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This. The root of the problem isn't economic - the culture is broken.
by gozur88 11y ago
This. The root of the problem isn't economic - the culture is broken.
- datalus 11y agoIt can also be both economic & cultural... Like a lot of things, it's much more subtle and complicated. If it wasn't, we'd have solved it by now.
- gozur88 11y agoI don't think there's much of an economic component. If you look at the numbers, people aren't doing badly by historical standards.
- Futurebot 11y agoRelative poverty is what is at issue, and it's associated with suicide: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1556-4029.12998/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1556-4029.12998/a... Economic turmoil in general is linked to suicide: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-27796628 http://www.bbc.com/news/health-27796628
- k-mcgrady 11y ago>> "I don't think there's much of an economic component. If you look at the numbers, people aren't doing badly by historical standards." What numbers are you looking at though? If you look at income inequality there has been a significant increase in the last few decades.
- gozur88 11y agoIncome inequality is a political problem. Nobody shoots himself because a person he doesn't know makes a lot more money. But he will shoot himself when his wife divorces him and takes his children.
- k-mcgrady 11y agoIt depends how the income equality comes about. If wages of the rich are increasing but wages of the poor are staying steady or falling (I don't have numbers but that seems more likely to me given the recession/unemployment etc.) life becomes more and more unaffordable for the poor.
- gozur88 11y agoWhy would life become more unaffordable for the poor even though their wages are steady (which is the case)? Immigrants and their children now make up more than 25% of the US population. How many poor people can you expect an economy to absorb before wages drop on the low end?
- uxp 11y agoIf wages remain steady, then they aren't being adjusted for inflation, and then life starts to become more and more unaffordable. Immigrants have about as much correlation with poor people as a cloudy sky has with flooding.
- gozur88 11y agoWe're talking constant dollars. If you want to talk unadjusted we're all in fat city. You're wrong about the immigrant thing. If you add a third again as many poor people to your population your statistics are gonna show a lot of poor people.
- atomi 11y agoThe way I look at it is if you were to walk into a store or restaurant and all you see are immigrants, and you were to somehow get rid of them they wouldn't magically be replaced by citizens. The store or restaurant just wouldn't exist or it would just be mostly empty. I don't think we should be trying to make far fetched correlations between suicide rates and immigration...
- jklinger410 11y agoAmerican culture is defined by our economy. The entire genesis of America was directly related to the economy.
- gozur88 11y agoNo, that's not true at all. The economy was no more important to early Americans than it is anywhere else.
- ArkyBeagle 11y agoBut that is the stuff of Adam Curtis' sad, hollow laughter in his films. It is like Harlan Ellison's favorite trope; we've killed all the old gods and can't remember how to make new ones.