For suicide prevention, try raising the minimum wage, research suggests

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/08/794568118/raising-the-minimum-wage-by-1-may-prevent-thousands-of-suicides-study-shows

by tshannon • 7 years ago

299 340 7 years ago

npr.org

gremlinsinc3• 7 years ago

I wonder what would happen to the suicide rate with medicare for all, and creating a max-wage that is (avg of contractors + employees * 150), or something similar, w/ additional 'bonus' multipliers for increasing # of U.S. hired.

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.

leetcrew2• 7 years ago

my guess is an effective system of healthcare and/or UBI would decrease the suicide rate somewhat, because people wouldn't feel so helpless.

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.

lazyasciiart4• 7 years ago

It doesn't encourage hiring more employees - how would that affect the average employee pay? You just have to pay more to the ones you have.

austincheney4• 7 years ago

Suicidal ideation is a mental health illness. Financial desperation is stressful, but that stress is not an indication of mental health distress. I don’t see these two things as having any correlation and I am not aware of any related evidence adjoining those two.

If finances are a factor in suicidal ideation then it’s a secondary consideration in addition to more prominent concerns.

Frondo• 7 years ago

I like the incentive that a maximum wage introduces: increase the pay of your staff and subcontractors hired by your company to raise your wage ceiling.

I can't see a drawback, aside from someone at that ceiling simply wanting to raise their salary without raising those working for them.

emptybits• 7 years ago

Re/ medicare for all ... Canada has universal health care yet a very similar suicide rate to the USA.[1] Canada doesn't have a livable minimum wage either. Each province sets its own. There is talk of UBI experiments.

[1] https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2011/02/us-vs-can...

zeroxfe• 7 years ago

That's 2011 data. Most recent data is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...

* Global rate: 10.5 per 100,000 people * Canada rate: 10.4 per 100,000 people * US rate: 13.7 per 100,000 people

godelski2• 7 years ago

But there's other factors there. Do we know if there was a change after Canada switched to universal health care?

solinent4• 7 years ago

Our model (Canada) doesn't include free ambulances or drugs, it's better to compare to the European model. We do have good welfare programs here however, and drugs are much cheaper anyways.

claudeganon6• 7 years ago

But by contrast, the UK and it’s NHS has almost half the rate of the US.

ashes-of-sol• 7 years ago

We have universal health care, but that does not typically cover dental, mental, or pharma costs. I think our system has been allowed to be mediocre because it still looks good compared to the US

14• 7 years ago

I really hope we do not get a UBI in any current forms. I know the second the stores realize that every person now has 'x' amount of dollars to spend, they will raise the prices to match the most they can extract. What I wish Canada would do instead is establish some sort of Universal Basic Rights like every man woman and child is entitled to 5lbs of potatoes a week, 1 gallon of milk, 1 pound of carrots, ect. I as a Canadian do not want a check every week, the next day I can be told my cost of living has gone up. I want to know I can eat and shelter myself at the end of the day. How we can do that I do not know and am thankful I am in a good financial position to not have to worry about it.

blaser-waffle• 7 years ago

The UBI experiments in ON were recently killed by Ford.

(the leader, not the car company; the brother of the crack smoking mayor, the white one)

lukifer3• 7 years ago

UBI would also probably help.

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.

hanniabu2• 7 years ago

I can attest to this. I've been in both situations where I was very financially comfortable and where I've been in more financially risk situations on and off. You definitely have higher stress, anxiety, and develop negative habits at financially risky times. And for reference the were longer time frames: 5 years well off, 3 years poor, 2 well off, 2 poor

claudeganon6• 7 years ago

Without other universal floors on things like housing and healthcare, UBI is just going to be eaten up by those costs. An indirect sop to these sectors isn’t going to do much to improve the average person’s quality of life.

Miner49er• 7 years ago

For the middle class maybe. His implementation will leave the poorest worse off.

claudeganon6• 7 years ago

There’s something obviously wrong with the U.S. because suicide is now the second leading cause of death among young people and has jumped 50+ percent since the Great Recession:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/opinion/suicide-young-peo...

whiddershins5• 7 years ago

What would you prefer the second-leading cause of death be for young people?

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.”

pkaye• 7 years ago

There is nearly a 2x difference in rate between white and native americans vs blacks, asians and hispanics. I'm wondering if there is a good understanding of that difference. I don't think it is just economic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States#/...

DaniFong2• 7 years ago

That stood out to me as well, indeed the numbers vary a lot nationally and ethnically.

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...

luckydata2• 7 years ago

Because if you're told you're supposed to "make it" since birth, and you don't, you feel like a piece of shit. Marginalized communities have been told the other story, every little thing is a win. Difference in expectations is huge, and source of all sort of bad things (like racial resentment etc...).

Solution: make this country slightly less "dog eat dog" and you'll solve a LOT of social issues almost overnight.

rayiner2• 7 years ago

I mean the data by race suggests it’s not economic, right? Black, Hispanic, and Asian people have half the suicide rate of non-Hispanic white people.

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.

satya71• 7 years ago

Social connections are the biggest anti-dote to depression and suicide. I suspect Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics have stronger social bonds.

spodek• 7 years ago

If you're going to disaggregate, by sex is the major axis. If the gap reversed, it would likely become one of the greatest issues to solve, whatever it took.

amelius• 7 years ago

I think a max wage totally makes sense, because nobody is more than a modest constant times more productive than anyone else, and anything created by a person is always built on existing knowledge and constructs created by society. Also, risk does not really exist anymore these days (with minimum wages, financial constructs around bankruptcy, etc.)

natalyarostova3• 7 years ago

A max wage is insane government overreach. If I want to make a deal with someone else where I’ll work to do something and in return they pay me a portion of the surplus value I create, there is no justification, moral or economic, to cap that amount.

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?

leobakerhytch• 7 years ago

A lesson from history shows this not to be the case: hand-wrought nails were such a precious and militarily significant commodity in Roman England, that when the legion left, they painstakingly concealed their hoard to prevent the locals gaining access to them.

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.

codegrappler• 7 years ago

High risk jobs need to be compensated accordingly as well. Artificially capping wages will dissuade people from entering those fields.

naniwaduni• 7 years ago

because nobody is more than a modest constant times more productive than anyone else,

Having met people causing net negative productivity, this is pretty hard to believe. Why do you expect this to be true?

kardos2• 7 years ago

A max wage will just lead to workarounds, hiring each family member at the maximum rate for instance, or schemes where a family member sues the company and the company "loses", etc. Is it worth it to play that game?

jtolmar4• 7 years ago

Your heart is in the right place, but the richest people derive their wealth from capital investment, not from wages. A maximum wage would address the gap between executives and workers, but not between investors and workers. Since the investors hold the power, the money that's no longer paid to executives would just go to them.

imtringued3• 7 years ago

It doesn't make any sense because it would have to be readjusted ahead of time all the time. A minimum wage is allowed to lag behind because nothing stops you from paying more but if people have 20% higher wages after 15 years of inflation why should they have to wait until the government approves a pay raise?

eplanit• 7 years ago

There is no statistical support of these ideas, though. Suicide rates in countries with Socialist economies are higher than in the U.S. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...

ixwt• 7 years ago

This is disingenuous. It doesn't classify by Socialist, but by country. Russia is #3 on global suicides, and when I think of socialist healthcare, my first thought isn't Russia.

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.

DanBC7• 7 years ago

I feel like everyone posting the link to that article needs to also post this quote from it in their comment.

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.

mjevans• 7 years ago

(a) Maximum Wage and/or wealth tax is the best way to fight inequality.

Raising the floor without modifying how much or how quickly those at the top earn only makes those barely above the bottom relatively poorer.

silexia3• 7 years ago

The wealth tax is the best way to fight inequality. A maximum wage would just discourage our best entrepreneurs. I agree that raising the floor without changing anything else doesn't do much.

thebean11• 7 years ago

(avg of contractors + employees * 150)

Hmm, this seems suspiciously biased towards certain types of business (for example, tech CEOs would make way more than retail CEOs)

andrei_says_2• 7 years ago

Have been reading Rutger Bregman’s book and UBI seems to be an incredible money saver and immense benefit. It would take however a big jump in consciousness to do something like this because who would take the shorty jobs paying 1/3 living wage if no one is afraid Of homelessness?

rubinelli• 7 years ago

If nobody is taking that job for a salary that is economically viable, then it shouldn't exist. We shouldn't make people waste their finite time on this Earth doing pointless jobs under the threat of homelessness or starvation.

MiroF6• 7 years ago

I think there are better policies than a UBI, but in face the "problem" you are indicating seems more like a benefit than a flaw.

paul_milovanov• 7 years ago

guys, guys... minimum wage, maximum wage... we got to go deeper! uniform constant wage!!!

JDiculous• 7 years ago

Don't forget student loans. Having six figures in student loans simply from getting a masters degree is enough to make one almost consider abandoning the U.S, especially when you consider that the older generation who caused this never experienced it themselves.

My most depressing times were when I was unemployed (not to be confused with "funemployed") and not making any money.

silexia3• 7 years ago

The best form of a maximum wage would be a simple wealth tax in place of the income tax. It doesn't discourage entrepreneurs continuing to work, but it doesn't allow wealth to accumulate in idle hands.

crooked-v2• 7 years ago

As the old saying goes: Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy a jet ski. And you never see an unhappy person riding a jet ski.

winrid• 7 years ago

Same with spicy food. Hard to be upset with some really spicy hot pot.

tempsy3• 7 years ago

making a living wage, and I would hardly call $1 above the current min wage a "living" wage, has nothing to do with having more money to buy things with and everything to do with feeling psychologically safe from spiraling into debt and possible homelessness.

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.

funklute• 7 years ago

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.

mnowicki• 7 years ago

I have my own little saying that I always say in response to that saying: Lack of money can definitely cause unhappiness though

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

Frost1x• 7 years ago

This is the part people fail to recognize: in our society, money is an abstraction that provides necessities and wants. If you cant provide necessities, then of course you're unhappy. Many people can't and most everyone cuts corners and makes sacrifices to meet needs.

lazyasciiart4• 7 years ago

Yes - money is directly related to happiness until you're making 'enough', for some locally defined value of enough. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2018/02/26/d...

Gibbon1• 7 years ago

Another hidden need that is studiously ignored is having enough margin that you can help others. I think that something that hits men very hard when they are struggling financially.

eeZah7Ux• 7 years ago

This misses the point. There is no one "money" in our psychology.

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.

adammunich• 7 years ago

As someone with a jet ski, it is indeed hard to be unhappy on a jet ski.

blakesterz• 7 years ago

I always heard the 2 greatest days of owning a jet ski are the first day, and the day you finally sell it. I've had several people say they get old REALLY fast. Kind of like pools, get a friend/neighbor with a pool and a jet ski, now THAT's happiness.

blowski• 7 years ago

That's rubbish. A lot of rich people suffer from depression, to the point of suicide.

godelski2• 7 years ago

That's missing the point of the saying.

crooked-v2• 7 years ago

Beyond the surface-level pithiness of the joke, the point is that having money may not guarantee happiness, but it makes it a lot easier to distract oneself with viscerally pleasant experiences and engage in new hobbies that may in fact lead to genuine happiness.

Can_Not• 7 years ago

They did a study once that indicated the first 95k buys happiness, but money after that, not so much.

dlp2115• 7 years ago

"Money isn't everything, not having it is." -Kanye

Or, money is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for happiness.

elfexec2• 7 years ago

Money can't buy happiness, but it prevents one of the worst things in the world for people/families - financial stress. I bet financial stress is one of the major causes of divorce/destruction of families, child underdevelopment ( mentally/physically ), crime, suicide, etc.

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.

ngngngng• 7 years ago

I was reading the other day that typically mass shootings happen during a recession, and right now is a confusing time because the economy is supposedly doing fantastic, yet we keep having mass shootings.

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."

opportune• 7 years ago

My suspicion is yes. Doesn’t much matter if mean economic indicators are trending up while the majority of people are becoming worse-off.

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.

lsiebert2• 7 years ago

The market is great, and a lot of money from the trump tax cuts has been used for buybacks that kept prices rising, but wages have stagnated as expenses such as health care, child care, education, etc have all increased rapidly.

bostonvaulter2• 7 years ago

So said another way, the market is great but the average american is the same or worse off.

keiferski• 7 years ago

This seems pretty reductionist. Every event isn’t attributable to economics.

MisterBastahrd3• 7 years ago

Those with investments have a much different economic situation than those who don't, to the point that it almost doesn't matter how well the economy is doing for the lowest wealth classes. Minimum wage in a bull economy is the same as minimum wage in bear economy.

hanniabu2• 7 years ago

The economy is only doing great for businesses. Common folk are barely recovered from the recession. So yes, I would say it's definitely due to inequality and a breakdown of indicators.

Domenic_S7• 7 years ago

Common folk are barely recovered from the recession.

By what measure?

sdegutis• 7 years ago

Fulton Sheen says that to stop violence, we need to resort to violence:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHaizmIj3ck&t=2000s

taborj3• 7 years ago

If you want to make a significant dent in the mass shooting problem (by the way, the FBI's crime stats page [0] is illuminating on many subjects, not the least of which is that violent crime rates are way down from earlier in the 2000s [1]), you need to start looking at why someone feels shooting up a bunch of innocent people is a valid response to whatever stressor they're feeling. Maybe there is an income inequality, and that can cause someone to feel angry. But there's a leap that needs to be made from "angry" to "mass murderer", and it'd be helpful to understand why that is. I suspect it's mental.

[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.-...

DuskStar• 7 years ago

I was reading the other day that typically mass shootings happen during a recession, and right now is a confusing time because the economy is supposedly doing fantastic, yet we keep having mass shootings.

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.

cartercole• 7 years ago

The minimum wage should be 0 - sincerely any good economist

tempsy3• 7 years ago

it might as well be - "gig" work is not bound by min wage laws.

ask an instacart worker how that's worked out for them.

Ohn02• 7 years ago

lol the minimum / livable wage is just another joke in lawmaking with vast loopholes.

keeganjw2• 7 years ago

The minimum wage should be livable - sincerely any good person

fennecfoxen• 7 years ago

The minimum wage should be livable - sincerely any good person

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.

MuffinFlavored6• 7 years ago

Livable to what extent? You should be able to afford food (what quality of food? do good people also believe everybody deserves to eat filet mignon/comparable on occasion?), transportation (which in some cases means car + gas + maintenance + insurance) + housing (what kind of housing? rent a room in a low cost area? have your own single family home?) + family (should you be encouraged to have 3 children aka mouths to feed if you are low income)?

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)

commandlinefan• 7 years ago

Well, people _should_ never get cancer or any other debilitating disease, but just because we want something to be real doesn't mean it is.

jimbokun2• 7 years ago

But why tie it to a wage, instead of something like UBI?

falcolas2• 7 years ago

... who would never work for 0 themselves, even though their own work arguably provides little tangible value.

anonuser123456• 7 years ago

Exactly. People won't work for less than their worth. So a minimum wage doesn't accomplish much except set a price floor that excludes low value add workers from the economy.

tombert2• 7 years ago

That's a common trope, but there have been studies indicating that minimum wage doesn't have a significant effect on unemployment. [0] [1]

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.

OscarCunningham• 7 years ago

Assuming that's accurate, we should set the minimum wage to infinity.

Ohn02• 7 years ago

It's also common sense

kangnkodos3• 7 years ago

Economists can't run experiments like other scientists. In a way, they are more like historians.

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.

Noos2• 7 years ago

The problem though is that a lot of goods sold are essentially optional and may not be able to withstand the price increase. Like I said upthread, this would act as a fitness check on businesses and weed out a lot of employers.

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.

linuxasheviller• 7 years ago

Any good economist would point to the economic inefficiencies created on the whole market by the externalities of the human suffering this would cause.

jimbokun2• 7 years ago

Might be viable if tied to a generous UBI.

Kiro2• 7 years ago

There are a lot of functioning countries with a minimum wage of 0 (e.g. Sweden).

codingslave4• 7 years ago

Really doubt this. Instead I would look into the connection between anti depressants/anti psychotics and suicide. There's research of strong connections, but immunity is claimed by the drug companies, "because they were already depressed/mentally unhealthy when put on the drugs". Mental health professionals and managers at large drug companies need to start going to jail for over-prescribing psychiatric drugs.

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.

seibelj2• 7 years ago

SSRIs saved my life, I don't like such wild claims. Don't be afraid of psychiatric drugs if you are hurting.

codingslave4• 7 years ago

Are you still on them?

Pfhreak• 7 years ago

+1, antidepressants are not magic and don't work for everyone, but they worked amazingly for me.

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.

samatman3• 7 years ago

These things are not mutually exclusive:

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...

rjkennedy98• 7 years ago

I couldn't agree with you more. Its sad that so many people have dismissed this possibility out of hand. Even the FDA agrees that there is a risk (which is why there are black box labels on antidepressants).

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.

chadlavi• 7 years ago

Pardon my French but what the heck do you think is driving rising depression rates and opioid addiction if not economic pressures? Do you really think those are unrelated?

notadoc3• 7 years ago

A large volume of research shows depression/suicide/drug abuse/etc are directly related to economic stress, but that's a much harder topic to address so it's ignored in favor of easy scapegoats and bogeyman.

notadoc3• 7 years ago

Stemming the flow of cheap fentanyl dumped into the United States by China

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.

codingslave4• 7 years ago

OK, and how's the "war on drugs" going thus far?

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.

sysbin• 7 years ago

I'm doubtful the discussion will go anywhere productive but I think part of your argument is an assumption, "And now you want to imprison doctors for treating pain and taking care of patients?" because filling a role of a job to just prescribe medication isn't really trying and when we don't actually know what the outcome will be. Following a protocol isn't really trying is all.

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.

llamataboot• 7 years ago

Are you claiming that a $1/hour increase in your wage makes you less likely to be on an SSRI? I'm not sure I follow your logic here...

mnm12• 7 years ago

I couldn't agree more about psychiatric medication but that doesn't mean there aren't multiple causes. Also, drug addiction in many cases is caused by low wages and terrible economic conditions so addressing the addiction needs to address the underlying issues which are low wages and a terrible economy for normal people.

theredbox5• 7 years ago

Well America has a difficult problem to solve. And that is its workforce is insanely expensive. Or lets say the rest of the world is insanely poor compared to the americans.

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.

degenerate2• 7 years ago

Does anyone have access to the paper? Raising the minimum wage means less jobs will be available, as employers cut costs and perform layoffs. My assumption is the paper neglects to factors this into their analysis, but if they do, I'd love to read it.

edit: paper shared below!

antoineMoPa• 7 years ago

Do you have links to articles to backup your assumption?

degenerate2• 7 years ago

No I don't.

tempsy3• 7 years ago

please read any study on cities that have substantially raised min wage in recent years (like Seattle) and understand how wrong you are about there being "fewer jobs" as a result before making such ridiculous statements

theredbox5• 7 years ago

Can you point me to a study other than the one in Seattle? I have only read about Seattle but have not really researched it thoroughly.

inanutshellus2• 7 years ago

Seattle's raising of the minimum wage was arguably symbolic.

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.

kangnkodos3• 7 years ago

The Seattle study was done during a time period when the economy of the city was going up significantly. The authors write in the paper that it's possible that if the minimum wage was not raised, it could have resulted in even more people employed.

whiddershins5• 7 years ago

That’s probably accurate, but hotly debated. I would be very cautious about stating it as fact, since there are many competing models and studies about the effects of raising minimum wage, and the one thing that is clear is that no one knows for sure.

paulgb• 7 years ago

This is the paper:

https://jech.bmj.com/content/jech/early/2020/01/03/jech-2019...

downerending• 7 years ago

Thanks. It's worth noting that they're studying people 18-64 with high school or less education.

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.

keeganjw2• 7 years ago

The well-being of people in countries with high minimum wages and strong social safety nets, compared to the US, says otherwise.

anigbrowl2• 7 years ago

You know, a lot of basic economic models rely on underlying assumptions like conditions of perfect competition or zero transaction costs which people tend to forget about when trying to apply those models to the real world.

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.

MuffinFlavored6• 7 years ago

What would increased minimum wage due to small business (<$50m/yr in revenue)? Wouldn't it force them to cut shifts/hours/consolidate positions?

jotm3• 7 years ago

For $1/hour? I'd hope it would force them to review their expenses. But you're right, it won't, they'll just cut hours.

Someone1234• 7 years ago

If they could cut hours or staff numbers they already would have done so.

_qwfv• 7 years ago

Or raise prices, or accept less pay at the top.

earlINmeyerkeg3• 7 years ago

accept less pay at the top.

For a second there I thought you we're being serious!

marcosdumay2• 7 years ago

When everybody raises prices at the same time, business survive.

refurb2• 7 years ago

Only if demand is entirely in elastic.

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.

burmer• 7 years ago

Obligatory Mitchell and Webb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owI7DOeO_yg

jotm3• 7 years ago

Kaufman is planning future work to see whether depression, a risk factor for suicide, also decreases with wage hikes

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.

ComputerGuru2• 7 years ago

I’m all for fair pay, even if it means things (products or services) become more expensive. But therein is the problem: If the minimum wage is ten dollars an hour and you’re making twelve dollars an hour, that’s very different from minimum wage being twelve dollars and you’re making twelve dollars. Raising the minimum doesn’t just give minimum wage earners more money, it simultaneously devalues the money they receive. Does it devalue it at a rate proportionate to how much more they now make (on paper)? I don’t know. We almost certainly have to increase it (x+n)% to realize a benefit that on paper would come from an x% increase alone.

Globalization and protectionism also play a role here, and are a critical factor in the answer (think global minimum wage vs local minimum wage).

LeifCarrotson• 7 years ago

It does not devalue it if they're sharing demand for those products with people who make $50 an hour and a select few who make $1000 an hour - assuming those incomes don't go up proportional to the increase in minimum wage.

ComputerGuru2• 7 years ago

No, it definitely does. I’m not talking about the old “everyone’s income will just go up” defense. There is a “time added” cost that is a part of the price of any good or service (which may comprise only a part of the value added measure). Imagine a product that is created from raw materials so abundant as to be in and of themselves worthless. Its cost is purely the cost of the time (and effort, which is actually convertible into time) that went into it (amortizing the cost of tools and equipment, overhead, utilities, etc). This “time cost” is a component of any product or service for sale. If the wheel on your car used the same exact materials and the same exact manufacturing process but took ten times longer (just stretch every step out) it would cost more, and not only because they can make less of them.

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.

0000011111• 7 years ago

I see income inequality as a key issue here. I recently read the "Triumph of injustice" and came away with a changed view in our tax system. After reading the book, I now believe that any household with a net worth over $100 million should be subject to both an income and capital gains tax of 99%. In short folks with income come and or net worth at levels that surpass their ability to buy a life of finical security for several generations only increase income inequality.

High historically high levels of income inequality have torn countries apart.

https://wwnorton.com/books/the-triumph-of-injustice

whatshisface3• 7 years ago

That would not create the semi-communist world you're hoping for: today's rich people are already rich, and the effect would be stopping anybody new from becoming rich.

Kye• 7 years ago

> "and the effect would be stopping anybody new from becoming rich."

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?

simonsarris2• 7 years ago

I suggest you look at current income figures and try to come up with a plan where juicing the rich works. There's a reason Germany's 42% tax bracket starts at... €55,961

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.

ceejayoz7• 7 years ago

There's a reason Germany's 42% tax bracket starts at... €55,961

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...

throwawayhhakdl• 7 years ago

I think this is the way to go. A wealth tax is unfair. But an income tax rated on your wealth feels very elegant. The richer you are, the harder it is to get richer. Which feels like it is fair because the richer you are, the more you leverage societal structures to become wealthier.

aidenn02• 7 years ago

I think 99% is an overkill. If you assume 7% ROI and 2% inflation then a 70% top marginal bracket (combined with unifying capital gains and income) would make it very hard to maintain wealth.

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.

alexpetralia• 7 years ago

What about those who are already rich? Wouldn't this simply impair income mobility?

You would have to strip income inequality, then reduce income mobility - but inevitably someone would become wealthy, further cementing their lead.

tunesmith2• 7 years ago

That's interesting because... right now we have a system that examines income and taxes income.

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?

sp3322• 7 years ago

dv_dt2• 7 years ago

Property tax on homes is a wealth tax...

silexia3• 7 years ago

A simple wealth tax of 4-5% would completely eliminate idle wealth in a couple of decades and would not destroy the American way of bootstrapping yourself to wealth like a 99% tax would.

m0zg• 7 years ago

Doesn't seem plausible, _especially_ when unemployment is high.

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.

LatteLazy• 7 years ago

Correlation isn't causation.

Its actively harmful to pretend it is because it diverts from real research and actual solutions and

theredbox5• 7 years ago

I always thought about more of a hybrid model for the US. Something like a market socialism a la Singapore.

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.

notadoc3• 7 years ago

Not too surprising. Suicide is a death of despair, which are closely linked to job loss, income loss, love loss, family loss, pain, etc. Easing any of those scenarios should help reduce suicide.

mc323• 7 years ago

Alternatively stop exporting jobs and outsourcing joining a race to the bottom.

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.

linuxftw• 7 years ago

You mean domestic policies have been negatively impacting the labor force for decades now? Get outta town! It's almost like low-to-no tariffs and importing literal slave-produced goods has created economic incentives to produce things overseas.

mc323• 7 years ago

I agree with Bernie and Trump on protecting American workers. Everyone else just goes along with the siren song of more better value add jobs that never materialized for the affected population.

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.

elfexec2• 7 years ago

Alternatively stop exporting jobs and outsourcing joining a race to the bottom.

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.

jessant• 7 years ago

What about people who lose their jobs or don't get hired in the first place?

djohnston• 7 years ago

money won't make you happy, but being poor will make you miserable, especially in the US

criddell• 7 years ago

It seems like you need to be pretty damned sure before you try this. If they were to raise the minimum wage and suicides don't drop, do you put the minimum wage back where it was?

aaron695• 7 years ago

This is dumb.

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?

totaldude87• 7 years ago

wow, how about..

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..

earlINmeyerkeg3• 7 years ago

NO taxes till $40k-50k for a family

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.

harryh• 7 years ago

You're talking about quite literally like 80% of the entire tax revenue generated by the government.

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%.

dlp2115• 7 years ago

1 is already mostly true at the federal level.

MiroF6• 7 years ago

not for payroll it isn't

earlINmeyerkeg3• 7 years ago

Aren't there studies that show the suicide rate among married men is drastically lower than unmarried men? I really don't think it has anything to do with income (or at least to a significant degree) than it does with loneliness. Men's self worth is tied to his friends and wealth. It's hard to share your wealth if everybody else makes the same as you. So making more poor people "less poor" still wouldn't solve the problem among men not acquiring prestige or status that attracts people to them. It makes it incredibly easy to feel like a loser and ponder "whats the point?"

xupybd• 7 years ago

New Zealand has a high minimum wage https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=RMW

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."

ctdonath5• 7 years ago

Minimum wage: if you can't produce $X/hr in value, you're prohibited from producing at all.

I suspect raising that cutoff would increase suicides.

sir_kin• 7 years ago

Real world data disagrees with your suspicion. Might want to rethink your reasoning.

ctdonath5• 7 years ago

Point me to the data. Those who get higher wages may be happier, but those unemployed due to their work being ended for want of value would understandably despair. Seems like data easily shifted for sociopolitical benefit.

alecco• 7 years ago

Raising minimum wage will push automation even further, making currently productive people switch to be welfare-dependent. Financed by taxes on the tech industry. This is a recipe for dystopia.

dlp2115• 7 years ago

You have provided, and I'm not aware of any empirical evidence that this is true. There is also plenty of evidence to the contrary, see min wage increases in individual states, Australia, and NZ.

4AoZqrH2fsk5UB• 7 years ago

Something I think gets lost in discussions about mental health is that sometimes people’s lives are just really really shitty.

It doesn’t take a genetic predisposition to get to a dark place when your life is falling apart.

clSTophEjUdRanu• 7 years ago

Isn't it obvious that most of America's problems stem from life being shitty for very many people?

Clubber• 7 years ago

Yes, but the specifics are important. It's different for different people. Perverted justice system, news hysteria, jobs that are either awful or great, bad medical system, seems like every institution trying to rob you, war culture, political corruption from all sides, corporate dominance, civil forfeiture, bad public schools, expensive college, government encroachment on basic liberties, mob mentality laws, decades of the above; that's just off the top of my head. It's amazing we aren't worse off.

droithomme• 7 years ago

https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2018/home.htm

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.

HomeDeLaPot• 7 years ago

Does the effect last, or is it a short-term windfall effect?

rkho• 7 years ago

I'd also like to see the inclusion of compulsory personal finance and budgeting education in our education system, both during high school and college/university years. A lot of the stress that encompassed my life back when I was working in a retail environment came from worrying over bills which ballooned because of my own lack of budgeting. It's an important skill that everyone should be exposed to early on.

987831973fkeji• 7 years ago

Eh, I might kill myself in a year or two - more money would not change anything. The recent realization that I will never find a romantic partner despite being (relatively) rich, tall, good looking, sociable and sane has been crushing. At least if I had money problems I'd have something else to blame than myself.

vmchale• 7 years ago

infinite minimum wage = zero suicide

For suicide prevention, try raising the minimum wage, research suggests

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