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> Source: List of countries by suicide rate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_su
by DanBC 5y ago
> Source: List of countries by suicide rate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r... (Sort by all descending)
> Thoughts?
My thought is please don't do this. You get no useful information. Wikipedia strips out all the necessary context. The source that Wikipedia uses explicitly tells you that comparing rates across countries is difficult and fraught with problems.
Heck, comparing rates across a single country - the US - is tricky because they've only just developed a unified definition of "suicide".
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/suicide https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/suicide
> Globally, the availability and quality of data on suicide and suicide attempts is poor. Only some 80 Member States have good-quality vital registration data that can be used directly to estimate suicide rates. This problem of poor-quality mortality data is not unique to suicide, but given the sensitivity of suicide – and the illegality of suicidal behaviour in some countries – it is likely that under-reporting and misclassification are greater problems for suicide than for most other causes of death.
- WhisperingShiba 5y agoOk, so besides my use of data which is very difficult to collect and verify, do you disagree with my statements of money failing to map to love and dignity?
- barry-cotter 5y agoGDP per capita maps excellently to dignity. The richer we get the less grinding, soul sucking poverty there is. The fewer children die of easily preventable diseases. The longer people live. The less people work jobs they hate just because they need sustenance. The more people work jobs they like. The more of their life people spend retired or just not working "in education". Insofar as wealth makes life less nasty and brutish it probably makes life more loving but money buys a lot of dignity.
- WhisperingShiba 5y agoPoint taken, and I agree... somewhat based on how you framed it. I believe that we have long gone past the point where people are questioning whether their needs are going to get met (in the United States, which is all I know well). I assert that around the 1990s money started to disconnect with utility generation. Instead of the work week reducing in hours, with the advent of telecommunication, we start getting always-on-call jobs, yet people are paid basically the same. Productivity goes parabolic; median wages stay the same. You have to admit that there is something fishy about this, right? I think we basically have found a method to optimize towards a local maximum in productivity, but we are missing the strategies which lead us to a global maximum. And I think this method of optimization towards the maximum is basically serfdom.