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

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

#151
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 f…

It worked out great for the rich, which is exactly who was telling us about the Siren song. So in a very toxic way they weren't lying, they just weren't talking about (the metaphorical) you.

If you haven't seen it, you might appreciate this article by Eric Weinstein. It details explicitly how the NSF went about betraying us. https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-gove...

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

#152
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

I think many of the poorest would happily choose a flat $1000/month over the benefit systems we have in place now. But even for those who opted out in favor of existing aid programs, I think the societal benefits of additional liquidity from everyone else getting the dividend would lead to more consumer spending, and therefore better employment opportunities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand-side_economics

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

#153
post #4

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,…

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.-...

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

#154

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

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?

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

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Not arguing either way, as I don't think I am knowledgeable enough on the subject to do so, but I feel like there is a lot of potential to confuse correlation and causation. It simply could just be that "children and adolescents taking antidepressants" are already in a high risk group that is 3 times as likely "to have suicidal thoughts or to attempt suicide", and antidepressants reduce that number to "twice as likel…

This is, of course, the very first thing any reputable study tries to control for; presumably the placebo and active populations are both taken from populations with comparable diagnoses.

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

#156

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, insecu…

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...

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

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Ironically, this happens because the medicine is working. FTA: > When a person’s depression starts to lift, he or she may feel less hopeless and helpless. That sounds like an improvement, but when people feel less helpless but still feel depressed, they may think about suicide as a way out, whereas before they were too immobilized to make a suicide plan. For that reason, a decrease in the symptoms of depression can i…

While plausible, that paragraph is speculation; it's also plausible that antidepressants push some subgroup of patients toward suicidal ideation.

I'm unaware of any study that answers this question definitively, but I'm interested, so if anyone sees something useful, please chime in.

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

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

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/Pric…

Cases like the Manhattan project team are rare. Cases like grossly overpaid managers and executives in FIRE industries are common.

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

#159

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, insecu…

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...

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

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

#160
post #4

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,…

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

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