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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

#261

Post by jtolmar »

amelius wrote: post #110
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…

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.)

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.

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

#262

Post by jtolmar »

leobakerhytch wrote: post #176
amelius wrote: post #110

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 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 interve…

Over a thousand years of technological advancement is not evidence of how effective some brilliant inventor is, given that humans do not live for thousands of years.

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

#263

Post by ianmcgowan »

austincheney wrote: post #54
leetcrew wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fee…

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.

"Suicidal ideation is a mental health illness." - this may be mostly true, but there are enough counter-examples to make this factually wrong. Terminally ill patients wanting euthanasia, bankrupt Wall Street brokers jumping from windows, and Romeo and Juliet (and other scorned lovers) would beg to differ.

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

#264

Post by jtolmar »

Kye wrote: post #114
whatshisface wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> "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?

No new people becoming rich is fine, but that plus keeping the existing ones is more than a little oligarchic.

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

#265

Post by bostonvaulter2 »

lsiebert wrote: post #10
ngngngng wrote: 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,…

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.

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

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

#266

Post by derefr »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #218
rayiner wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there evidence for this? An alternative explanation is that black and Hispanic people are more likely to be religious, and religious people have lower suicide rates in the United States. They are also more likely to have kids, which also is associated with lower suicide rates.

more likely to be religious That's not necessarily a contradiction, since churches double as social clubs and Christian charity means supporting your neighbour who is in trouble. So if you are active in a church you belong to a circle that is a little less dog-eat-dog. Same thing with immigrant communities.

> So if you are active in a church you belong to a circle that is a little less dog-eat-dog.

That would imply that life in the US ~300 years ago, when pretty much everyone belonged to a church, was less dog-eat-dog.

If anything, I would say it was the opposite. People would often shoot someone—someone who is just as likely as themselves to be a "good Christian"—just for being an interloper on their farmland, i.e. for having the opportunity (whether they took it or not) to make off with some of their turnips.

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

#267

Post by austincheney »

ianmcgowan wrote: post #263
austincheney wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Suicidal ideation is a mental health illness." - this may be mostly true, but there are enough counter-examples to make this factually wrong. Terminally ill patients wanting euthanasia, bankrupt Wall Street brokers jumping from windows, and Romeo and Juliet (and other scorned lovers) would beg to differ.

I wouldn’t count fiction as an indication of fact and Wall Street brokers under extreme social pressure to recover lost value may well be experiencing PTSD.

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

#268

Post by droithomme »

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.

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

#269

Post by anm89 »

14 wrote: post #169
emptybits wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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…

Serious question. What if you don't like potatoes?

This sounds like a dystopian nightmare.

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

#270

Post by bjourne »

naniwaduni wrote: post #232
amelius wrote: post #110

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.)

> 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?

In software engineering we're talking about 10x developers all the time. Whether they actually exist or not is kind of disputed.

Do we have 1000x or more business leaders? Because that's how well compensated a select few of them are. I don't believe we have. Because at most one developer is 100 times more productive than other one, so it makes no sense that a business person would be 1000 times more productive than another one.

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