Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 355 posts

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

#221

Post by paul_milovanov »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #2

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…

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

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

#222

Post by ggreer »

aaron_m04 wrote: post #158
natalyarostova wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If managers and executives are so overpaid, why aren't top firms outcompeted by companies that offer lower wages for such positions? Lower wages would allow those companies to offer the same services at lower prices and take over the market.

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

#223

Post by Domenic_S »

ceejayoz wrote: post #148
Domenic_S wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's the remainder of your premium going to come from when you're only paying 10% salary for it? Private insurance companies sure aren't going to reduce their prices.

Can we stop pretending the rest of the developed world doesn't exist? The per-capita healthcare spending of Europe, public and private, is about half what ours is with similar health outcomes. We are an extreme outlier. https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm The remainder of the premium stops going into the pockets of insurance middlemen .

> the premium stops going into the pockets of insurance middlemen.

This just replaces one middleman (insurance co) for another (government).

I can tell by the downvotes that my point whooshed over everyone's head -- my point was essentially yours. Changing who pays isn't going to change anything. We have to change what gets charged.

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

#224

Post by DaniFong »

whatshisface wrote: post #149
DaniFong wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You could give the survey to random people, and when somebody dies, you go back and find their most recent survey. That's their exit poll.

yeah, that could work if it was wide scale enough.

apparently google and facebook already have some kind of tech that estimates if people are vulnerable to suicidal ideation based on searches ("hey google, how do I kill myself painlessly?" gives the national suicide prevention hotline -- good)

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

#225

Post by codingslave »

filoleg wrote: post #124
samatman wrote: post #67

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…

Right and this is where plausible deniability comes in from the point of view of the pharmaceutical companies. Drug studies are problematic because nothing happens in a vacuum.

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

#226

Post by Domenic_S »

sp332 wrote: post #177
Domenic_S wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Common folk are barely recovered from the recession. By what measure?

% change in real mean wealth. https://psmag.com/economics/wealth-inequality-and-the-great-...

When you measure wealth as including home equity, as this article does, this is bound to happen in 2007. I'm not sure it tells us anything meaningful except that home prices were way out of whack and for many people their home is a substantial % of their wealth.

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

#227

Post by mayniac »

Kiro wrote: post #190
jimbokun wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be viable if tied to a generous UBI.

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

Sweden has unions which negotiate minimum wages for everyone in their industry. So yes, nationally there is no minimum wage, but in practice, almost everyone is covered by a minimum wage.

Considering that almost 70% of people in Sweden are part of a union* compared to about 10% in the USA, scrapping federal/state minimum wages in America would be catastrophic, at least in the short term.

*and those that aren't will still benefit from union set minimum wages

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

#228

Post by satya71 »

pkaye wrote: post #93
gremlinsinc wrote: post #2

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 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#/...

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

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

#229

Post by Brain_Thief »

0xffff2 wrote: post #127
henryfjordan wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were starving and I offered you a job washing dishes for $2/hour, would you take it to be able to afford some rice+beans tonight or would you rather not eat tonight? You're worth more than $2/hour. We need minimum wage laws to protect people from being crunched by capitalists exploiting labor market inefficiencies.

> You're worth more than $2/hour. Says who?

It was a parameter stipulated in a hypothetical example.

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

#230

Post by pmoriarty »

rayiner wrote: post #196
pkaye wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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#/...

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.

I'd like to see the correlations after things such as how many close family members and friends one has are taken in to account.

I suspect that the larger and more cohesive one's support network is, the less likely you are to commit suicide, and that the more socially isolated one is, the poorer one is, and the sicker one is, the more likely one is to feel hopeless and see suicide as the only way out.

Other important factors are things like how many recent traumatic events (such as relationship breakups, serious illness, bereavement, rape, witnessing or being a victim of violence, etc) one has suffered, recent alcohol and drug use/abuse, and then very hard to quantify things like how good one is at coping with such events.

You can't really boil all this down to any one factor, and there's no one solution to any of these issues. But, yes, reducing misery (whether economic or social) should help.

Post reply on HN