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Comment by hellbanner | Hacker News Reader

Gee, I wonder if this has anything to do with the pay discrepancy between CEOs, investors and us wage slaves.

Interestingly the states with the lowest suicide rates (Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, New York, and other relatively wealthy blue states) also have some of the highest income inequality [1]. Another counterintuitive thing about suicide in the US is that demographics that tend to earn less (e.g. young people, Blacks) tens to commit suicide at lower rates than wealthy demographics (Whites, Asians, older people).

Pointing to income inequality as cause of a high suicide rate does not seem particularly convincing.

1. https://www.zippia.com/advice/states-highest-lowest-income-i...

If the point you're trying to make is that suicide isn't correlated with low income, you shouldn't look at broad demographics, you should look for studies about suicide that focus on financial status. Like this study, which found that low income was correlated with high suicides on a group of a million people after adjusting for other factors:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5463019/

Low income is not inequality. Also, if you even bother to look at your google search result, it says "socioeconomic positions" proxied by insurance premium.

> Low income is not inequality

I never said the word inequality, and I don't understand why you're bringing it up in a discussion about suicide risk factors.

> if you even bother to look ... proxied by insurance premium

I did look, and that's why I saw this:

"Medicaid recipients had the highest suicide hazard ratio (2.28; 95% CI, 1.87–2.77)."

Medicaid is about low income or low assets

> I never said the word inequality, and I don't understand why you're bringing it up in a discussion about suicide risk factors.

Then why did you respond to a comment that mentioned inequality to begin with.

Why did I respond to a comment that drew conclusions using the wrong statistics? It's pretty simple. I was teaching someone a small lesson about drawing conclusions from the wrong statistics, and backing myself up with a link to a study to show them what statistics you should use to draw such conclusions. As the HN Guidelines say, "Eschew flamebait [...] unless you have something genuinely new to say" - I don't have anything genuinely new to say about inequality and suicide, and I don't see you or the other person who responded to me saying anything genuinely new either.

Also "Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle" - please stop making my comment (about drawing conclusions from the wrong dataset) about your own political interests, unless you have something genuinely new to say, in which case I'm all ears.

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