I wonder what would happen to the suicide rate with medicare for all, and creating a max-wage that is (avg of contractors + employees * 150), or something similar, w/ additional 'bonus' multipliers for increasing # of U.S. hired.
UBI would also probably help. As a freelancer I've had some really slim months and depression hits hard when money is tight.
There's a very direct correlation between income security, insecurity, stress, depression, and suicidal thoughts.
Re/ medicare for all ... Canada has universal health care yet a very similar suicide rate to the USA.[1] Canada doesn't have a livable minimum wage either. Each province sets its own. There is talk of UBI experiments.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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
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.
There is nearly a 2x difference in rate between white and native americans vs blacks, asians and hispanics. I'm wondering if there is a good understanding of that difference. I don't think it is just economic.
Because if you're told you're supposed to "make it" since birth, and you don't, you feel like a piece of shit. Marginalized communities have been told the other story, every little thing is a win. Difference in expectations is huge, and source of all sort of bad things (like racial resentment etc...).
Solution: make this country slightly less "dog eat dog" and you'll solve a LOT of social issues almost overnight.
Yup, USA culture is toxic as fuck (that's not to say it's different elsewhere, just talking from experience in the US). You're expected to make money and/or have some impressive-sounding career to have "made it", or else you're a loser.
I call this the "loser" class (obviously, I don't personally see them as losers, just in terms of societal expectations). You're supposed to go make money or you're a loser. Hopefully, you're "in charge of people" too, because managers and executives are the only people that contribute to society. Do-ers just cost money. You buy a house and become a homeowner to be a "real American" and not be a loser. You better get a big car and attractive partner too. I think there's a talking heads song about this.
Worse, we think that all failures should be permanent. Once you become a member of this class, especially as you age, it becomes difficult to get out. What have you been doing all these years? Did you not want to sit in a cage for your entire adult life? No degree? Have you ever been fired? Have you had any issues with the law? Well, you're done. No longer a member of the "successful American" class, you're now a loser. A despised and ridiculed lesser class within society.
We'll let a few losers out, and rise to the level of good American, but generally, they stay there. Don't forget that you deserve this, and it's your fault because you're a bad person. I'm not surprised by the suicide rate at all.
Is there evidence for this? An alternative explanation is that black and Hispanic people are more likely to be religious, and religious people have lower suicide rates in the United States. They are also more likely to have kids, which also is associated with lower suicide rates.
That's not necessarily a contradiction, since churches double as social clubs and Christian charity means supporting your neighbour who is in trouble. So if you are active in a church you belong to a circle that is a little less dog-eat-dog. Same thing with immigrant communities.
> So if you are active in a church you belong to a circle that is a little less dog-eat-dog.
That would imply that life in the US ~300 years ago, when pretty much everyone belonged to a church, was less dog-eat-dog.
If anything, I would say it was the opposite. People would often shoot someone—someone who is just as likely as themselves to be a "good Christian"—just for being an interloper on their farmland, i.e. for having the opportunity (whether they took it or not) to make off with some of their turnips.
When you're putting tremendous direct effort into those turnips, when those turnips will likely make the difference between life & death thru the winter, when others facing bleak prospects are likely to take "the opportunity to make off with those turnips", when there is no viable/relevant police enforcement to speak of, yes you take trespass very seriously.
Contrast that with the modern luxurious miracle of the $1 hamburger: with just 9 minutes of minimum-wage commodity labor, one can obtain a fresh complete meal (bread, meat, veggies, cheese) any time all year.
When you’re living the latter, the gravity of the former is hard to grasp.
Does society say that? I've never come across a description of white privilege that didn't compare it to playing your life on easy mode. Sure, your life might be tough but it's less tough than it would be if you in the exact same situation and not white.
Using the term "marginalized communities" as a broad descriptor for people with a certain skin color in America is misguided and counterproductive. It paints a distorted view of reality and is a political statement more than anything else.
being poor and uneducated in this country IS being marginalized. I clearly stated that if you're white the expectations are different, but whatever else you're reading in my message is your projection.
I mean the data by race suggests it’s not economic, right? Black, Hispanic, and Asian people have half the suicide rate of non-Hispanic white people.
Another anomaly: Hispanic people have the second highest life expectancies in the United States (after Asians), significantly higher than non-Hispanic whites, despite on average having lower incomes and health insurance coeverage.
I'd like to see the correlations after things such as how many close family members and friends one has are taken in to account.
I suspect that the larger and more cohesive one's support network is, the less likely you are to commit suicide, and that the more socially isolated one is, the poorer one is, and the sicker one is, the more likely one is to feel hopeless and see suicide as the only way out.
Other important factors are things like how many recent traumatic events (such as relationship breakups, serious illness, bereavement, rape, witnessing or being a victim of violence, etc) one has suffered, recent alcohol and drug use/abuse, and then very hard to quantify things like how good one is at coping with such events.
You can't really boil all this down to any one factor, and there's no one solution to any of these issues. But, yes, reducing misery (whether economic or social) should help.
Most of the evidence suggests (unintuitively) that insurance coverage doesn't have much of an impact on health outcomes, but does have a large impact on economic outcomes. I say that as a supporter of M4A
If you're going to disaggregate, by sex is the major axis. If the gap reversed, it would likely become one of the greatest issues to solve, whatever it took.
That stood out to me as well, indeed the numbers vary a lot nationally and ethnically.
How are you supposed to study it, though? Not exactly a good situation for an exit poll.
Imaginably the government could be in a position to grant a gift, and help, to offer a moment of respite from whatever is causing the most distress -- that might help some people...
yeah, that could work if it was wide scale enough.
apparently google and facebook already have some kind of tech that estimates if people are vulnerable to suicidal ideation based on searches ("hey google, how do I kill myself painlessly?" gives the national suicide prevention hotline -- good)
As the only candidate currently running on a UBI platform, Andrew Yang has argued that one of its benefits would be a reduction in economic anxiety, with ancillary benefits to health in the form of stress reduction and improved executive function, as well as lower rates of depression, suicide, and drug addiction.
I can attest to this. I've been in both situations where I was very financially comfortable and where I've been in more financially risk situations on and off. You definitely have higher stress, anxiety, and develop negative habits at financially risky times. And for reference the were longer time frames: 5 years well off, 3 years poor, 2 well off, 2 poor
I think many of the poorest would happily choose a flat $1000/month over the benefit systems we have in place now. But even for those who opted out in favor of existing aid programs, I think the societal benefits of additional liquidity from everyone else getting the dividend would lead to more consumer spending, and therefore better employment opportunities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand-side_economics
Without other universal floors on things like housing and healthcare, UBI is just going to be eaten up by those costs. An indirect sop to these sectors isn’t going to do much to improve the average person’s quality of life.
I agree that universal health care should be solved independently from UBI (Yang supports opt-in Medicare For All).
Housing is a more complicated story; there's certainly a theory that landlords will simply raise rents in proportion to their tenants new ability to pay more. On the other hand, a stable income boost might make the housing market more fluid, giving renters more options to move when the rent goes up. I personally favor LVT to discourage rent-seeking, and there's a lot that could be done by removing zoning and building restrictions (multi-family conversions, etc) to make housing more competitive.
my guess is an effective system of healthcare and/or UBI would decrease the suicide rate somewhat, because people wouldn't feel so helpless.
I'm not sure that max wage algorithm creates a healthy incentive though. it would seem to encourage hiring more employees than necessary just to increase the executive's compensation. I think people can often tell when their job isn't really necessary and it probably doesn't feel very good.
I like the incentive that a maximum wage introduces: increase the pay of your staff and subcontractors hired by your company to raise your wage ceiling.
I can't see a drawback, aside from someone at that ceiling simply wanting to raise their salary without raising those working for them.
I meant some claim CEO pay tied to worker might encourage layoffs.
If you have 10 workers average pay 100k and you last off your lowest paid worker the average goes up, and you're paying less out of pocket.
By having bonuses showing that you're not trying to game the system by laying people off it encourages job growth.
That and the idea of pay cap is to ensure business growth over CEO enrichment. How does it hurt the companies bottom line if the CEO can only earn 10 Mill not 50m? When it gives 40 surplus for new devs or r and d people to grow new products and income opportunities.
yeah, it would actually decrease the number of employees if employee cost is significant enough to not be absorbed by raising the price. It might also decrease it by forcing a robustness check on existing businesses. A lot of them manage but couldn't absorb a financial hit; this would be a minor crisis but one that could just push marginal businesses over the edge.
Suicidal ideation is a mental health illness. Financial desperation is stressful, but that stress is not an indication of mental health distress. I don’t see these two things as having any correlation and I am not aware of any related evidence adjoining those two.
If finances are a factor in suicidal ideation then it’s a secondary consideration in addition to more prominent concerns.
False correlation. Take this damning quote from your second link:
> Data analysis from a 2013 study published in the journal Clinical Psychology Review shows that those who died by suicide were eight times more likely to be in debt.
Correlation does not imply causation. To illustrate the silliness when the related items are transposed the statement becomes absurdly false even though the logic remains identical: persons in debt are 8 times more likely to be suicidal. Nobody is claiming that because it’s preposterous and there is no such data.
Stress is not a mental health illness. Having debt is also not a mental health illness.
Having debt may not be a mental health illness, but mental health illnesses are significantly exacerbated by debt.
I was discharged from a mental health ward 3 weeks ago after an unsuccessful suicide attempt. My brother was murdered a year ago and I've been struggling with depression since.
I lose my job a few months ago and money has been tight in my household, to the point where I began to see myself as nothing buta financial anchor weighing down my partner.
Freeing her from having to manage my debts was the primary justification for my suicide attempt. My mental health illness (mixed anxiety and Depressive disorder) is not caused by debt, but the affective symptoms (in this case suicidal ideation) were.
Or to put it another way: the easy way out of debt allows people to rationalize an an otherwise irrational decision. (°)
NatCen analysed detailed NHS data about adults’ mental health undertaken for the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute. It found that 13% of people in problem debt – about 420,000 a year – think about suicide and 4% of them – more than 100,000 people – try to end their life.
Suicide attempts in people with debt are around 400x more likely than those without debts (it's around .01% in the UK yearly), which surely counteracts the idea that nobody is claiming that people in debt are more likely to be suicidal?
Having debt certainly isn't a mental illness, but we can't ignore the effect having debt has on people with mental illnesses.
Edit: sorry for any typos or grammatical errors, my medication causes difficulties typing and recognising errors
(°) Of course, it may actually be rational, since her financial security would be significantly improved by the removal of debt and the extra mouth to feed - but rationality does not necessarily imply correctness.
Did you know that army medics are 3x more likely to be diagnosed with PTSD than army infantrymen encountering combat? Likewise being a combat medic/doctor isn’t an illness. There is no discussion of eliminating those jobs to save people from mental health illnesses. Even if those jobs and/or debt were eliminated there is no reason to suggest the persons at potential risk of such illnesses would cured from the risk of such.
Teenage homosexuality is another high suicide pattern. Nobody is suggesting treating juvenile sexual orientation.
Since suicide is the result of mental health illness and mental health illnesses are a medical problem would you agree that it’s safe to say it is something that demands medical attention? Medical doctors treating that condition don’t throw the patient into a finance class to hear about managing debt or give the patient money to relieve the financial distress. The subject of financial crisis isn’t treated at all.
Many things can have an effect on persons with illnesses. The goal of a doctor is to treat the illness and lower the pain. They do this through a combination of observation, medication, and counseling.
Ignoring the medicine and medical aspect of suicide to focus purely on financial management, as so many in this thread suggest, will likely result in a sharp increase in suicidal completion.
If advocating against such harm and ignorance costs me all my HN karma I am ok with that. I am not afraid of being stuck in an echo chamber.
I'm not advocating the removal of treatment for people in debt, I'm just saying that mental health illnesses are exacerbated by stress and money problems can be a huge source of stress.
You have to treat the entire patient, it's the difference between the nightingale and peplau schools of nursing: the patient is not just their symptoms, they are a complete human who has to be treated to prevent recidivism in to a dangerous mental state.
Without the stresses of financial debt I'm not suicidal, I'm depressed and have anxieties and impulses, but one of those impulses isn't suicidal ideation.
In this instance, the diagnosis is an anxiety disorder, not suicidal ideation, but the addition of a second aspect - the debt - can severely increase the chances of the symptom of suicidal ideation occuring.
Again: people with mental health illnesses should be treated for those illnesses, but we also can't ignore the family practicioner and governments role in ensuring that people in financial hardship have the support that they need.
As they say, a small amount of prevention is worth a lot of cure: I imagine the cost on the government to help with the debt is lower than the cost on the government to deal with the mental health issues exacerbated by the debt.
There is no discussion of eliminating those jobs to save people from mental health illnesses.
In the UK, ex combat medics receive government funded psychotherapy with specially trained mental health practitioners who deal specifically with people who have worked as medical professionals on deployment. So there are some countries pioneering the treatment of patients with a higher risk profile for mental health illnesses. I was for 5 years a combat medical technician with the royal logistics corps and I've had this treatment first hand.
Edit: again, sorry if I don't make sense in some areas, I'm trying very hard :)
> Ignoring the medicine and medical aspect of suicide to focus purely on financial management, as so many in this thread suggest, will likely result in a sharp increase in suicidal completion.
This is not supported by anyone working within suicide prevention. Indeed, focussing on the medical model is rejected by any organisation working in suicide prevention, and they talk about the full range of bio-psycho-social factors involved in suicide.
It is simply incorrect to say that suicide is caused only by mental illness.
> the statement becomes absurdly false even though the logic remains identical: persons in debt are 8 times more likely to be suicidal
Why do you think this is absurd? How are you defining "suicidal"?
There's good reasons why reputable organisations involved in suicide prevention recognise financial difficulty as a risk factor (one of many) for suicide.
> 156. Patients who died in the first week after leaving hospital were more likely than those who died later after discharge to have a diagnosis of personality disorder (15% v. 10%). Over half (52%) had experienced recent adverse life events, especially financial (25%) and family problems (23%).
> Although under 20s and 20-24 year olds had many antecedents in common, there was a changing pattern,reflecting the stresses experienced at different ages. Academic pressures and bullying were more common before suicide in under 20s, while workplace, housing and financial problems occurred more often in 20-24 year olds
> Factors that should be recorded in an initial assessment of social circumstances include, but are not limited to: (i) family members, significant others or carers who can provide support; (ii) dependents; (iii) housing; (iv) personal or financial proble
"Suicidal ideation is a mental health illness." - this may be mostly true, but there are enough counter-examples to make this factually wrong. Terminally ill patients wanting euthanasia, bankrupt Wall Street brokers jumping from windows, and Romeo and Juliet (and other scorned lovers) would beg to differ.
I wouldn’t count fiction as an indication of fact and Wall Street brokers under extreme social pressure to recover lost value may well be experiencing PTSD.
Don't forget student loans. Having six figures in student loans simply from getting a masters degree is enough to make one almost consider abandoning the U.S, especially when you consider that the older generation who caused this never experienced it themselves.
My most depressing times were when I was unemployed (not to be confused with "funemployed") and not making any money.
I think a max wage totally makes sense, because nobody is more than a modest constant times more productive than anyone else, and anything created by a person is always built on existing knowledge and constructs created by society. Also, risk does not really exist anymore these days (with minimum wages, financial constructs around bankruptcy, etc.)
A max wage is insane government overreach. If I want to make a deal with someone else where I’ll work to do something and in return they pay me a portion of the surplus value I create, there is no justification, moral or economic, to cap that amount.
Finally, by what measure do you feel able to assert that no one is more productive than someone else based on some constant? How much more productive was the team of the Manhattan project than some other team of physicists?
But what defines overpaid? You? If there is an opportunity to not over-pay, you should be able to start your own firm and put overpaying ones out of business.
...Of course, we can actually be even more clever than this, if we want, and imagine models where we are both right (of course they might not be true).
For example, we might say the value provided by a manager is, on average, $1,000,000. However, this is driven mostly by the top 10 percentile who are worth $10,000,00 a year, whereas the median is actually slightly overpaid. We can justify this distribution by adding uncertainty on the signal. A more thoughtful model of this quick example exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)#Job-mar...
So the next question would be: What is more likely? That people are overpaid, obviously, and the government needs to stop it? Or the market is behaving optimally under complex uncertainty, and the government, being no better at interpreting signal than these firms themselves, is likely just to make things more complicated and screwed up by entering? (I'll leave this as an exercise to the reader, but if you want to solve it formally follow the journal articles in the link I shared above).
>If there is an opportunity to not over-pay, you should be able to start your own firm and put overpaying ones out of business.
Sure, but first lend me a few hundred million in capital would ya?
I realize not every business requires that much but I work for an oil supermajor... so, little hard to do what you're suggesting without your help. The "capital" in "capitalism" keeps getting in the way.
If managers and executives are so overpaid, why aren't top firms outcompeted by companies that offer lower wages for such positions? Lower wages would allow those companies to offer the same services at lower prices and take over the market.
I think the correct way to think about it is not that nobody does anything wrong, it's that if people consistently do things wrong, and it's reasonable clear that they are doing things wrong, then their long run survival rate in a competitive market will be zero, as someone else will outcompete them.
If someone is making a claim that someone is clearly doing something wrong, the burden of proof should -- to some extent -- be on them to explain why despite this, they are continuing to be successful without going out of business (if that is in fact the case).
For example, it feels to me that the way FANG companies hire SDEs and place them on teams is inefficient and weird. Why are 24 year old 1337coders considered fungible to work on any project? It doesn't make sense to me. But it's hard for me to convince myself that my feeling is correct, given that there are billions of dollars on the table for anyone who can come up with a better strategy.
I think this argument fails because “firm-space” is sparse. There are many companies, but there are way more possible companies given all the degrees of freedom. Also, the number of “competition events” is small. Companies don’t have the opportunity to run gradient descent to optimize themselves. A bunch of companies can make the same bad decision for the same bad reason, and they will each succeed or fail because of a bunch of unrelated factors.
A lesson from history shows this not to be the case: hand-wrought nails were such a precious and militarily significant commodity in Roman England, that when the legion left, they painstakingly concealed their hoard to prevent the locals gaining access to them.
Fast forward to the 1860s, and nail production is automated to the extent that wire nails can be produced by the tens of millions with almost no human intervention.
The worker who forges nails by hand and the inventor who automates their production are undoubtedly orders of magnitude apart in productivity.
Most likely the person who invented the machine to automate nails didn't become rich. Maybe, just maybe, the people who owned the company that produced nails first, if they had a patent or something like that. So maybe some people can be thousand of times more productive, but that doesn't mean they should earn thousand of times more money.
Over a thousand years of technological advancement is not evidence of how effective some brilliant inventor is, given that humans do not live for thousands of years.
In software engineering we're talking about 10x developers all the time. Whether they actually exist or not is kind of disputed.
Do we have 1000x or more business leaders? Because that's how well compensated a select few of them are. I don't believe we have. Because at most one developer is 100 times more productive than other one, so it makes no sense that a business person would be 1000 times more productive than another one.
A max wage will just lead to workarounds, hiring each family member at the maximum rate for instance, or schemes where a family member sues the company and the company "loses", etc. Is it worth it to play that game?
"Somebody might work around it" is never a good argument against a policy. Whatever the policy's goals are, even a version full of loopholes will accomplish more of those goals than not implementing the policy at all.
The point is that it won't be effective. We'll get a situation like [1] that takes decades to fix:
> Concept and origin (1991)
> Partial closure (2018)
To essentially cap wages, you could use higher tax rates in higher tax brackets, and that might actually be enforceable as it would leverage the existing enforcement apparatus that has decades of experience patching workarounds.
Your heart is in the right place, but the richest people derive their wealth from capital investment, not from wages. A maximum wage would address the gap between executives and workers, but not between investors and workers. Since the investors hold the power, the money that's no longer paid to executives would just go to them.
It doesn't make any sense because it would have to be readjusted ahead of time all the time. A minimum wage is allowed to lag behind because nothing stops you from paying more but if people have 20% higher wages after 15 years of inflation why should they have to wait until the government approves a pay raise?
The best form of a maximum wage would be a simple wealth tax in place of the income tax. It doesn't discourage entrepreneurs continuing to work, but it doesn't allow wealth to accumulate in idle hands.
The wealth tax is the best way to fight inequality. A maximum wage would just discourage our best entrepreneurs. I agree that raising the floor without changing anything else doesn't do much.
Have been reading Rutger Bregman’s book and UBI seems to be an incredible money saver and immense benefit. It would take however a big jump in consciousness to do something like this because who would take the shorty jobs paying 1/3 living wage if no one is afraid Of homelessness?
If nobody is taking that job for a salary that is economically viable, then it shouldn't exist. We shouldn't make people waste their finite time on this Earth doing pointless jobs under the threat of homelessness or starvation.
In an employers’ market with no unions and no regulation ensuring a livable wage, many corporations write business plans relying on precisely this kinds of jobs.
There’s something obviously wrong with the U.S. because suicide is now the second leading cause of death among young people and has jumped 50+ percent since the Great Recession:
What would you prefer the second-leading cause of death be for young people?
I am being serious. Some things have to be the top causes of death for young people and the list definitionally can’t include the aspirational “old age.”
This seems like an odd question. Obviously we should prefer accidental death among young people vs. that which is self-inflicted, while hoping that the overall number of deaths diminishes, regardless of circumstance. But I don’t think a spike in youth suicide is something we should hand waive away in any case.
We can have get accidental death up to second place by banning railings, air bags, helmets, and tire tread patterns.
In other words, was there really a spike in youth suicide or did it just climb in rank because we reduced other causes of death? Something must be first, something must be second, and so on.
The only argument you could really make is that suicide rates have been rising across the US since 1999, up in most states and up by 30% in half of all states, making youth suicide of a part with the broader trend. But I don’t think this is any less disheartening.
I don't understand. That chart shows very clearly that youth rates of death by suicide have gone up since 1999. It shows a climb from 10.x in 2007 to 14.x in 2015. That's not quite a third, but it's not far off.
More importantly it shows that deaths from suicide are i: no longer declining and ii: increasing.
This increase appears to happen around 2007 onwards -- this is when we had worldwide financial insecurity, with things like the sub-prime mortgage crisis.
We know financial insecurity is a driver for higher rates of death by suicide, and we have a good idea that the financial problems in 2007 drove some of the increase.
On the linked graph I see the highest suicide rates in the late 90s. They dropped in the early 2000s and then at some point start climbing.
It’s like, one can pick any window from a graph like that to make a point.
Think if someone did that with the stock market. You could prove the market was going down, or up, merely by choosing the window that suits the claim.
Now, the graph only goes through 2015. I am receptive to the notion suicide rates have been climbing and are at all time highs. You may have a vital and valid point.
But the graph I linked doesn’t back it up, and you are including a whole bunch of causation in your comments that makes your argument start to sound ideologically shaped.
I feel like everyone posting the link to that article needs to also post this quote from it in their comment.
> The WHO statistics are based on the official reports from each respective country, therefore are no more accurate than the record-keeping in the specific country, and revisions (updates) are usually performed as well.
> In much of the world, suicide is stigmatized and condemned for religious or cultural reasons. In some countries, suicidal behaviour is a criminal offence punishable by law. Suicide is therefore often a secretive act surrounded by taboo, and may be unrecognized, misclassified or deliberately hidden in official records of death.[3]
It is very hard to compare rates of suicide across countries.
This is disingenuous. It doesn't classify by Socialist, but by country. Russia is #3 on global suicides, and when I think of socialist healthcare, my first thought isn't Russia.
Many of the countries I think of as socialist healthcare (UK, Denmark, Canada, to name a few), they all come up below the US in suicides.
UBI would also probably help. As a freelancer I've had some really slim months and depression hits hard when money is tight.
There's a very direct correlation between income security, insecurity, stress, depression, and suicidal thoughts.