Comment by awakeasleep
20 hours ago
What happened to the theory that the deaths were decreasing because we burned through our buffer of people susceptible to deaths of despair? That always seemed reasonable to me.
20 hours ago
What happened to the theory that the deaths were decreasing because we burned through our buffer of people susceptible to deaths of despair? That always seemed reasonable to me.
Surely as time goes on and wealth inequality increases, the number of people "susceptible" to deaths of despair will only increase.
But this attitude smells an awful lot like the stupid person's eugenics. Let's not cater to it.
I feel like actual material wealth matters much more than relative wealth or inequality for this metric.
Eh. Most costs that matter scale to relative wealth, and the cos scales accordingly, and we have more homeless people than any rich country on earth, and we have no community worth a damn—we have snap, medicaid, and section 8, and our kind neighbors are rabid to end them all. This is, in most ways, the worst country on earth to be poor in. If i were poor in cincinnati suburbs I'd kill myself too.
Perhaps there's another place where poverty is a greater curse, though. But I would rather be poor in Burundi or Haiti than Ohio—at least I can sleep outside without dying and my neighbor won't fucking shoot me for existing. But this is what i get for living in the us, the place with the most evil people to have ever lived.
Wealth inequality doesn't cause this kind of despair. We have the greatest wealth inequality in history, but also the objectively best quality of life in history by most metrics (extreme poverty, hunger, starvation, death from disease, infant mortality...)
It does not matter to me if Elon Musk makes another billion dollars if I am making more as well. That does not cause "despair" to a well adjusted person.
Extreme poverty on the other hand (which has been decreasing) does cause these deaths. When people have nowhere left to go and no hope, they to turn to drugs.
Mental illness is another cause. I wonder if we should have gotten rid of asylums.
If bothers me if he spends that money exerting an outsized influence on my political institutions, though. Wealth inequality isn't really about wealth so much as power. I really don't care if Musk or anyone else lives more comfortably than me, but I do care if they have more than one figurative vote in how my society functions.
2 replies →
Surely you mean extreme poverty has been decreasing as a percentage of population, not in real numbers?
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well if you read to the end of the article you might find out.