That's 2011 data. Most recent data is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...

* Global rate: 10.5 per 100,000 people * Canada rate: 10.4 per 100,000 people * US rate: 13.7 per 100,000 people

Canada's suicide rate is also greatly impacted by the unfortunate prevalence of it among the native population. It's really quite sad to see. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Canada#Among_Indige...

Wonder if this can be normalized with other factors that influence these things, like average daily sunlight and temperature...

Curious to see how Michigan would compare with Ontario or Alaska or Northern Washington would compare with British Columbia

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 Canadian do not want a check every week, the next day I can be told my cost of living has gone up. I want to know I can eat and shelter myself at the end of the day. How we can do that I do not know and am thankful I am in a good financial position to not have to worry about it.

> 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.

That's not how economics works. The prices most stores charge is limited by competition. The only areas you might see an effect are in ones where supply is highly, and likely artificially, constrained.

Housing is artificially constrained due to zoning regulation, and in any given area there is a small number of major landlords, who all know each other and who all are politically well connected. UBI will be a conduit to funnel money from the taxpayers to large landowners.

However with ubi more people might have the means to move out of the cities sooner than they otherwise would have. This reducing demand.

I think this is why people want 'less government'. What they really mean is there are too many governments, the basic three levels, plus other institutions like home owners associations. Moving means dealing with a whole different bureaucracy, and falling to the bottom of a new list.

I mean rent control would be an answer in these markets. You could have that determined by formula or analysis. In California commercial property use should invalidate prop 13 as well. That should open things up.

>That's not how economics works. The prices most stores charge is limited by competition.

There would be no much change in competition, as everybody that sells anything of low-medium value will benefit from the increased spending capacity UBI receivers. The increased demand across all competitors will raise prices.

Glad someone noticed. If everyone is getting $1000/month, that becomes the new $0/month. Basic necessities, especially rent, will jump in cost; a low-end landlord will know everyone there has another $1000/month to spend, as does everyone looking for an apartment, so rent will jump because if one renter doesn't want to pay more there will be someone else who can. Of course economic complexities will affect this, but that's the short version.

"Supply and demand" is an absolute economic law. Anyone trying to distort that (say, redistributing taxes so all get $1000/month) finds out the hard way. If S&D is not directly addressed in your pet socioeconomic proposal, implementation will fail.

$1000/mo buys (some) food, $0 does not

You won't have $1000/mo for food when your landlord raises rent by $1000/mo.

As I said, the actual economics around this are more complicated, but the paraphrase/summary is that if nobody has to work for $1000/mo and everybody gets $1000/mo then $1000/mo will be worth practically nothing, with staples & necessities rising to consume that.

If we exclude rent from consideration, and apply the economics of UBI to just food: the average price of 1 Calorie (of which you need ~2000/day) rises $0.016, or $32/day. For a baseline reference, I regularly make healthy meals at $1/plate. Congrats, you've just increased the cost of food to at least $35 per day - precisely because "everyone now has $1000/month, free".

If we then roughly combine that with housing (as primary costs): I figure a normal baseline poverty minimum of $10/day for living space & utilities plus $3/day food, but then you're adding $32/day available which those necessities will instantly absorb (supply-and-demand) ... ergo you've just increased poverty-level living costs by 3.5x!

Unintended consequence: giving everyone $1000/month increases the cost of a $1 hamburger to $3.50. Now the beggar with $0 has to find/panhandle close to four times as much to afford something barely considered a complete meal. This is not what you had in mind.

> You won't have $1000/mo for food when your landlord raises rent by $1000/mo.

You would if you're homeless and can't pay the rent because you need food to survive.

The effects are profoundly complicated by implementation details; but in theory...

'Trading' is a complex little signalling display where the seller shows how hard it is to produce a good (represented in price) and the buyer signals that they have previously contributed enough of some sort of resource to justify the production of the good (represented by having the money to pay the price).

UBI messes with that by allowing everyone to signal they contributed economically even if they did not. This effectively redistributes resources contributed by someone who is economically productive to someone who is not.

The impacts of that are hard to nail down. It might cause some prices to rise and other prices to fall. It will likely cause less resources to be allocated to the future; because economically unproductive folks tend not to invest in the future. However it is much more efficient than the bureaucratic complexity of a modern welfare state and easier to reason about.

Financing a UBI is extremely difficult. It makes more sense to raise the minimum wage and introduce a "guaranteed minimum wage". It would be very similar to a UBI except you need a job and it only covers 1/2 of the difference between what a job pays and the official minimum wage. The downside is that there is still a lot of room for abuse but earning a $ through working is still twice as valuable as earning a dollar through the minimum wage so in the end economics prevail and a welfare trap is avoided. It also means that if you hate your job you can switch to a lower paid one and still receive some support. Bad jobs will face a lower supply of workers which will force companies to raise their wages to match the working conditions.

Apart from failing to account for competition, I think the problem with this kind of analysis is that it misses how transformative UBI would be for how we reward work. All those dirty, unpleasant jobs paying minimum wage will suddenly become a lot harder to fill. When people have a viable safety net the compensation those jobs offer will have to be commensurate with the unpleasantness of the work. Who would spend 40 hours a week cleaning for $200 a month when you already get $1000?

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

This sounds like a dystopian nightmare.

Is it as much of a dystopian nightmare as, say, having no food at all?

We already have soup kitchens in America. We have solutions of last resort regarding hunger. So this is a total strawman.

Yes. Having every man, woman and child line up for government potatoes, government bread, and government cheese at some government office is unequivocally a dystopian nightmare.

Saying that "every man, woman and child" would be lining up is a straw man also. "Every man, woman and child" does not currently line up at soup kitchens.

There's also no reason that distribution has to work that way. How about an EBT card mailed to every home, which can be used for potatoes, cheese, and bread at any grocery store?

> Saying that "every man, woman and child" would be lining up is a straw man also. "Every man, woman and child" does not currently line up at soup kitchens.

It's also a strawman because not everyone would be lining up for potatoes in this instance, presumably some people can afford to eat in this free suds world. Maybe we'll even have a post-potato society eventually, when everyone decides they hate potatoes after they all get jobs (probably not).

How about an EBT card gets mailed to them and we don't shame them for being poor?

It's not a dystopian nightmare but the parent completely ignores the practicality of the law. There is a reason why food stamps exist and it's because we don't know what they want to eat or can eat.

Set up temp motorhome parks until the housing crisis is over. Happened in the 1950s, during that housing crisis.

Have free 'bootcamps'. Want to change careers and be a mechanic or welder? Take an intense 6 month course. That's what happened in WWII, people stuck in crappy depression era towns all of a sudden got retrained in a few months.

Exactly my complaint about UBI.

You can't push money around; it's tougher than you, and will push back. But you can push a sack or potatoes. If a domestic potato farmer tries to raise prices, a foreign farmer will be all too happy to undercut them to get back to the commodity price.

Instead of taking money from some and giving to others, it has to be invested in actual production, and the output granted to the recipients directly. If there are any middlemen involved at all, they will certainly reduce the efficiency of the entitlement program.

Our model (Canada) doesn't include free ambulances or drugs, it's better to compare to the European model. We do have good welfare programs here however, and drugs are much cheaper anyways.

But there's other factors there. Do we know if there was a change after Canada switched to universal health care?

I think it would be hard to compare the two times. Canada is unrecognizable in so many ways when compared with Canada before that point in time. We got a constitution, no-fault divorce, and a whole lot of other major changes in the course of about ten years, the same ten years the provincial health insurance was introduced AFAIK.

Yes, like Seasonal Affective Disorder.

The UBI experiments in ON were recently killed by Ford.

(the leader, not the car company; the brother of the crack smoking mayor, the white one)

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

But by contrast, the UK and it’s NHS has almost half the rate of the US.

Where are you getting your facts from? The UK has a higher than global average, with some demographics tragically high.

UK – 11.2 per 100,000 people – in 2018 (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/sep/03/suicides-rat... & https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...). I think the UK's Office of National Statistics is a better source of information that Wikipedia.

UBI is a great idea. Unfortunately, minimum wage now usually means "in work" poverty, that's not a good thing.

edit: @0000011111, I think income inequality could certainly be a driver.

The UK counts suicide deaths differently to the US, and it's likely the the UK over counts while the US under counts.

I agree that the ONS is a better source of information than Wikipedia.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

Here's the old definition:

> The previous National Statistics definition of suicide includes deaths from intentional self-harm (where a coroner has given a suicide conclusion or made it clear in the narrative conclusion that the deceased intended to kill themselves) and events of undetermined intent (mainly deaths where a coroner has given an open conclusion) in people aged 15 and over.

It's this "events of undetermined intent" part that is different. In the US (and I guess many other places" those deaths are not counted as suicide.

The US uses this definition:

> Death caused by self-directed injurious behavior with an intent to die as a result of the behavior

This was my off the 2016 WHO numbers, 13.7 per 100K in the US vs 7.6 per 100K in the UK:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide...

But your correct that we should probably go by the individual countries’ statistics, where the UK is slightly above the average compared to other developed countries and the US a good amount above it.

Also UK minimum wage is £8.21 for folks 25 and older