It can also be both economic & cultural... Like a lot of things, it's much more subtle and complicated. If it wasn't, we'd have solved it by now.

I don't think there's much of an economic component. If you look at the numbers, people aren't doing badly by historical standards.

Relative poverty is what is at issue, and it's associated with suicide:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1556-4029.12998/a...

Economic turmoil in general is linked to suicide:

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-27796628

>> "I don't think there's much of an economic component. If you look at the numbers, people aren't doing badly by historical standards."

What numbers are you looking at though? If you look at income inequality there has been a significant increase in the last few decades.

Income inequality is a political problem. Nobody shoots himself because a person he doesn't know makes a lot more money.

But he will shoot himself when his wife divorces him and takes his children.

It depends how the income equality comes about. If wages of the rich are increasing but wages of the poor are staying steady or falling (I don't have numbers but that seems more likely to me given the recession/unemployment etc.) life becomes more and more unaffordable for the poor.

Why would life become more unaffordable for the poor even though their wages are steady (which is the case)?

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?

If wages remain steady, then they aren't being adjusted for inflation, and then life starts to become more and more unaffordable.

Immigrants have about as much correlation with poor people as a cloudy sky has with flooding.

We're talking constant dollars. If you want to talk unadjusted we're all in fat city.

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.

The way I look at it is if you were to walk into a store or restaurant and all you see are immigrants, and you were to somehow get rid of them they wouldn't magically be replaced by citizens. The store or restaurant just wouldn't exist or it would just be mostly empty. I don't think we should be trying to make far fetched correlations between suicide rates and immigration...

You're missing the point. Let's say you have a country with a million middle class people (only). Over a ten year period a million poor people with a sixth grade education and no ability to speak the language immigrate to your country (legally, illegally, doesn't matter).

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.

So instead of a wall that will cost billions to build and billions more to maintain, we use that money to invest in education, decrease taxes and raise the minimum wage.

Were you not able to make the connection that he wasn't talking about income inequality causing suicides? He was talking about people having less money than before, financial problems, stagnating wages.

But people don't have less money than before. "Stagnating" doesn't mean "going down".

  > "Stagnating" doesn't mean "going down"

inflation means that today's $1 can buy less than yesterday's $1. If your wages are not increasing at least at the rate of inflation then you are steadily getting poorer. After all, 50 years ago you could buy a house in my neighbourhood for about $60k, now it's at about $500k (without any significant changes to demographic/gentrification pushing prices up).

Okay now, let's all get on the same page here. Wages are flat in constant dollars.

Yes, we all know how inflation works.

"It's more complicated than just one factor."

Uses absolute statements based on pure conjecture to defend their points.

American culture is defined by our economy.

The entire genesis of America was directly related to the economy.

No, that's not true at all. The economy was no more important to early Americans than it is anywhere else.

But that is the stuff of Adam Curtis' sad, hollow laughter in his films. It is like Harlan Ellison's favorite trope; we've killed all the old gods and can't remember how to make new ones.