> "She calculated that in 2005, unmarried middle-aged men were 3.5 times more likely than married men to die from suicide, and their female counterparts were as much as 2.8 times more likely to kill themselves. The divorce rate has doubled for middle-aged and older adults since the 1990s, she said."
There has been huge changes in our societies concerning the role of men and women, their relations, when/if they have children, the type of jobs available (which many are soul-wrecking pointless work), the food we eat, the move towards atheism, the increase in material wealth, the Internet...
There is a myriad of possible factors and we need some serious studies before we can reach a conclusion. You can't just say "it's because capitalism" and be done with it.
We severely undervalue social value for material value, and we're suffering horribly for it.
This is how it's always been. So that doesn't hold water.
I think the problem is, and you touched on this in your original comment, is that some people don't get a chance to "sell their time/energy".
The unemployment numbers being quoted everywhere are a joke. Those numbers exclude discouraged workers who exit the economy and those people are the likeliest to off themselves.
See the graph here:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/02/the...
Male participation in the wage economy peaked right before the recession of 1958. We have now seen 57 years of decline. Women's participation in the economy peaked in the late 90s. How many decades of decline would you need to see before you feel you seeing a crisis?
Albeit, I hate using the phrase "retired" here. Retired for most simply means the equivalent of someone being born into wealth retiring at age 0.
Anyway, there are around 75 million kids, so real figures are something like 40% unemployed. But a lot of people are working under the table, no longer in classical employment, etc.
Though hopefully the kids are also doing something as well besides just factory public schooling. Figure 1 in 4 is 14-18 and they might have some part time job, albeit unlikely.
There is a fundamental shift to consider, though. A hundred years ago regardless of employment figures most people were farming and by farming that meant the whole family worked together to eat and provide shelter for themselves, and raise enough money to buy that which they cannot provide to themselves.
I suspect this isn't a choice but a result of labor saturating the traditional market.
I think capitalism became very good at optimizing for profit and it pushes aside faster than ever anything that stays in it's path (and now that's more and more people).
>We severely undervalue social value for material value
Unfortunately the market has spoken: material value.
Society is what we make of it. We still have a choice.
Also, kudos to everyone up the chain in this subthread; this is the discourse I expect when coming to HN.
The extent that the market is a free market is much debated.
Contrast this to people of affluence I've known who've stopped even having a reflection in the mirror. Their identity just disappeared.
I don't think there's wide agreement on just what constitutes social value once you get down to the detail level.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1556-4029.12998/a...
Economic turmoil in general is linked to suicide:
What numbers are you looking at though? If you look at income inequality there has been a significant increase in the last few decades.
But he will shoot himself when his wife divorces him and takes his children.
Immigrants and their children now make up more than 25% of the US population. How many poor people can you expect an economy to absorb before wages drop on the low end?
Immigrants have about as much correlation with poor people as a cloudy sky has with flooding.
You're wrong about the immigrant thing. If you add a third again as many poor people to your population your statistics are gonna show a lot of poor people.
If you look at the poverty statistics, you've had an enormous increase in poverty and your average wage is much lower. But that's just... math.
Also, those people will push down wages on the lower end. Wages are a function of supply and demand. When you add a whole bunch of people to the supply without increasing demand, the clearing price will be lower just like the price of cars would drop if you doubled production and dumped them on the market. If you're a native born person you're not going to get a raise for a long, long time.
If you really believe suicides are in part driven by income inequality, you can't pretend immigration isn't part of the problem.
> "Stagnating" doesn't mean "going down"
Yes, we all know how inflation works.
Uses absolute statements based on pure conjecture to defend their points.
The entire genesis of America was directly related to the economy.
In every comment thread about this news I see capitalism referred to as the probable cause.
You can look all you'd like if you want to be thorough, but I feel like you will discover what everyone already knows.
Care to explain that? Atheism may be growing--in fact, Wikipedia gives an upper bound of the US atheist population at ten percent[0]--but I've never seen anything resembling what I would call an actual cultural movement towards atheism.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism#United...
The dominant non-commercial social organ for most people in their local community is their church. Atheists are by definition cut off from this.
There are exceptions of course, Unitarian churches etc, but I would posit that most atheists don't find a comparable social grouping.
Once you joined a church (it didn't really matter which one), you gained a lot of social connections that turned into business connections. I don't know if there was any statistical truth to that, but it was definitely accepted in my family's social circle as a rule.
Care to put forth any evidence that this might possibly be the case?
Personally I think the actual cultural movement towards 'atheism' is simple Leftism. Most people may still believe in the belief of God and thus differ from atheists on the ontological question, but their beliefs about the world in general are vastly different from those of their (for some religions, even still living) ancestors of the same declared denomination and those beliefs are in conflict with classic doctrine.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/03/5-key-findin...
Hopefully this is changing, but I think it's less that is atheism growing and more that people are becoming comfortable admitting what they really think.
Surely (not athiest) => theist => (believes in a god) => (has a religion)
I'm nonreligious, I don't care to discuss it or think about religion as a part of my life, but it's okay if others want to be religious themselves.
Why don't I want to be labeled atheist? It's looked down upon and many hardcore atheists are exclusionary.
You know how when someone insists on it being GNU/Linux, but most people don't care? That's why I'm nonreligious (but technically atheist).
Now I call myself a "Reformed Fundamentalist Atheist" because it captures that I don't care anymore (reformed), and it sounds enough like a real religion that people seem to accept it as one.
In the spirit of many of the good things on the internet, the Reformed Fundamentalist Atheist church (RFA) is of course an open source religion, under the MIT license :)
A lot of people I think don't care to form a belief one way or another. I'm not sure what that's called.
This statement as such is still just about correlation, not causation (compare ice cream sales and drowning deaths).
But it has been studied.
* CONCLUSIONS: Religious affiliation is associated with less suicidal behavior in depressed inpatients. After other factors were controlled, it was found that greater moral objections to suicide and lower aggression level in religiously affiliated subjects may function as protective factors against suicide attempts. Further study about the influence of religious affiliation on aggressive behavior and how moral objections can reduce the probability of acting on suicidal thoughts may offer new therapeutic strategies in suicide prevention.*
http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/appi.ajp.161...
A religious person in pain without hope looks at suicide as an option and thinks, "I've got it bad now, but it's only going to get worse if I do this..."
Whereas a non-religious person is thinking, "I've got it bad now, but if I do this I won't have to feel anything ever again"
For the discussion I also didn't really make a distinction between a true atheist and someone who believes in a higher power but doesn't go to Church. I should probably have used "secularism".
It's hard to fit in with rich whites / asians who have a boat from their parents and wear designer clothes when you spent your whole childhood playing with cards and worrying about money.
As a rich white/Asian, I agree. Now what? We will all go back to coding in atom/vim/etc and continue our lives, forgetting we ever had this whole conversation.
I don't say this in anger, but it's a lost cause entirely because you (and many others, past versions of myself included) choose to believe it's a lost cause. Us all going back to our editors and forgetting this conversation in defeat is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it's particularly insidious to publicly acknowledge your privilege and then make this gesture, because it sets an example for others of your level of privilege. It's isomorphic with the problem of white people who support the BLM movement in spirit, but think they can't become proactive allies to black America because they don't know how - but it's not a matter of knowing, it's a matter of taking actions, often difficult and uncomfortable ones.
If anything, I see very FEW people who were born with the proverbial silver spoon on their mouths.
I had money. I had sustainability and stability. But I was not happy.
In fact its pretty silly to think either of those things create happiness or are even the precursors to it.
Heres the very first study I found when googling income inequality and suicide [0]:
> Our results indicate that there is a statistically insignificant positive effect of inequality on the incidence of suicide.
For some groups of people (farmers, vets, construction workers) the correlations between the economy and suicide is very clear. There's pretty good correlation between economic downturn and increased rate of death by suicide.
It is simplistic to just say "it's the economy", but the economy is pretty clearly one important factor.
Having said that, your first paragraph is spot on.
Edit:
Citation: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/suicide/rates_1999_2014....
Figure 2
People often talk about how the poor in the US still live better than the poor in the third world, but the poor in third world countries are not excluded from renting relatively decent places because of bad credit, they don't give away their class by their bad teeth, they (mostly) do not have to sleep under bridges (unless they have serious mental issues), their mobility is not restricted by the need to have a car (which all the attendant on-going costs), and so on.
I could be dirt poor in a third world country and people will not avoid me like I am some sort of defective, repugnant, morally challenged person; I am still normal.
Thanks for the insightful comment.
Very good point. I have been living in a lower-middle class neighborhood in one of the world's poorest countries for around 3 years now, but I'm originally from the US. There are fewer inherent indications of wealth vs. poverty here, whereas in the US you can often tell at a single glance. Even if you literally strip away social indicators like clothing, I think I could gauge someone's economic status from their naked body (sadly), and if not that, then definitely from their dialect.
It's a thread that runs throughout the book, in order to explain religion and nationalism and war were deeply entwined all throughout recorded history and well into prehistory for as long as we've had the mental capacity to think about matters larger than we are.
It's pretty rare throughout history that your kids will almost surely be better off than you were. We enjoyed a brief spurt of that here in the US. It's probably over. Welcome back to the old normal.
While in theory anyone in the US can make it with sufficient effort, the reality is that some people get economically shat on through no fault of their own. Our national mythology/culture doesn't take this into account, and as a result we're incredibly vicious towards those who struggle.
As more and more capital needs less and less labor to be profitable and create value, we're going to need to find more effective ways to make sure everyone's needed, or things have a potential to get much worse before they get better.
EDIT: As others have noted, we also severely undervalue social capital, so we by and large firesale it to accumulate more material value. We work more instead of spending time with friends and family, thereby dangerously isolating ourselves. Thank you all for pointing this out.