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/display.aspx?DocID=38469
> 156. Patients who died in the first week after leaving hospital were more likely than those who died later after discharge to have a diagnosis of personality disorder (15% v. 10%). Over half (52%) had experienced recent adverse life events, especially financial (25%) and family problems (23%).
https://www.hqip.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/8iQSvI.pd...
> Although under 20s and 20-24 year olds had many antecedents in common, there was a changing pattern,reflecting the stresses experienced at different ages. Academic pressures and bullying were more common before suicide in under 20s, while workplace, housing and financial problems occurred more often in 20-24 year olds
https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/docs/default-source/improving-care...
> Factors that should be recorded in an initial assessment of social circumstances include, but are not limited to: (i) family members, significant others or carers who can provide support; (ii) dependents; (iii) housing; (iv) personal or financial proble
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?
...Of course, we can actually be even more clever than this, if we want, and imagine models where we are both right (of course they might not be true).
For example, we might say the value provided by a manager is, on average, $1,000,000. However, this is driven mostly by the top 10 percentile who are worth $10,000,00 a year, whereas the median is actually slightly overpaid. We can justify this distribution by adding uncertainty on the signal. A more thoughtful model of this quick example exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)#Job-mar...
So the next question would be: What is more likely? That people are overpaid, obviously, and the government needs to stop it? Or the market is behaving optimally under complex uncertainty, and the government, being no better at interpreting signal than these firms themselves, is likely just to make things more complicated and screwed up by entering? (I'll leave this as an exercise to the reader, but if you want to solve it formally follow the journal articles in the link I shared above).
Sure, but first lend me a few hundred million in capital would ya?
I realize not every business requires that much but I work for an oil supermajor... so, little hard to do what you're suggesting without your help. The "capital" in "capitalism" keeps getting in the way.
If someone is making a claim that someone is clearly doing something wrong, the burden of proof should -- to some extent -- be on them to explain why despite this, they are continuing to be successful without going out of business (if that is in fact the case).
For example, it feels to me that the way FANG companies hire SDEs and place them on teams is inefficient and weird. Why are 24 year old 1337coders considered fungible to work on any project? It doesn't make sense to me. But it's hard for me to convince myself that my feeling is correct, given that there are billions of dollars on the table for anyone who can come up with a better strategy.
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?
Do we have 1000x or more business leaders? Because that's how well compensated a select few of them are. I don't believe we have. Because at most one developer is 100 times more productive than other one, so it makes no sense that a business person would be 1000 times more productive than another one.
> Concept and origin (1991)
> Partial closure (2018)
To essentially cap wages, you could use higher tax rates in higher tax brackets, and that might actually be enforceable as it would leverage the existing enforcement apparatus that has decades of experience patching workarounds.
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.”
In other words, was there really a spike in youth suicide or did it just climb in rank because we reduced other causes of death? Something must be first, something must be second, and so on.
https://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-suicide-rates-rising-...
So there’s unequivocally a spike.
The only argument you could really make is that suicide rates have been rising across the US since 1999, up in most states and up by 30% in half of all states, making youth suicide of a part with the broader trend. But I don’t think this is any less disheartening.
More importantly it shows that deaths from suicide are i: no longer declining and ii: increasing.
This increase appears to happen around 2007 onwards -- this is when we had worldwide financial insecurity, with things like the sub-prime mortgage crisis.
We know financial insecurity is a driver for higher rates of death by suicide, and we have a good idea that the financial problems in 2007 drove some of the increase.
On the linked graph I see the highest suicide rates in the late 90s. They dropped in the early 2000s and then at some point start climbing.
It’s like, one can pick any window from a graph like that to make a point.
Think if someone did that with the stock market. You could prove the market was going down, or up, merely by choosing the window that suits the claim.
Now, the graph only goes through 2015. I am receptive to the notion suicide rates have been climbing and are at all time highs. You may have a vital and valid point.
But the graph I linked doesn’t back it up, and you are including a whole bunch of causation in your comments that makes your argument start to sound ideologically shaped.
[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.
Denmark has incredibly high tax rates and a welfare state that runs laps around any North American country.