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Comment by curo | Hacker News Reader

Any ideas on why income inequality has a negative correlation with suicide mortality?

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/suicide-rate-vs-income-in...

EDIT: responding to the spurious & not a good fit comments, the correlation in 2015 (the first year with good data) is -0.41 (n=64)

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Stoicism would be my guess. Remember emotions are relative - having something bad happen won't necessarily cause as large an emotional response if you are used to bad things happening to you.

that makes sense, the higher the fall; the harder the impact. Related to this, I think the social nets in poorer countries are stronger so the fall isn't as rough.

All that said, this is inequality not income.

>All that said, this is inequality not income.

Inequality is unfair. The more unfairness someone has to put up with the less sensitive they will be to other stressors and perceived unfairness.

This obviously isn't as simple as I'm making out. Individual people will have different stressors. However when we talk large scale I think this simplistic view can be warranted.

Suicide mortality might be correlated with geographic location (roughly speaking: latitude) rather than (or in addition to) income inequality.

The more secular countries tend to be both more equal and having people not worried about eternal damnation if they kill themselves.

Perhaps correct for the wealth effect? i.e. are wealthier countries generally more unequal? Just a blind hypothesis.

May be a spurious correlation.

-0.41 for 65 countries with data in 2015 (most recent year)

That doesn't mean it isn't spurious. Spurious just means that there isn't a causal relation between the two variables (in either direction).

Check the wiki page; there are some examples there that will make the argument about as eloquently as HN comments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spurious_correlation

ah got it, thanks for the link

Pure speculation but likely reasons could include bad data, traditional societies with lesser pressure to "succeed" and actually developing countries that give opportunities.

However the correlation is not strong enough as evidenced by Egypt and Pakistan.

Cause beeing poor can force you to stick together, and with relative richness, we are alone and divided with our choices.

This comment has been flagged for some reason, but I've also noticed the same thing anecdotally.

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