February 28, 2008
Economics of suicide
Zubin Jelveh points us to a pretty grim chart: the location of suicide jumps from the Golden Gate Bridge. If that isn’t cheerful enough for you, here is a piece from Slate on the economics of suicide:
Marcotte’s study found that after people attempt suicide and fail, their incomes increase by an average of 20.6 percent compared to peers who seriously contemplate suicide but never make an attempt. In fact, the more serious the attempt, the larger the boost—”hard-suicide” attempts, in which luck is the only reason the attempts fail, are associated with a 36.3 percent increase in income. (The presence of nonattempters as a control group suggests the suicide effort is the root cause of the boost.)
Why should suicide be an economic boon? Once you attempt suicide you suddenly have access to lots of resources—medical care, psychiatric attention, familial love and concern—that were previously expensive or unavailable. Doubters may ask why the depressed don’t seek out resources earlier. But studies have demonstrated that psychological and familial resources become “cheaper” after a suicide attempt: It is difficult to find free medical care when you are sad, but once you try to kill yourself, it’s forced on you.
I have to advise you not to try this at home.
That’s one possible explanation, but another component could be that the group of attempters has self-selected for people with other characteristics that cause the higher earnings relative to non-attempters.
Traits that attempters have that non-attempters don’t: initiative, interior locus of control, gumption.
And as for the higher returns to “serious” attempts, perhaps the traits of competence and foresight result in more effective income-earning strategies, as well as suicide attempts.
All in all, an exceptionally dismal day for our science. Good post.
Posted by: Zdeno | February 28th, 2008 at 4:20 pm | Report this commentIt appears that the author has committed an age-old error of mistaking correlation for causation. It is quite clear that people actually attempting suicide are considerably more decisive, more in charge of their lives (yes, ending it is also a part of life). Why should those that are more decisive in general have the same or lower income? One would expect them to earn more, which is precisely what is observed.
Posted by: Charmed Quark | March 8th, 2008 at 5:23 pm | Report this commentThus, the presence of a third factor (decisiveness, will) that is correlated with both income and the ability to follow through on a suicide attempt yields a correlation between the latter two. The causation is spurious.