As Families Change, Korea’s Elderly Are Turning to Suicide | Hacker News Reader

As Families Change, Korea’s Elderly Are Turning to Suicide

nytimes.com

101 pointsdanso47 comments

This is a severe abuse of statistics.

They are succeeding at alarming rates; the suicides among people 65 or older ballooned to 4,378 in 2010, from 1,161 in 2000.

The are absolute counts, not rates. The male 65+ population went up 70% in the same period, and the 75+ subgroup doubled [1]. This explains away much of the increase (c.f. generic statistics in [2]). And at the same time:

The number of suicides among other adults and teenagers also surged... (no numbers)

Is it even clear the age-normalized suicide rate increased at all among the elderly, relative to the general population? I don't think the journalist checked.

edit: BBC says Korea's general-population suicide "more than doubled" over the same period [3]. So the 65+ suicide rate is almost completely explained by the null hypothesis. The count of 65+ suicides went up by 3.77x; the male 65+ population increased by 1.68x, and the general population suicide rate by >2.0x, which together is a factor of 3.36x. That leaves a <12% increase in [65+ suicide rate]/[general population suicide rate] (I'm still ignoring (rare [2]) female suicides). In a better analysis this might completely disappear. E.g. the 75+ subgroup outgrew the 65+ subgroup and they are much more suicidal [2], but I don't know how much more.

[1] http://www.census.gov/population/international/data/idb/regi...

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5236508

[3] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14784776

Totally correct.

Also, it seemed odd not to compare to suicide rates in other countries - was it low before and typical now? Or typical before and high now? We can't tell from the article.

There might be substance in the topic, but the numbers presented don't support it.

This, by the way, is one of the reasons that the aggregate national suicide rate in Korea (and also in Japan) exceeds the aggregate national suicide rate in the United States. The elderly (persons born before the end of the Korean War, and especially before the end of World War II) in those countries kill themselves at a much higher rate than the same birth cohort in the United States. On the other hand, rates of YOUTH suicide in recent decades have been much more comparable among those countries, and once when I checked in the 1990s, looking up World Health Organisation statistics, the youth suicide rate in the United States was actually higher than that in Japan. So some of the international comparisons in suicide rates have to take a careful look at cohort effects (rates specific to a particular era of birth) to better tease out hypotheses for the causes of differing rates of suicide.

This is an old issue all over the world, including in east Asia, the issue of children growing up and taking care of themselves and their children rather than their elderly parents. A comment on Hacker News (as I recall) recently mentioned the 1953 Japanese movie Tokyo Story (東京物語), which I began watching on a DVD from the public library last night. Yes, even in 1953 in early postwar Japan, families had to adjust to children not necessarily being by the side of their parents as the parents grew old.

Seconding Ozu's Tokyo Story. You can watch it for free on Hulu today – I assume only in the US – along with the rest of the Criterion Collection: <http://www.hulu.com/watch/215840>.

Certainly, when individuals vote to turn over personal responsibilities to the the government, things will turn out badly in the end. However, the break down of personal responsibilities within families is not the result of economic success. Has the article's author considered their implied message - that if only Koreans had experienced economic failure, then everybody would just happy as pigs in slop? That's absurd, of course, as their northern neighbors provide the perfect example for the comparison. If there is a breakdown in familial responsibilities, it is not likely to be the result of economic success. Many people around the world work not just in a distant city, but in a distant country in order to send the fruits of higher earnings home to family - so it is not reasonable to assume that moving to a different city somehow forces a person to lose their sense of familial responsibility. If such a breakdown is occurring, the explanation for its cause lies somewhere other than economic success.

> turn over personal responsibilities to the the government

Sounds like the modern states are doing a much poorer job caring for their members than a prehistoric tribes used to. At least the tribes provided their members with 4 basic benefits like to hunt together (defense), resolve disputes (justice/law), care of elderly (pensions) and wounded (healthcare).

It absolutely blows my mind that someone would consider any of the 4 to be "personal responsibility". Frankly, I find it absurd to pay money for a lawyer to win in court. In my mind that's an equivalent of out-spending your opponent on a personal army and just taking what you need by force.

Pensions are not personal responsibility. And California state workers are happy to agree with me, that's why they tax pensionless private sector workers to help themselves with a "state pension". And nobody is protesting against this outrageous behavior... Weird. Where are the burning cars and shattered storefronts?

Prehistoric societies would send their elderly out into the snow to die once they were no longer productive members of the tribe. Nomadic tribes would simply leave behind the elderly who couldn't keep up any more.

It wasn't so much that they were heartless - they simply did not have the resources to do otherwise.

So why don't EU countries have a very high suicide rate, since they have even more pervasive welfare states? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3134928/pdf/jivr...

Your paper shows that some of them do. In all four tables (age/sex subgroups), the top quartile includes France, Belgium, Austria, and Switzerland, as well as South Korea. Germany is in the top quartile for females.

It's the ones that don't which disprove the hypothesis. Ireland and the UK both have pervasive public health systems, with nursing homes being a more common destination for the aged than living with children, but are only in the second quartile.

Maybe a few centuries from now our major societies will no longer rely on population growth. The consequences of this unsustainable approach won't be pretty. My kid will be expected to financially support at least two retirees via Social Security contributions and pay back a chunk of those borrowed $trillions.

Your kid will have to support retirees through the output of his labor; the labor required to support a person is dropping , and soon it can be completely automated. The financial economy is a heuristic to explain the underlying economic conditions, not vice-versa.

The problem is that "support a person" is also a moving target that is ever inflating. Additionally, distribution inefficiencies (whether you're inclined to believe the bad actors are big government, corporations, or the "1%") also keep moving that target.

Look at it this way. Per-capita GDP has gone up over time yet poverty rates have stayed fairly fixed over the last 40 years.

See also processor speed vs desktop snappiness over time for a similar example of where the underlying performance drivers may look great but the end result appears to stay the same.

Poverty is a percentage, not an absolute measure. It will never be eliminated as long as there is a distribution of income.

It's not a specific percentage because it does fluctuate (not going to look up what it's based on just now), but effectively it will never be eliminated. This is precisely my point to the original poster who postulated that increases in worker productivity were making it easier to support those not working.

As labor is automated there will be increasing downward pressure on my kid's wages and job prospects. Harder work will be required to pay the taxes that are increased to make up for the falling wages.

Until eventually, Full Communism.

As labor is automated, labor share of profits will fall under current arrangements; and the political pressure to change those arrangements will increase.

But the political pressure from the wealthy overrides the pressure from the average person. Hence taxes go up as wages fall in response to labor automation.

As labor is automated, the only leverages that will matter are controlling natural resources and the capacity for violence.

I guess if your kids absolutely must work on an assembly line.

On the other hand, as automation gets cheaper the barrier to entry for lots of different enterprises continues to go down. See Computers->Desktop Publishing->Web Enterprises or 3D Printers eliminating the need for expensive manufacturing.

Automation has increased by leaps and bounds over the last hundred years and comparative wages in industrialized countries have gone up.

If you want to look for dangers to your kids (assuming you're American), make sure you take a gander at the national debt. In particular, look at the nation's unfunded liabilities. It's probably too late to do much about them besides try to minimize their impact. The problem is already going to crush your kids.

> The problem is already going to crush your kids.

Yes, whether or not they work on an assembly line. The kids can't possibly pay all they'll be demanded to pay, but the consequences of that will be great as well. There may well be a revolution.

Not the labor required to support an elderly person, believe you fucking me.

Population growth is expected to level off by 2050 or thereabouts.

This is something I've been thinking about in the good old USA too. Throughout most of history elderly relied on family to take care of them, but modern society often has families spread out over great distances and children not prepared or expecting to have to care for their parents, and with people living longer than ever it becomes much more of a job to care for your parents. Combine that with the fact that pensions are becoming increasingly rare and social security benefits are likely to be cut at some point in the future, and you have the potential for a massive increase in elderly living below the poverty line with no one to care for them.

Even if you prepare and save, that's no guarantee as the recent economic troubles demonstrated, with many people nearing retirement seeing massive decreases in their investments. Not to mention, with the skyrocketing costs of college tuition and wages that have not kept up with inflation, adequately saving for retirement has become increasingly difficult as well.

I'm not sure what's going to happen but I don't see the future as being that promising as we age and quite frankly, I can see a lot of seniors turning to suicide when whatever meager savings they have run out. I hope I'm wrong, but it looks quite bleak...

"adequately saving for retirement has become increasingly difficult"

Is that true or is it just a shift in culture where people blow all their money on crap they don't need, disposable convenience, and live a more "up-scale" life style instead of saving for retirement?

I was reading a few blogs about early retirement the other day such as,

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/04/06/meet-mr-money-must...

The financial situations vary widely but the common theme is they save a lot more of their income % wise than a typical person. The guy that writes the above blog retired at 30. Those are extreme examples but surely if that is possible then retiring after working until 60+ isn't particularly out of reach.

Suppose you're going to live until 90. That's 60 years of retirement. Suppose you're given up on the whole materialism treadmill and are willing to live close to the poverty line, say $25000 per year. That still works out to $1.5M. How many people even make $1.5M by the time they're 30, even before taxes? And that's to live more or less in poverty.

> ... That still works out to $1.5M. How many people even make $1.5M by the time they're 30, even before taxes? And that's to live more or less in poverty.

The above analysis misses something important -- compound interest.

Without compound interest, yes, if you need $1.5 million to retire, then you need $1.5 million in advance. But if you create and then invest your nest egg, the math changes completely.

Consider an average return on investment of 12% per annum. That means if you only need $12,000 per year to live in decent poverty, you only need a nest egg of $100,000. In this scenario, to account for inflation, you must withdraw less than $12K per year and let the nest egg grow faster than inflation can erode it.

But let's say that stock market won't deliver 12% per year -- it hasn't been doing that for a while. Let's say a more realistic return is 8% from various investments. Let's also say we want an income of $50K per year for life. So we need a nest egg of:

    50 / 0.08 = $625K

That doesn't seem too bad, or unrealistic. It requires discipline and a lot of advance planning. But it's entirely practical.

Now back to your original example:

> ... That still works out to $1.5M. How many people even make $1.5M by the time they're 30, even before taxes? And that's to live more or less in poverty.

Let's say we have that nest egg -- $1.5M. Assuming an 8% return, what does that give us per year?

1.5M * 0.08 = $120K

And guess what? You aren't under any responsibility to die when your money runs out, because it isn't going to run out -- at the end of your life, you still have $1.5M in the bank to give to your children.

> The above analysis misses something important -- compound interest.

You are making the assumption that getting an 8% return is something that is easy and safe to do. What happens to the people who retire in a year like, say, 2007. Their first year of retirement, expecting to withdrawal $50k to live on and instead watch their $625k dwindle down to $460,000. The next year maybe they get lucky and only lose 2%, minus the $50k they withdrew. Now they're down to around $400k. Ok the market picks up and they get a 3% average the next year but took out another $50k. Now they've got $360k. After a mere 3 years of retirement they've used up half their savings. Even if they manage to get 8% a year for the next 30 years, they now only have $28,000 a year to live on. Whoops.

The assumption that your money won't run out is not a given. This is the reason it's important to have a LARGE nest egg. While $625k might do it if you could invest it at 8%, you can't count on that and the market could quickly leave you living with your children. To really be safe you're going to need significantly more money than you think you will. You also aren't accounting for inflation, which means as you age either you're going to have to cut your expenses ~3% a year or you're going to have to increase your withdrawls ~3% a year.

I don't know what the story is with these retired by 30 people, but I would be willing to bet a fair number of them will find themselves broke and returning to work at some point in their lives.

> You are making the assumption that getting an 8% return is something that is easy and safe to do.

But it is. It's as safe as anything you can name. Or would you prefer a bank savings account, insured against loss, that produces a return of less than 1%?

A bank savings account is safe by one definition, but since it's an example of sanctioned corporate theft, it's not safe at all.

> The assumption that your money won't run out is not a given.

That assumption depends on the wisdom of those who run the accounts. There are any number of ways to prevent eroding the principal, primarily by paying attention to investment growth and inflation.

> I don't know what the story is with these retired by 30 people, but I would be willing to bet a fair number of them will find themselves broke and returning to work at some point in their lives.

Well, I happen to be one who successfully retired young. I wrote a best-selling program (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Writer) in 1980 (wen I was 35), made a bundle, and retired. I sailed solo around the world for four years, had a lot of adventures, and every year I travel to Alaska in my latest boat to photograph grizzly bears. And in constant dollars, I have approximately the same nest egg that I did when I started.

It's simple -- all you need to do is pay attention to your investments and to inflation.

> You also aren't accounting for inflation, which means as you age either you're going to have to cut your expenses ~3% a year or you're going to have to increase your withdrawls ~3% a year.

What? No, all you need to do is adjust your withdrawals to account for inflation. That's simple -- it's as simple as multiplying two or three numbers together as in my prior post.

Required nest egg = desired annual income * inflation factor / investment return

Nest egg = $50K * 1.03 / 0.08 = $644K

This could obviously be rearranged to change the expected annual income instead of the size of the nest egg.

And if the rate of inflation changes, you change the inflation factor and recompute before going to the bank.

> But it is. It's as safe as anything you can name.

Having $625,000 and hoping for an 8% return to sustain your retirement is not nearly as safe as, say, having $2 million dollars to sustain your retirement.

If you've only got so much money, sure, trying to live off the interest is not a terrible strategy. If we're talking retirement planning (which I thought we were), then planning to live off 8% interest of a minimal amount of savings is NOT a good strategy to shoot for. It is far better to be conservative, plan to have a larger amount of savings and invest in safer options (such as bonds) and plan to have enough money to sustain you for 30 years.

Now of course if it comes time to retire and you only have $500k to make last, you're obviously going to want to take some greater risks with your investments and live as minimally as possible and hope for the best.

This is why I made my initial point, that I can see elderly suicides rising in the future. What's going to happen when the market doesn't go your way and at 80 years old you're out of money and your kids have their own problems? At that point you don't have a lot to look forward to other than living on welfare and watching your health decline...

> If you've only got so much money, sure, trying to live off the interest is not a terrible strategy. If we're talking retirement planning (which I thought we were), then planning to live off 8% interest of a minimal amount of savings is NOT a good strategy to shoot for.

Of course it is. It's the most obvious and most reliable strategy to plan for, regardless of how much money you have. Do you suppose Warren Buffett has a cash slush fund stashed away in his mattress for his retirement?

> This is why I made my initial point, that I can see elderly suicides rising in the future.

That might happen. It might happen because people can't plan their lives very well.

> Now of course if it comes time to retire and you only have $500k to make last, you're obviously going to want to take some greater risks with your investments and live as minimally as possible and hope for the best.

How is that a problem, and how does it contradict the idea that one should plan a retirement based on investments?

I think your objection is not to prudent investments but to the unfairness of life. If so, go ahead -- complain about how unfair life is, but in the meantime, save some money for your retirement.

You're assuming no return on capital after inflation. $1.5M would be way more than you need to retire on 25,000 per year.

At four percent return after inflation, you would need 625,000 dollars to sustain a 25,000/year lifestyle indefinitely. Four percent per year is about what you can expect for long-term returns on a slightly stock-heavy diversified portfolio.

The above reasoning assumes no lifestyle inflation due to advances in technology (there were no LCD TVs in 1980), and also assumes that you will be incapable of earning another dollar after you retire.

Is that true or is it just a shift in culture where people blow all their money on crap they don't need, disposable convenience, and live a more "up-scale" life style instead of saving for retirement?

Yep! Maybe a $25K car and a smaller house is better.

Anyone can retire comfortably and even early, sure. Retiring at 30 takes commitment most people aren't interested in making, however. And of course you have people like me who have no interest in retiring until I have to because I'm crazy enough to love what I do.

But regardless you can't deny the fact that with wages decreasing over the past 20+ years in comparison to inflation, it is absolutely more difficult to save for retirement. Regardless of your financial choices, if you have less money after spending the minimum require to sustain yourself, you will have less to save for retirement. That doesn't mean it's impossible to retire, just more difficult. Perhaps you used to be able to have a pretty nice house and car and still be safe in retirement, and now you have to drive a cheap used car and live in a more modest home to do it. There are more sacrifices to make...

I think the current working generation is going to have a difficult time too because a lot of us have seen our parents grow up and retire with ease thanks to pensions. When you witness retirement as being a pretty simple thing with no real money concerns it makes it unlikely you're going to sit down and really think about how screwed you might be. After all it was no problem for your parents. Yet when it's your turn and there is no pension and your social security payout has been cut to 70%, well, things are going to be rough.

There are a good number of people which aren't fiscally responsible, only taking action when it reaches a level of crisis.

BankRate.com did a survey a while back... http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-06-25/business/chi-2... ... that showed some interesting numbers in terms of emergency funds (28% having none, only about 25% having the recommended 6 months). Half of the respondents indicating their net worth had no change year over year? I can cite far too many anecdotes that could corroborate that, across the age spectrum.

Personally I've stuck to the 50/30/20 rule of Needs/Wants/Savings for about 6 years. Now that's shifting more to 30/30/40 as my income has significantly increased while my "monthly nut" hasn't really budged. I have about 2 years of living expenses in my emergency fund, only because I watched my father go for 2 years and 3 months without work between 2003 and 2005.

reminds me of a TV ad for Chinese New Year from Petronas, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3NDaZ2p6ug (see the poster's comment for English translation).

Been to Korea 4 times. To work(read slave off by choice), while my visa was business. On whichever weekend I was left alone by my firm I spent it in travelling around, trying things out, meeting people and trying to strike a conversation. Elderly people were extremely polite and courteous and extremely reserved too. Maybe because of the huge language barrier(any language other than Korean has very limited reception in Korea) which is IMHO, though very difficult for me, something South Koreans should be proud of - being self sufficient without English(the colonial hangover) which has crept into social DNA everywhere else.

Yes, the 'family' seems to be non-existent in Korea now, following the western tracks. This assumption is based upon external observation and talking to my Korean guest-house people, some staff who are from India/Pakistan/Nepal(either Korean citizens now or having lived their long), colleagues(friends let's say) who ever opened up on such matters(usually after a few drinks). I can confirm that after a few drinks every society becomes one and social taboos are duly fd off. Most open were(once they are open) Korean females friends I have known their, whether met in office or outside - they talked very animatedly about their parents and how they don't find time for each other and most likely will never find it. They also are worried whether their own state is going to be worse than this. Here's the last line of the article, "When I see these old people, I see how my own generation will die.".

One answer was common. Your parents bring you up till you get your job and are on your feet, after that you are on your own. And they(parents) are on their own too!

They usually spend their time in shops alone and sitting alone in those park benches with those stoic faces. A very healthy life style/food makes the matters worse(as in loneliness) as the life expectancy is quite high in SK. Maybe that's a saving grace in India(my country) as families are slowly disappearing here too, and/or turning into dysfunctional arrangements which is not even a distant resemblance of glorious old Indian family.

As for social care - politicians are very corrupt and do surpass even US standards. In US at least even heavyweights get long imprisonments. In Korea they get parliamentary pardon. Nobody cares about national elderly population(besides, just paying bills is hardly they want/need). So, while everyone is busy taking share prices higher and higher and building new things, the last generation - which is no longer a workforce - is left behind in the race; mercilessly abandoned.

"without English(the colonial hangover)"

Korea was never colonized by English-speakers, as far as I know.

Japanese, yes.

I referred to the main reason behind spread of English. Yes, Korea was never colonized by the English and they don't speak Japanese either.

"Maybe because of the huge language barrier(any language other than Korean has very limited reception in Korea) which is IMHO, though very difficult for me, something South Koreans should be proud of"

Proud to speak only one language? Is this the same kind of pride as looking down on people marrying someone from another country? The same kind of pride as never having eaten foreign food? These are not things to be proud of.

This was about self-sufficiency in a one's own language. The mother tongue. Like the British are in English and the Germans are in German and Chinese are in Mandarin(or Chinese).

Of course it's good to learn other languages and I, myself, am learning Spanish(though everybody recommend German but it was too stiff for me).

>>These are not things to be proud of.

I stand my statement(again, in the context of self-sufficiency) and that is everything to be proud of.

Will talk about my home country. Indians learn and emphasize on English just because they will get jobs, not because they have love for this language. In cities(here in Bangalore too) kids are learning English first. Hell, some even learn French(or so) after English and then they, maybe, shall learn their mother tongue. I have not seen any single parent of a toddler talk to him/her in the malls in their mother tongue. They always use English which is something to be very much ashamed of. Fortunately I didn't see this in Korea. A big thumbs up to them :-)

"any language other than Korean has very limited reception in Korea"

That's not about being self-sufficient. It's just lack of knowledge.

I see we do not seem to agree at all here. I respect your opinion but I am forced to say - no, it's not.

If what you say is to be true then there would be other countries which would be the most stupid places on earth(no names here).

They are fine with Korean. They can do almost anything in their own language, so they hardly need to learn English(which is changing now) but not knowing English(or any other language) doesn't at all mean lack of 'knowledge'. Knowledge is not just learning foreign languages or English for that matter.

Why do you think more and more people learning German and Mandarin today? Certainly not because they think they will turn genius(from stupid) but because they will find jobs in those countries and they can use their knowledge/skills with the help the new language in those countries.

Now, I do not see any any German learning Hindi or Korean. Do you?

"Now, I do not see any any German learning Hindi or Korean. Do you?"

Yes, I do. I see them learning languages that they are likely to find a use for beyond their own. Many Germans speak two languages, and many can get by in three. The Dutch are generally fantastic; I know Dutch people who are conversational in four. Most Indians I meet get by in Hindi, English and often a third local dialect.

>>Most Indians I meet get by in Hindi, English and often a third local dialect.>>

The phrase is generally used by people who don't really know "who are most of the Indian" :-). Please do not be offended. I take you were either a tourist in India or met Indians abroad who were either travelling or working there.

And whatever people you met in India go by "English" for the very reason in mentioned in OC and Hindi is like mother tongue for around half of India and also because of the way lives of Indians are intertwined but have different language they communicate either in English or Hindi. I am sure how many languages we Indians speak in various parts(states) of the country and it is spoken as in you speak German in Germany and Spanish in Spain and Portuguese in Portugal and I didn't even count dialects.

Hmm... welcome to life as an American.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com