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Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Economic Issues. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Economic Issues. Show all posts

Thursday, April 30, 2020

Suicide Mortality and Coronavirus Disease 2019—A Perfect Storm?

Reger MA, Stanley IH, Joiner TE.
JAMA Psychiatry. 
Published online April 10, 2020.
doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2020.1060

Suicide rates have been rising in the US over the last 2 decades. The latest data available (2018) show the highest age-adjusted suicide rate in the US since 1941.1 It is within this context that coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) struck the US. Concerning disease models have led to historic and unprecedented public health actions to curb the spread of the virus. Remarkable social distancing interventions have been implemented to fundamentally reduce human contact. While these steps are expected to reduce the rate of new infections, the potential for adverse outcomes on suicide risk is high. Actions could be taken to mitigate potential unintended consequences on suicide prevention efforts, which also represent a national public health priority.

COVID-19 Public Health Interventions and Suicide Risk

Secondary consequences of social distancing may increase the risk of suicide. It is important to consider changes in a variety of economic, psychosocial, and health-associated risk factors.

Economic Stress

There are fears that the combination of canceled public events, closed businesses, and shelter-in-place strategies will lead to a recession. Economic downturns are usually associated with higher suicide rates compared with periods of relative prosperity.2 Since the COVID-19 crisis, businesses have faced adversity and laying off employees. Schools have been closed for indeterminable periods, forcing some parents and guardians to take time off work. The stock market has experienced historic drops, resulting in significant changes in retirement funds. Existing research suggests that sustained economic stress could be associated with higher US suicide rates in the future.

Social Isolation

Leading theories of suicide emphasize the key role that social connections play in suicide prevention. Individuals experiencing suicidal ideation may lack connections to other people and often disconnect from others as suicide risk rises.3 Suicidal thoughts and behaviors are associated with social isolation and loneliness.3 Therefore, from a suicide prevention perspective, it is concerning that the most critical public health strategy for the COVID-19 crisis is social distancing. Furthermore, family and friends remain isolated from individuals who are hospitalized, even when their deaths are imminent. To the extent that these strategies increase social isolation and loneliness, they may increase suicide risk.

The info is here.

Thursday, April 16, 2020

A Test: Can You Make Morally Mature Choices In A Crisis?

Rob Asghar
Forbes.com
Originally posted 10 April 20

Here is an excerpt:

Crisis Ethics in a COVID-19 Context

Of course, SARS-Cov-2 and the rise of the COVID-19 threat have sharpened the issues and heightened the stakes.

At the moment, we do have a global near-consensus on many things: Stay at home. Conduct your religious gatherings online. Do what you can to protect your family's health and that of others.

But the consensus quickly breaks down. How long can we truly afford to do this, especially given evidence that the virus returns once stricter measures are relaxed? How do we judge the misery caused by the virus against other impending miseries? Will an entire generation be economically shattered?

Here, a number of values grind against one another.

For a good number of idealists, sentimentalists and technocrats, it's inconceivable that society could do anything other than to shutter for as long as necessary to prevent further coronavirus spread. Anything else reveals utter contempt for the elderly and the vulnerable. They argue that lockdowns must be draconian and extended, because those countries that initially had success containing the virus witnessed new outbreaks as soon as they loosened restrictions.

Utilitarians, pushing back, raise concerns about how lockdowns have unintended consequences that grow more dangerous over time. Idealists and technocrats tend to dismiss them as Fox News-addicted ogres who are all too eager to dig a grave for Grandma in order to protect their precious stock portfolios.

But at some point, painful realities do have to be reckoned with. As Liz Alderman wrote in the New York Times recently, European officials are walking a high wire in their efforts to provide massive relief efforts. "European leaders are wary of relaunching the economy before the epidemic is proved to be under control," Alderman wrote. "The tsunami of fiscal support by France and its neighbors — over €2 trillion in spending and loan guarantees combined — can be sustained only a few months, economists say."

The info is here.

Friday, October 14, 2016

Economic Inequality: It’s Far Worse Than You Think

By Nicholas Fitz
Scientific American
Originally published on March 31, 2015 (and likely worse today)

Here is an excerpt:

The average American believes that the richest fifth own 59% of the wealth and that the bottom 40% own 9%. The reality is strikingly different. The top 20% of US households own more than 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% combine for a paltry 0.3%. The Walton family, for example, has more wealth than 42% of American families combined.

We don’t want to live like this. In our ideal distribution, the top quintile owns 32% and the bottom two quintiles own 25%. As the journalist Chrystia Freeland put it,  “Americans actually live in Russia, although they think they live in Sweden. And they would like to live on a kibbutz.” Norton and Ariely found a surprising level of consensus: everyone — even Republicans and the wealthy—wants a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo.

The article is here.

Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Intrinsic honesty and the prevalence of rule violations across societies

Simon Gächter & Jonathan F. Schulz
Nature 531, 496–499 (24 March 2016)
doi:10.1038/nature17160

Abstract

Deception is common in nature and humans are no exception. Modern societies have created institutions to control cheating, but many situations remain where only intrinsic honesty keeps people from cheating and violating rules. Psychological, sociological and economic theories suggest causal pathways to explain how the prevalence of rule violations in people’s social environment, such as corruption, tax evasion or political fraud, can compromise individual intrinsic honesty. Here we present cross-societal experiments from 23 countries around the world that demonstrate a robust link between the prevalence of rule violations and intrinsic honesty. We developed an index of the ‘prevalence of rule violations’ (PRV) based on country-level data from the year 2003 of corruption, tax evasion and fraudulent politics. We measured intrinsic honesty in an anonymous die-rolling experiment5. We conducted the experiments with 2,568 young participants (students) who, due to their young age in 2003, could not have influenced PRV in 2003. We find individual intrinsic honesty is stronger in the subject pools of low PRV countries than those of high PRV countries. The details of lying patterns support psychological theories of honesty. The results are consistent with theories of the cultural co-evolution of institutions and values, and show that weak institutions and cultural legacies that generate rule violations not only have direct adverse economic consequences, but might also impair individual intrinsic honesty that is crucial for the smooth functioning of society.

The article is here.

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Men at Work

By Allison J. Pugh
Aeon
Originally posted December 4, 2015

Here are two excerpts:

One option is to get angry. When I interviewed laid-off men for my recent book on job insecurity, their anger, or more often a wry bitterness, was impossible to forget. By and large, like Gary the laid-off tradesman, they were not angry at their employers. At home, however, they sounded a different note. ‘I have a very set opinion of relationships and how females handle them,’ Gary told me, rather flatly. ‘It’s what I’ve seen consistently throughout my life.’ On his third serious relationship, Gary talked about the ‘hurt that’s been caused to me by a lack of commitment on the part of other people’, and he complained that ‘marriage can be tossed out like a Pepsi can’. In the winds of uncertainty, Gary’s anger at women keeps him grounded.

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Nonetheless, most working‑class men such as Gary are trapped by a changing economy and an intransigent masculinity. Faced with changes that reduce the options for less-educated men, they have essentially three choices, none of them very likely. They can pursue more education than their family background or their school success has prepared them for. They can find a low-wage job in a high-growth sector, positions that are often considered women’s work, such as a certified nurse practitioner or retail cashier. Or they can take on more of the domestic labour at home, enabling their partners to take on more work to provide for the household. These are ‘choices’ that either force them to be class pioneers or gender insurgents in their quest for a sustainable heroism; while both are laudable, we can hardly expect them of most men, and yet this is precisely the dilemma that faces men today.

The article is here.

Note from me: This article not about the standard issues in ethics. However, it does bring up the issue of competence. Do we, as psychologists, understand the culture of males in a changing economic system? And, is the changing economic picture a factor in the increase in white, male suicides?

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

What White Privilege Really Means

It’s not about what whites get. It’s about what blacks don’t.

By Reihan Salam
Slate.com
Originally published December 17m 2014

Here is an excerpt:

Why does the white privilege conversation ignore the ways in which Asian Americans have used their social ties to achieve success, or the yawning chasm that separates upper-middle-income Mormon Californians from impoverished Appalachian whites? The simple answer is that we talk about white privilege as a clumsy way of talking about black exclusion.

Even white Americans of modest means are more likely to have inherited something, in the form of housing wealth or useful professional connections, than the descendants of slaves. In his influential 2005 book When Affirmative Action Was White, Ira Katznelson recounts in fascinating detail the various ways in which the New Deal and Fair Deal social programs of the 1930s and 1940s expanded economic opportunities for whites while doing so unevenly at best for blacks, particularly in the segregated South. Many rural whites who had known nothing but the direst poverty saw their lives transformed as everything from rural electrification to generous educational benefits for veterans allowed them to build human capital, earn higher incomes, and accumulate savings. This legacy, in ways large and small, continues to enrich the children and grandchildren of the whites of that era. This is the stuff of white privilege.

The entire article is here.

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science

By William J. Broad
The New York Times
Originally published March 15, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

Absent from his narrative, though, was the back story, one that underscores a profound change taking place in the way science is paid for and practiced in America. In fact, the government initiative grew out of richly financed private research: A decade before, Paul G. Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, had set up a brain science institute in Seattle, to which he donated $500 million, and Fred Kavli, a technology and real estate billionaire, had then established brain institutes at Yale, Columbia and the University of California. Scientists from those philanthropies, in turn, had helped devise the Obama administration’s plan.

American science, long a source of national power and pride, is increasingly becoming a private enterprise.

The entire story is here.

Sunday, February 16, 2014

The wealth gap and inequality can and should be fixed

In his column dated 27 January, Johann Redelinghuys argues that economic inequality is part of the natural order of things, and that attempts to fix it are, essentially, a waste of time and resources. He is wrong on every level: morally, practically and factually.

By Marelise van der Merwe
Daily Maverick
Originally published January 29, 2014

Let’s take the factual level first. In essence, Redelinghuys argues that “individual differences and inequality are clearly established elements in the natural order of things” and that they are “the predictable outcomes of the capitalist economic system which most of the world now subscribes to”. Crucially, he mentions neither the degree of inequality nor the way that it got there, which I would argue is central to the discussion. Certainly, a degree of difference is arguably natural; but glaring or crippling inequality, especially if it got there by unnatural means, is not.

I’m not attacking capitalism. I have no interest in a socialism-vs.-capitalism standoff, which I believe to be unnecessary, since unlike Redelinghuys, I don’t believe gross inequality to be an inevitable or “predictable outcome” of the capitalist system. I believe it is possible to be both capitalists and decent human beings. 

Monday, July 15, 2013

The Half-Trillion-Dollar Depression

By CATHERINE RAMPELL
The New York Times
Published: July 2, 2013

Mental illness has been an increasingly significant health concern over the past several decades, but it’s now becoming an economic one too. The number of Americans who receive Social Security Disability Insurance for mental disorders has doubled during the past 15 years. Eliza is now one of an estimated 11.5 million American adults with a debilitating mental illness, on whom the country spends about $150 billion annually on direct medical costs — therapy, drugs, hospitalizations and so forth. But the biggest blow to the overall economy are the many hidden, indirect costs. People with serious mental illness earn, on average, $16,000 less than their mentally well counterparts, totaling about $193 billion annually in lost earnings, according to a 2008 study published in The American Journal of Psychiatry. And many mentally ill workers, who are more likely to miss work, also suffer from what social scientists call presenteeism — the opposite of absenteeism — in which they are very likely to be less productive on the job when they show up.

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Even though tens of millions of people will get more coverage, estimates suggest that only 1.15 million new users will take advantage of mental-health services. A lot of people who will be extended coverage don’t need care; others, fearful of the stigma around mental health, may not take it. What’s more distressing, from both an economic and a social perspective, is that a lot of people who do muster the courage still won’t get the right kind of treatment. About half of Americans who seek care for serious mental illnesses get treatment that does not help them or is not even recommended for their condition.

The entire article is here.