Does inequality cause suicide, drug abuse and mental illness? | Hacker News Reader

Does inequality cause suicide, drug abuse and mental illness?

economist.com

37 pointsceolin19 comments

This is a very materialistic culture. All around us the story is told that to be successful and live life to the fullest you have to make a lot of money, own expensive things, the latest gadgets, sports cars, mansions, be surrounded by beautiful men/women on your own yacht, etc. Few would deny that people with such material success "have it made" or are "living the life".

That's what many people's whole lives are focused around. Their families often pressure them to be (or at least dream of their being) rich doctors or lawyers (or, more recently, tech billionaires), etc.

If you don't make it in these material ways, for whatever reason, you're often viewed as a failure, as a loser, still living in mom's basement, and so on. You might be working at a shitty job, making very little money, being treated like crap or a replaceable cog, unlikely to ever afford to retire, watching your family (who are also poor) be bankrupted by medical bills or not being able to afford the medical treatement and care they need as they grow older.

None of this is likely to help your self-esteem, it might even make you depressed (surprise!), and when you run in to psychological or physical difficulties from your decades of working at a no-future job and being treated like crap while others in the media or in rich areas of town are sipping cocktails or going vacationing in exotic locales while you continue to sweat it out at the factory or the call center or the online retail warehouse where you're even penalized for taking bathroom breaks and can't afford to go on vaction (if you get any), you might feel like you're on an endless treadmill and you might actually start to have trouble coping. Imagine that.

well, one of the biggest criticisms of materialism is religion, and western culture has been very good at marginalizing it for the sake of the rich. I think people are finding out that for all of religion's faults, it acted as a alternate source of transcendent morality which could help mitigate those difficulties you describe so well.

Don't worry, the rich will solve it though. Legal weed and other drugs to sedate and make us listless, and cheap low culture like video games as an alternate form of meaningless self-medication are their solution. Lot of us are just being warehoused that way if we wind up losing in the materialistic culture.

Much of western religion in practice simply legitimised the power of the kings and nobles. It might have had a lot to say about the evils of materialism but it rarely addressed the evils inherent in the hierarchical systems of government and control.

Different religions have different moralities. "It is okay if poor people starve; they deserve it for having done something bad in their previous life" is a religious idea, too.

That's my life, over 10 yrs w dev experience and still hard to get hired or make over $24k a year. Luckily I saved money living at home and could afford to be unemployed, so now employers think I'm lazy for taking some time off work. Socially it's been hard as well so I stay in places I fit in better, meaning more minority centric cities. I don't fit in Anglo America and never will

I hope I’m not coming off brash but I am having difficulty wrapping my head around how someone with 10 years of dev experience can’t break minimum wage. What kind of dev do you do? Have you looked into freelance work? Do you set salary expectations low from the get go?

Rarely does X cause Y in all but the simplest of mechanical processes. Rather X is a contributing factor to Y, when conditions A, B or C are present.

I'm sure inequality boosts suicide rates when depression, fear of the future (going to jail, an embarrassing truth coming out, etc.) or emotional distress/trauma are present.

This. It's like finding eating fresh vegetables correlates with longer lifespan, when really people that eat fresh vegetables have higher socioeconomic status, access to health care, education, etc etc. The leap from correlation to causation is quite large.

I heard an interesting argument that we shouldn't focus on inequality, we should focus on poverty instead.

Inequality is something easy to get people mad about (something something CEOs make 300x more), but the real issue that people are worried about is poverty.

The thing I find bemusing about works like this is that rarely is any effort made to even see how consistently, or even if, a hypothesis holds up in other nations. Instead it seems like the idea is to take the inequality in the US, find a negative issue in the US, and suggest a link. That's awful science. So for instance here are two relevant lists.

[1] List of nations by income equality.

[2] List of nations by suicide rate.

There are approximately 180 nations ranked in each. What immediately came to mind here is South America. They have absolutely raging inequality, but also negligible suicide rates.

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#11 income inequality Brazil #135 suicide rate

#12 income inequality Columbia #135 suicide rate (tied with Brazil)

#13 income inequality Panama #142 suicide rate

#16 income inequality Honduras #155 suicide rate

#17 income inequality Guatemala #174 suicide rate

That alone looks quite damning of any attempt to link income inequality to suicide. In fact South America in particular shows a very strong link between high income inequality and low suicide rates! For completeness, these are the top 5 nations in income inequality and their suicide rates:

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#1 income inequality South Africa #54 suicide rate

#2 income inequality Namibia #87 suicide rate

#3 income inequality Haiti #67 suicide rate

#4 income inequality Botswana #48 suicide rate

#5 income inequality Suriname #6 suicide rate

---

One thing I would add on the suicide rates for the top is this [3]. That's a list of nations by AIDS/HIV prevalence. South Africa is #4. Namibia is #5. Haiti #24. Botswana is #3, Suriname #35. That's more than a slight confounding variable! Perhaps income inequality causes AIDS! Of course that's a tasteless joke, but the point is the absurdity of correlations.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_HIV/AIDS_...

It also temporarily reduces IQ. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/poverty-intellige...

I read somewhere that people who have sex regularly don't commit suicide. Not sure if it's actually true though. Would be interesting to see if this obvious intuition is true. Ofcourse it's a chicken and egg problem that depressed ppl don't want to have sex.

It's not true.

Predicting suicide is hard. Currently the best we have is asking people whether they think they're going to kill themselves, seeing if they've made previous attempts or have self harmed in the last year, or seeing if they have an alcohol misuse problem.

It's true that people with depression experience reduced libido (sometimes from the illness, but sometimes from the medication), but it would be better to use depression as a risk factor.

> It's not true.

Sorry but how do you know this?

Numerous studies have been made on suicide, frequency of sex isn’t a discriminating factor in any of them, when you control for other aspects of their lives.

Suicide is complex and there are different modalities: long term depression vs sudden stress being the most obvious. You can get a lot of (v sad) data if you search journal publications on suicide.

Then you have different responses to stress and depression (some engage in “risky behavior” which can include lots of sex for example). On the other hand depression has a confirmed hit to sexdrive.

I’m sure on a case by case basis you can get all sorts of variation, but the net statistics don’t support amount of sex impacting suicidal ideation, nor ideation (on average) impacting amount of sex.

Could this condition be caused by chronic covetousness?

You’re getting downvoted for snark, but your question is valid nevertheless. Most people wouldn’t know why they see value in material things, which leaves only one possible reason: because someone else has, I must have as well.

It's one possible reason but certainly not the only possible reason.

I don’t think that’s that prevalent. It’s more that that nicer house is in a bettter school district etc.

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