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Suicide Rates Are Up, But the Most Obvious Explanations Are Probably All Wrong

by LaureneT40 Posted on April 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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The CDC reports that the suicide rate was up again in 2014, and the Washington Post immediately offers some possible reasons. I’ve added numbers for easy reference:

(1) Last decade’s severe recession, (2) more drug addiction, (3) “gray divorce,” (4) increased social isolation, and even (5) the rise of the Internet and social media may have contributed to the growth in suicide, according to a variety of people who study the issue.

But (6) economic distress — and dashed hopes generally — may underpin some of the increase, particularly for middle-aged white people. The data showed a 1 percent annual increase in suicide between 1999 and 2006 but a 2 percent yearly hike after that, as the economy deteriorated, unemployment skyrocketed and millions lost their homes.

David French comments:

There’s much more to say about this, but millions of our fellow citizens — friends and neighbors — are experiencing existential crises that are far beyond the ability of politics to solve. With civil society faltering, families fracturing, and millions of Americans “bowling alone,” the human toll will only continue to rise. God forgive our nation for believing we could build a culture without you.

Let’s slow down a bit. The causes of suicide are complex, and correlations are hard to prove. Still, there are a couple of things we can say. First, there should at least be a correlation if you’re claiming causation, and second, the purported cause had better come first. You can’t blame increased suicide on things that didn’t happen until years later.

With that in mind, let’s look at recent suicide rates for men. Not only does this help us control for gender, but it’s also a less noisy set of data since men commit suicide at nearly 4x the rate of women. It turns out that suicide rates barely budged between 1999-2005, so I’m going to look only at 2005-14. The chart is on the right, with suicide rates divided into three 3-year buckets. Here are some things we can say based on this and other data in the CDC report:

The Great Recession (and economic distress more generally) doesn’t really fit the facts. The suicide rate went up the most from 2005-2008, before the Great Recession. It went up the least from 2011-14. But if prolonged economic distress was at fault, you’d expect just the opposite: no effect before the recession and the greatest effect after it had been grinding away for a couple of years with no relief in sight.
Drug addiction is more plausible—but only modestly. According to HHS, marijuana use is up since 2005, but that’s an unlikely cause of suicide. Cocaine, hallucinogen, and illicit prescription drug use is down. Heroin use and heroin dependence are up. Overdose deaths among heroin and prescription opioid users are also up—but they’ve been rising since 2002 and it’s unclear how many of these deaths are suicides anyway. More generally, overall drug addiction rates have waxed and waned over the past five decades, and it’s difficult to tease out a correlation between addiction and suicide rates over the long term.
“Gray divorce” has been a thing since the 80s, well before the suicide rate started rising. It hit the mainstream in early 2007 with the publication of Calling It Quits, also before the suicide rate started rising. What’s more, suicide rates have been flat among the elderly since 1999. It’s other age groups that have seen an increase. This is unlikely to be more than a minuscule cause at most.
Increased social isolation could be a cause, but the 2006 paper that kicked off this discussion suggested only that Americans had become more isolated between 1985 and 2004. This corresponds to a period when suicide was declining or flat. What’s more, a 2009 Pew study that replicated the 2006 research found a substantially smaller—possibly zero—effect.
Internet and social media could also be a cause, though I don’t really see what the mechanism is supposed to be. And that 2009 Pew study found that internet and cell phone users were less isolated than others.

We also know that suicide is up only among whites and Native Americans, but not among Hispanics or African-Americans. So any theory about the rise of suicide needs to at least engage with what might cause this. Are whites more economically distressed than blacks? That seems distinctly unlikely. Do they have higher drug addiction rates? Higher social isolation? More family fracturing? Maybe, but I’d like to see the evidence. And what about overall life satisfaction rates? They seem to have been quite stable over the past few decades. This doesn’t suggest that growing existential angst is the cause.

My point here is not really that the increase in suicide rates can’t possibly be due to any of these things. A deeper dive might implicate any of them. What’s more, a lot of these possible causes affect a lot of people. But although suicide has seen a large percentage increase since 2005, in absolute terms it’s only gone up by about 1000 per year. That’s a small number, which makes it really hard to tease out from large-scale effects. A mere 1 percent change in the Gallup life satisfaction index, for example, represents a couple of million people, so it’s unlikely to give us much insight into relatively tiny changes in the suicide rate.

So what is my point? Just this: writers need to be careful not to casually project their own sentiments or guesses onto a topic like this. Sure, the Great Recession might be the cause of more suicides. Maybe existential crises and fracturing families are the cause. Opioid abuse could be a factor. But just because these all seem plausible doesn’t mean they’re true. Likewise, just because you personally don’t like the direction of American culture doesn’t mean they’re true either—no matter how true they seem. None of them should be tossed out casually.

For my money, we flatly don’t know what’s causing the increase in suicides over the past decade. Based on the size of the numbers and the evidence at hand, if you put a gun to my head I’d probably guess opioid abuse was the biggest cause. But I don’t know, and I’m not sure anyone else knows either.

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Suicide Rates Are Up, But the Most Obvious Explanations Are Probably All Wrong

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Native Americans Are Taking the Fight for Voting Rights to Court

by CarynX74xvmpk Posted on March 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday night, the long lines of Arizona primary voters highlighted the potentially disastrous fallout from a 2013 Supreme Court ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The specter of a new disenfranchisement controversy was all too familiar for a group of people who have been fighting for their right to vote in Arizona and much of the West for years: Native Americans. “What’s happening in Indian Country is reflective of what’s happening nationwide,” says Daniel McCool, political science professor at the University of Utah and coauthor of the book Native Vote.

Earlier this month, Indian Country Media Network reported that Native American and Alaska Natives have flagged voting-related problems in 17 states, via litigation or tribal diplomacy with local officials. For example, in Alaska—which will hold its Democratic caucuses Saturday—Alaska Natives scored a victory in September 2014, when a federal judge concluded that state election officials violated the Voting Rights Act when they failed to translate voting materials for Alaska Natives in rural sections of the state. After nine months of talks, they reached a settlement to get election pamphlets translated into six dialects of Yup’ik and Gwich’in through 2020, granting them language assistance ahead of the caucuses this weekend.

9 Facts that Blow Up the Voter-Fraud Myth

Meanwhile, congressional efforts to protect voting rights for Native Americans and Alaska Natives have come to a halt. Last July, Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) announced a bill that would prevent states from moving polling places to inconvenient locations, banishing in-person voting on reservations, and altering early voting locations. The bill, inspired by a voting access case in Montana that compelled three counties to open satellite offices on reservations, has stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Here are a few other cases to keep in mind:

Poor Bear v. Jackson County: In September 2014, members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe from the Pine Ridge Reservation filed a lawsuit against Jackson County, South Dakota, alleging that county officials refused to create a satellite office where Sioux residents could register and file in-person absentee ballots. For tribal citizens, the closest place to submit their absentee ballots is the county auditor’s office in Kadoka, a town that’s 95 percent white and roughly 27 miles away. (Native Americans must travel twice as far as white residents in the county to submit ballots in person, according to the lawsuit.) Voters can also submit absentee ballots by mail, but they have to submit an affidavit to prove their identity if they lack a tribal photo ID card, a potential hardship for Native American voters.

The county commission declined to approve the office because “it believed funding was not available,” despite a Help America Vote Act plan that allowed the county to use state funds to create the office. After residents filed for a preliminary injunction, the commission agreed to open a temporary satellite voting office in the runup to Election Day 2014. Last November, in an agreement with South Dakota’s secretary of state, the Jackson County Commission approved a satellite site through 2023.

Brakebill v. Jaeger: In January, seven members of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians filed a lawsuit against North Dakota state secretary Alvin Jaeger, alleging that the strict requirements under the state’s voter ID law imposed a discriminatory burden on Native Americans. When the state enacted House Bill 1332 in April 2015, it limited the forms of permissible identification at voting booths, required forms of identification to display the voter’s home address and date of birth, and eliminated a provision that allowed voters to use a voucher or affidavit if they failed to bring an ID. The lawsuit alleges that the bill “disenfranchised and imposed significant barriers for qualified Native American voters by establishing strict voter ID and residence requirements.”

According to the lawsuit, Native Americans in North Dakota have to travel an average of nearly 30 miles to obtain a driver’s license. The lawsuit also claims that many Native Americans lack tribal government IDs with residential addresses, which is an alternative form of ID under state law. In February, Jaeger tried to get the case tossed out, arguing that the voter ID law was constitutional. The judge has yet to decide.

Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission v. San Juan County: Less than two years ago, prospective Navajo Nation voters in San Juan County, Utah—where Native Americans are nearly 47 percent of the population—had to travel an average of two hours to submit a ballot in the predominantly white city of Monticello, without access to reliable public transportation. That’s because in 2014, according to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and others in late February, the county closed polling places and switched over to mail-in ballots, placing a “disproportionately severe burden” on Navajo residents. The county has yet to respond in court to the case.

It wasn’t the first time San Juan County has been sued for violating the Voting Rights Act. In fact, the Navajo Nation claimed in a previous lawsuit that the county commission “relied on race” when it decided not to change the boundary lines for a largely Native American district in 2011, three decades after they were initially drawn. In February, US District Judge Robert Shelby ordered the county to redraw its election district lines after he ruled that its current boundaries, which were set after a settlement with the Justice Department in the 1980s, were unconstitutional.

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Native Americans Are Taking the Fight for Voting Rights to Court

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China Baits the Forex Gods

by ChristoSlama Posted on January 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Yesterday:

Wagers that the yuan will slump 10% or more against the dollar are “ridiculous and impossible,” a senior Chinese economic official said Monday, warning that China had a sufficient tool kit to defeat attacks on its currency. “Attempts to sell short the renminbi will not succeed,” said Han Jun, deputy director of the office of the Central Leading Group on Financial and Economic Affairs, at a briefing at the Chinese Consulate in New York.

I suppose he’s probably right. Still, this has an uncomfortable ring of the kind of thing treasury officials tend to say just before a sustained assault on their currency demonstrates that even huge autocracies with lots of foreign reserves aren’t immune to market forces. Stay tuned.

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China Baits the Forex Gods

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My Right to Die

by LUWLonnyyzfkhi Posted on January 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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Several years ago, my father-in-law was in the end stages of multiple myeloma. He was a retired doctor, and he knew what was coming. So one night he called us all over to his house, said his last goodbyes, and then went into his bedroom and took his own life.

But Harry died before he had to. Assisted suicide was illegal in California at the time, and he was afraid he might soon lose the physical ability to take his life. And he almost died alone. Until a friend talked him out of it, he had decided not to tell any of us beforehand, out of fear that we might be held responsible for assisting him.

Now I’m the one with multiple myeloma. I’m still years away from having to make the decisions Harry did, but when my time finally does come, I have an option that he didn’t: legal, doctor-assisted suicide thanks to a right-to-die bill that Gov. Jerry Brown signed last year:

When I’m within six months of death, I can ask my doctor for a prescription sedative that will kill me on my own terms—when I want and where I want. Will I ever use it? I don’t know. I suspect that taking your own life requires a certain amount of courage, and I don’t know if I have it. Probably none of us do until we’re faced with it head-on.

But either way, I won’t have to die before I want to out of fear that I’ll lose the capacity to control my own destiny if I wait too long. Nor will I have to die alone out of fear that anyone present runs the risk of being hauled in by an overzealous sheriff’s deputy. I’ll be able to tell my wife I love her one last time. I can take her hand and we can lie down together on our bed. And then, slowly and peacefully, I’ll draw my last breaths.

I don’t want to die. But if I have to, this is how I want it to happen. I don’t want a “suicide party,” but neither do I want to suffer needlessly for months. Nor do I want to cause other people any more pain than I have to. I want to go out quietly, with my loved ones at my side.

Please read the whole thing. Doctor-assisted suicide is not a simple issue. There are legitimate fears about how it will be used and what it might lead to—and it’s not for everyone. In fact, the evidence suggests that it will never be used by more than a few percent of terminal patients. But I’m convinced that, for those who do want it, it’s simply a better, more humane way to treat our fellow human beings.

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My Right to Die

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Good News: The Fed Is Finally Going After Leverage in the Shadow Banking Sector

by DanteDornllauqi Posted on January 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here’s some welcome news. The Fed is bringing back an old tool to regulate leverage in the financial market: increased margin requirements. And in even more welcome news, these requirements will apply to everyone, not just banks:

A little-noticed global agreement recently paved the way for the central bank to move forward with plans to alter margin requirements. Under the accord announced Nov. 12, regulators representing 25 economies agreed to adopt rules similar to ones the Fed is developing, a united front intended to prevent financial firms from moving transactions offshore in response to tighter Fed rules.

….Unlike earlier Fed margin rules, which focused largely on stock purchases, the new rules being crafted by the central bank would apply to securities-financing transactions, a multitrillion dollar market involving repurchase agreements, or repos, for stocks and bonds, as well as lending of securities.

….Unlike most of the central bank’s regulatory authority, this rule would reach beyond banks and across the entire financial system, affecting investment funds and other nonbank players, reflecting the Fed’s growing concern about what has been called shadow banking.

The tighter that regulations become on banks, the more incentive there is to move transactions into the shadow banking sector.1 That’s why we need rules that apply everywhere. As we learned in 2008, a run on the shadow banking sector is every bit as dangerous as a run on ordinary banks. In fact, since shadow banks are so loosely regulated, shadow runs can be even more dangerous than normal runs.

In any case, this is basically an effort to reduce leverage in yet another corner of the financial industry. That’s a good thing. Pretty much any effort to reduce leverage in any part of the financial sector is a good thing. As I’ve mentioned before, I’d trade pretty much every financial regulation we’ve put in place since 2008 for a simpler, more robust restriction on leverage everywhere and anywhere it occurs. This stuff is boring, but it’s important.

1Commercial banks take short-term deposits and make long-term loans. They are inherently vulnerable to runs since depositors can remove their money anytime they get scared, but banks can’t just call in their loans at will in order to fund all the depositors who want their money.

A shadow bank is any entity that isn’t a commercial bank but acts just like one (borrows short, lends long). By 2008, the shadow banking sector was about as big as the ordinary commercial banking sector, and the shadow banking run in that year was responsible for a large part of the Great Meltdown.

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Good News: The Fed Is Finally Going After Leverage in the Shadow Banking Sector

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The CARD Act Has Saved Us $12 Billion Per Year

by celemaiieftinebileteavion Posted on January 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Who do credit card companies make the most money from? Answer: the poor, by far, because they rack up the highest fees and the highest interest expense. Card issuers also make some money on the rich, because they buy a lot of stuff. This generates interchange fees (usually 2-3 percent of the amount charged) that exceed the cost the reward points they dole out to attract these customers.

It’s the customers in the middle who cost them. They don’t buy enough stuff to generate lots interchange fees, but they aren’t poor enough to get themselves stuck with lots of late fees and interest charges. The chart below shows this. Folks with FICO scores between 660 and 730 (representing about a third of all customers) are net losses for credit card companies.

This comes from a paper written last year about the effect of the CARD Act, a law passed in 2009 that modestly regulated the credit card industry. The authors’ conclusion: “The CARD Act successfully reduced borrowing costs, in particular for borrowers with the lowest FICO scores. We find no evidence for offsetting increases in other costs or a decline in credit volume.” All in all, the CARD Act saved consumers—mostly lower-income consumers—about $12 billion per year. For much more, see today’s Harold Pollack interview with one of the authors here.

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The CARD Act Has Saved Us $12 Billion Per Year

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Hip Hip Hooray For They!

by MonikaKerr Posted on January 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post reports some terrific news:

Singular “they,” the gender-neutral pronoun, has been named the Word of the Year by a crowd of over 200 linguists at the American Dialect Society’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on Friday evening.

….The Post’s style guide ratified this usage last month, which caused some grammar pedants to shriek. But as Post copy editor Bill Walsh explained, the singular they is “the only sensible solution to English’s lack of a gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronoun.”

OK, so we can now say:

I talked to Pat, and they said the sofa was on its way.
Pat said their sofa had been promised for tomorrow.
Pat came over, and I talked to them about when the sofa would arrive.

Takes some getting used to, doesn’t it? But I’m all for it. I will celebrate the day when gendered pronouns are gone for good.

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Hip Hip Hooray For They!

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Denver District Attorney Clears Police in Shooting of Native American Man

by JorjaHartigan Posted on September 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey has declined to press criminal charges against a Denver police officer who shot and killed a Native American man in July. The man, Paul Castaway, holding a knife to his own throat and threatening to kill himself, was walking toward officers when Officer Michael Traudt fired three shots into Castaway’s midsection. Along with a nine-page report explaining his decision, Morrissey on Monday released surveillance footage of the shooting.

The shooting spurred protests in Denver this summer, as Castaways’ family disputed the initial police account that claimed Castaway, 35, came “dangerously close” to officers with a knife. At the time, they said officers didn’t have to shoot him, and he was clearly mentally ill and in need of help. Prior to releasing the video publicly, Morrissey had shown it to members of Castaway’s family, who said it showed him holding the knife to his throat—not pointing it in the direction of the police.

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Denver District Attorney Clears Police in Shooting of Native American Man

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Native Americans Get Shot By Cops at an Astonishing Rate

by yiszkj53 Posted on July 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Nearly 100 people demonstrated in downtown Denver earlier this week after police there shot and killed 35-year-old Paul Castaway on July 12. Police said the man was coming towards an officer with a knife, but his family and witnesses on the scene dispute those claims and say he was pointing the knife toward himself.

The shooting comes a little more than a month after two Denver Police officers were cleared in the shooting death of Jessie Hernandez, a 17-year-old girl killed in January when the officers fired into a stolen car she was supposedly driving toward them in an alley.

According to his mother, Castaway struggled with schizophrenia and alcoholism. Witnesses say he was holding a knife to his own throat and didn’t threaten officers, according to the Denver Post. Castaway was shot four times and died later that night. Denver Police Department spokesman, Sonny Jackson, told the Post that the department is reviewing the incident, and that the officers involved will be named soon.

Castaway was a Lakota Sioux. His death brings up a rarely-discussed aspect of the ongoing conversation around police brutality in the United States: Native Americans are more likely than most other racial groups to be killed by police. Indian Country Today noted that according to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a nonprofit organization that studies incarceration and criminal justice issues, police kill Native Americans at a higher rate than any other ethnic group.

The center’s analysis relied on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Center for Health Statistics. It found that Native Americans, making up just .8 percent of the population, are the victims in 1.9 percent of police killings. When the numbers are broken down further, they reveal that Native Americans make up *three of the top five top age-groups killed by law enforcement:

Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice

“This is a reflection of an endemic problem in the perception of non-white people when it comes to the administration of justice,” Chase Iron Eyes, an attorney with the Lakota People’s Law Project in South Dakota, told Mother Jones. The group put out a report called “Native Lives Matter” in February discussing various ways the justice system disproportionately impacts Native Americans. He said the US Department of Justice needs to address police violence against Native Americans and that Castaway’s death is only the most recent example of the problem.

“You can tell they’re shooting out of fear,” he said. “If it’s not out of hate, for some reason they’re pulling the trigger before determining what the situation actually is. Something does need to happen. Somebody does need to take a look and we need help.”

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Native Americans Get Shot By Cops at an Astonishing Rate

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Obama Just Came Out Hard Against the Washington Football Team’s Racist Name

by Leon51tt8 Posted on July 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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In an irony that will surely be lost on team owner Dan Snyder, the Washington Redskins are being kicked off their land.

From the Washington Post:

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell told D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser this spring that the National Park Service, which owns the land beneath Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, was unlikely to accommodate construction of a new stadium for the Redskins unless the team changes its name.

Jewell oversees both national park land and America’s trust and treaty relationships with Native American tribes.

Her decision not to extend the District’s lease of the RFK land badly hinders Bowser’s bid to return the Redskins to D.C.—and boosts efforts to lure the team across the Potomac to Northern Virginia.

Jewell, who has been an outspoken critic of the team’s controversial name, added that adjusting the federal lease on the property, which doesn’t expire for another 22 years, is “not likely to be a priority for the administration.” The team’s owner Dan Snyder, who has vowed to never change the team’s name, has long been interested in building a new stadium in the DC area.

There’s actually a great precedent for this. As we explained in 2013,

The showdown began in 1961, when John F. Kennedy’s interior secretary, Stewart Udall, who’d committed to ending segregation anywhere in his sphere of influence, declared his intent to break pro football’s last color bar…The call for integration was met with opposition, most notably from the team’s owner, George Preston Marshall, a laundromat magnate turned NFL bigwig who had held firm for years. Udall had one advantage over Marshall: The team’s new home field, DC Stadium (later renamed RFK Memorial), was federal property. With Kennedy’s approval, Udall gave Marshall a choice: He could let black players on his team, or take his all-white squad to someone else’s gridiron.”

Don’t worry, Washington fans: There’s always Virginia (or stay in Maryland).

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Obama Just Came Out Hard Against the Washington Football Team’s Racist Name

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