4 ms·

Taxi-Driver Suicides Are a Warning

24 points by acdanger 8y ago

hprotagonist 8y ago
The taxi driver seems gloomy. Salim stares at his face in the mirror as he speaks, watching the ifrit’s dark lips. “They believe that we grant wishes. Why do they believe that? I sleep in one stinking room in Brooklyn. I drive this taxi for any stinking freak who has the money to ride in it, and for some who don’t. I drive them where they need to go, and sometimes they tip me. Sometimes they pay me.” His lower lip began to tremble. The ifrit seemed on edge. “One of them shat on the backseat once. I had to clean it before I could take the cab back. How could he do that? I had to clean the wet shit from the seat. Is that right?"
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  Welcome to driving taxis. People have been dealing with the exact same problems for about 400 years, since at least the hire coaches of London. Charles Dickens interviews a cab driver (1860): http://www.taxi-library.org/dickens.htm http://www.taxi-library.org/dickens.htm It sucks that taxi drivers are getting screwed by the system they bought into, but if they can get out from under their debt and get into Uber or Lyft, that might protect them from some of these problems. But obviously the "getting out from under the debt" part is pretty difficult.
  - cestith 8y ago
    Dumping one's life savings undiversified into any bubble can be disastrous. Many people found this out about tech stocks, about homes, about highly leveraged derivative securities, and many other bubbles. To a smaller extent people have found losses in bubbles around everything from Beanie Babies to gas and oil. Getting out from under the debt of the investment has been hard after many a bubble for many a person. That's what the taxi industry in New York was. Uber and Lyft burst that bubble.
  - mundo 8y ago
    > if they can get out from under their debt and get into Uber or Lyft, that might protect them from some of these problems They've lost their career due to new technology, and the solution is to drive cars for a company trying to create self-driving cars?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
xapata 8y ago
> We badly want to believe that we still live in a non-zero-sum nation, in which good-paying jobs for low-skill workers are abundant, and opportunities for advancement are always just around the corner. Instead we have taxi drivers who are being driven to suicide because they can’t bear the competition from slightly more desperate people who want the little that they now have. It's common sense that, even if "the market" will adjust and those displaced workers will change skills, that adjustment isn't instantaneous. Thus unemployment insurance, etc. The trouble is those taxi drivers weren't employees. The US social contract is almost entirely implemented through the relationship of employee to corporate behemoth. Since that's dissolved, so too has the mechanism for softening the impact of economic change. > And all this is unfolding at a moment when the labor market is the tightest it has been since the turn of the century This "tightness" is misleading, because labor is less collective than last century. The low unemployment rate has not caused higher wages (in most fields) like it used to.
mike-cardwell 8y ago
The entire premise/point of this article seems to be that there has been an increase in the suicide rate, but then offers no evidence to support that. The closest they come to offering evidence is the statement "Since December, there has been a rash of apparent suicides among the city’s taxi drivers", with a link to a NY times article where there is also no evidence of an increase or any information whatsoever about what the normal rate has been over the past 20/30 years. Is this what passes for journalism?
- xapata 8y ago
  No, that's the excuse to write the article. The point seemed to be to discuss the low-skill labor market. While the excuse was flimsy, the point was well-made.
  - mike-cardwell 8y ago
    People will walk away from that article thinking that the suicide rate among taxi drivers in NY is high and that it has increased. Both things the article has not offered any evidence for, and which by the looks of things, are probably untrue.
    - xapata 8y ago
      Funny, my immediate assumption was that it was a bogus claim. Most "news" about some uptick in a rare thing in a small subpopulation is just noise. It's like reporting on which city has the highest cancer rate. Of course it's some tiny town where the small sample size causes some outlier.
Torwald 8y ago
The problems are made by the state with it's unnecessary regulations of the market.
nickles 8y ago
According to the linked article [0] there have been 5 taxi driver suicides over a period of 5 months. Annualized, that is 12 per year, assuming a constant rate. The article states there are 180,000 taxi drivers in NYC. Given these numbers, the annualized rate per 100,000 taxi drives is 6.7 suicides. While each of these deaths is tragic -- and more resources should be dedicated to preventing future ones -- it appears that the media is promoting a narrative not supported by statistical evidence. Taxi driver suicides occur at a lower rate than New York's 8.1 per 100,000 people and even lower than the national rate (13.26) or the overall male rate (~23-27) [1]. It may seem callous to make these observations; however, discouraging such narratives is critical to avoiding suicide contagions [2], which are very real and dangerous phenomena. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/27/nyregion/taxi-driver-suicide-nyc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/27/nyregion/taxi-driver-suic... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide
- nscalf 8y ago
  This exactly. There is an epidemic of suicides and mental health problems in this country. While I love seeing that people are addressing these problems, lets not allow simple narratives to muddy the waters.
  - xapata 8y ago
    > epidemic of suicides and mental health problems Especially after all the re-definitions for what "mental illness" means, and the development of drugs to treat them. I take a cynical view.
    - 319206781093846 8y ago
      Indeed diagnostic criteria have changed and the number of people who can afford medical care has increased, so even if it was true that mental health problems have increased you couldn't compare so easily old and new data. New diagnostic criteria however don't influence the 'diagnosis' of suicide so, in my opinion, comparing old and new numbers should be ok.
AnthonyMouse 8y ago
The true cause of this is cost disease. Housing, healthcare and education have exploded in cost. So it's no longer possible to work 40 hours at an unskilled job during the day to pay the cost of getting an education at night, because you have to work two jobs just to pay for housing and healthcare. Leaving no time, much less money, to go to school and get out of that situation. This can't be solved with subsidies. That's half of how we got here to begin with -- offer to loan students $5000/semester and the price of school goes up by $6000/semester, because it's easy to sell a ten dollar bill for $14 when the government is paying the first $5. We need to reduce actual costs so that people can afford things again. Increase the housing supply, eliminate medical and insurance bureaucracy, streamline the process for learning a trade and starting a small business. So that people can work an unskilled job temporarily, instead of getting stuck there forever because they have to keep running faster just to stay in the same place.

24 points by acdanger 8y ago

The taxi driver seems gloomy. Salim stares at his face in the mirror as he speaks, watching the ifrit’s dark lips. “They believe that we grant wishes. Why do they believe that? I sleep in one stinking room in Brooklyn. I drive this taxi for any stinking freak who has the money to ride in it, and for some who don’t. I drive them where they need to go, and sometimes they tip me. Sometimes they pay me.” His lower lip began to tremble. The ifrit seemed on edge. “One of them shat on the backseat once. I had to clean it before I could take the cab back. How could he do that? I had to clean the wet shit from the seat. Is that right?"

peterwwillis 8y ago
Welcome to driving taxis. People have been dealing with the exact same problems for about 400 years, since at least the hire coaches of London. Charles Dickens interviews a cab driver (1860): http://www.taxi-library.org/dickens.htm http://www.taxi-library.org/dickens.htm It sucks that taxi drivers are getting screwed by the system they bought into, but if they can get out from under their debt and get into Uber or Lyft, that might protect them from some of these problems. But obviously the "getting out from under the debt" part is pretty difficult.
- cestith 8y ago
  Dumping one's life savings undiversified into any bubble can be disastrous. Many people found this out about tech stocks, about homes, about highly leveraged derivative securities, and many other bubbles. To a smaller extent people have found losses in bubbles around everything from Beanie Babies to gas and oil. Getting out from under the debt of the investment has been hard after many a bubble for many a person. That's what the taxi industry in New York was. Uber and Lyft burst that bubble.
- mundo 8y ago
  > if they can get out from under their debt and get into Uber or Lyft, that might protect them from some of these problems They've lost their career due to new technology, and the solution is to drive cars for a company trying to create self-driving cars?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

xapata 8y ago

> We badly want to believe that we still live in a non-zero-sum nation, in which good-paying jobs for low-skill workers are abundant, and opportunities for advancement are always just around the corner. Instead we have taxi drivers who are being driven to suicide because they can’t bear the competition from slightly more desperate people who want the little that they now have. It's common sense that, even if "the market" will adjust and those displaced workers will change skills, that adjustment isn't instantaneous. Thus unemployment insurance, etc. The trouble is those taxi drivers weren't employees. The US social contract is almost entirely implemented through the relationship of employee to corporate behemoth. Since that's dissolved, so too has the mechanism for softening the impact of economic change. > And all this is unfolding at a moment when the labor market is the tightest it has been since the turn of the century This "tightness" is misleading, because labor is less collective than last century. The low unemployment rate has not caused higher wages (in most fields) like it used to.

mike-cardwell 8y ago

The entire premise/point of this article seems to be that there has been an increase in the suicide rate, but then offers no evidence to support that. The closest they come to offering evidence is the statement "Since December, there has been a rash of apparent suicides among the city’s taxi drivers", with a link to a NY times article where there is also no evidence of an increase or any information whatsoever about what the normal rate has been over the past 20/30 years. Is this what passes for journalism?

xapata 8y ago
No, that's the excuse to write the article. The point seemed to be to discuss the low-skill labor market. While the excuse was flimsy, the point was well-made.
- mike-cardwell 8y ago
  People will walk away from that article thinking that the suicide rate among taxi drivers in NY is high and that it has increased. Both things the article has not offered any evidence for, and which by the looks of things, are probably untrue.
  - xapata 8y ago
    Funny, my immediate assumption was that it was a bogus claim. Most "news" about some uptick in a rare thing in a small subpopulation is just noise. It's like reporting on which city has the highest cancer rate. Of course it's some tiny town where the small sample size causes some outlier.

Torwald 8y ago

The problems are made by the state with it's unnecessary regulations of the market.

nickles 8y ago

According to the linked article [0] there have been 5 taxi driver suicides over a period of 5 months. Annualized, that is 12 per year, assuming a constant rate. The article states there are 180,000 taxi drivers in NYC. Given these numbers, the annualized rate per 100,000 taxi drives is 6.7 suicides. While each of these deaths is tragic -- and more resources should be dedicated to preventing future ones -- it appears that the media is promoting a narrative not supported by statistical evidence. Taxi driver suicides occur at a lower rate than New York's 8.1 per 100,000 people and even lower than the national rate (13.26) or the overall male rate (~23-27) [1]. It may seem callous to make these observations; however, discouraging such narratives is critical to avoiding suicide contagions [2], which are very real and dangerous phenomena. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/27/nyregion/taxi-driver-suicide-nyc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/27/nyregion/taxi-driver-suic... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide

nscalf 8y ago
This exactly. There is an epidemic of suicides and mental health problems in this country. While I love seeing that people are addressing these problems, lets not allow simple narratives to muddy the waters.
- xapata 8y ago
  > epidemic of suicides and mental health problems Especially after all the re-definitions for what "mental illness" means, and the development of drugs to treat them. I take a cynical view.
  - 319206781093846 8y ago
    Indeed diagnostic criteria have changed and the number of people who can afford medical care has increased, so even if it was true that mental health problems have increased you couldn't compare so easily old and new data. New diagnostic criteria however don't influence the 'diagnosis' of suicide so, in my opinion, comparing old and new numbers should be ok.

AnthonyMouse 8y ago

The true cause of this is cost disease. Housing, healthcare and education have exploded in cost. So it's no longer possible to work 40 hours at an unskilled job during the day to pay the cost of getting an education at night, because you have to work two jobs just to pay for housing and healthcare. Leaving no time, much less money, to go to school and get out of that situation. This can't be solved with subsidies. That's half of how we got here to begin with -- offer to loan students $5000/semester and the price of school goes up by $6000/semester, because it's easy to sell a ten dollar bill for $14 when the government is paying the first $5. We need to reduce actual costs so that people can afford things again. Increase the housing supply, eliminate medical and insurance bureaucracy, streamline the process for learning a trade and starting a small business. So that people can work an unskilled job temporarily, instead of getting stuck there forever because they have to keep running faster just to stay in the same place.