CanPol Megathread: Big Changus

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vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

zapplez posted:

Can't wait for the LPC / NDP federal coalition government.

Even if this weren't a pipe dream, those are CPC majority numbers.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2019 05:14

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 10:31

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Furnaceface posted:

Is he planning on hiring Hudak to run his campaign?

Probably nothing will ever beat "vote for me to lose your job" but I'm sure they'll do their best

# ¿ Mar 6, 2019 06:10

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

It's really worth remembering that the last Conservative majority, they got 5 seats in Quebec.

We used to think some fragile alliance between Quebec conservatives and the rest of the country was necessary for the Cons to win but that's demonstrably not true anymore. Winning the West and Suburban Ontario would be enough for at least a Conservative minority.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2019 06:17

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

less than three posted:

Call them the Prairies, not the West.

The populated areas of BC don't deserve to be lumped in with them.

In 2011 the Cons won 21/36 seats in BC, so they definitely deserve it

# ¿ Mar 6, 2019 13:32

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Health Services posted:

I don't get this whole 'saving jobs' thing. Surely, if one company goes out of business for non-commercial reasons, the volume of work in that sector will still stay roughly the same and the workers and engineers out of a job will be hired by other companies that need to grow to meet demand?

the lucrative market for building libyan torture prisons is global in scale so those valuable jobs might not come from canada

# ¿ Mar 6, 2019 16:37

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

A Typical Goon posted:

Following through in your electoral promises is actually extremely easy when you have a large majority government

Look at this guy thinking that handily winning an election after explicitly campaigning on the idea that you will do a specific thing is enough of a mandate to do that thing

# ¿ Mar 6, 2019 18:12

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Mr. Apollo posted:

It�s also being pushed by businesses as a way to cut back on benefits and salaries. There are several �CEOs for UBI� type groups that say stuff like �it allows for increased flexibility with regards to hiring and compensation� they also encourage increasing the sales tax to pay for UBI since �people will have the money to pay for the increase�.

I've even heard people say things like UBI would let us get rid of the minimum wage because if you're guaranteed not to starve to death, then businesses should be allowed to pay you $2 an hour.

Seriously it's important to remember that like 9/10 people proposing UBI are doing so from the right, because it's a way to get rid of the things they hate about the interventionist state while still allowing people to participate in the market as consumers.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2019 05:47

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

We're witnessing, in real time, the entire contents of the glass case in Trudeau's office labeled "break in case of scandal"

# ¿ Mar 7, 2019 13:34

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Baronjutter posted:

How dare you say guns are dangerous, by saying that you're putting children at risk of being shot when gun owners become violent at the idea of new gun regulations!

Or even more to the point "our responsible gun owners are going to start shooting kids if you try to take away our murder-toy hobbies"

No, see, we wouldn't. It would be, you know, those other gun owners. You know the ones.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2019 16:24

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Arcsquad12 posted:

Gun owners have always been crazy. The RCMP seizing a bunch of guns without warrants back in Alberta ten years ago didn't help, because it's the loving RCMP.

You're right it didn't help, they should have seized all of them.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2019 16:30

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Tsyni posted:

I like guns. Most of my life I thought they were horrible, until I used them. They are fun.

Isn't most gun crime in Canada done with guns smuggled from the USA anyway? You guys sound like real downers.

oh well excuse me i never realized guns were fun, wow my whole life has been changed thank you, deadly weapons for everyone now that i know how fun it is to use them

# ¿ Mar 8, 2019 19:21

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

xtal posted:

Or, more simply put, "the vast majority of us are law abiding, rational people, until you gently caress with us." Like why do you think they have guns to begin with? It's perfectly consistent.

Every gun owner is a law-abiding gun owner until they break the law.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2019 19:23

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Here, have a bunch of stats on guns in Canada:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/canada-gun-facts-crime-accidental-shootings-suicides-1.4803378

Also of note, while it's a common trope to say that Canadian gun crime is done with guns smuggled in from America, the data literally doesn't exist to prove that one way or another, and a lot of crimes are also committed with guns that were originally legally-owned in Canada but then stolen in a robbery.

There's also, of course, the fact that the vast majority of people who die by gun are suicides by lawful gun owners, but nobody cares about them when talking about why we should reduce the number of guns in society.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2019 19:53

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

enki42 posted:

I feel like there's not a lot that an outright ban would do that more consistently enforcing the current laws wouldn't do. It's already illegal to be in possession of a handgun even with an RPAL except for extremely limited circumstances (transporting it to / from a range while locked in your car), so what additional benefit does a ban provide?

There's the argument that legal guns could be stolen, I suppose, but despite the lack of good statistics, it's probably fair to say that it's not significantly harder to smuggle a gun in from the U.S. vs. stealing a gun, so a decreased supply of legal Canadian guns would probably just result in more cross-border smuggling.

Again, 75% of gun deaths in Canada are suicides and the vast majority of those are being committed with legally-purchased and legally-owned firearms. Research also shows that reducing the availability of one method of suicide does not result in an increase of corresponding magnitude in suicide by other means.

The gun debate always pisses me off because we're constantly pretending that the only people who die from gun violence are people are are shot by "criminals", i.e. people actively engaged in the commission of multiple crimes, like spree shooters or gang members. That's completely false. The overwhelming majority of people who die from guns die as a result of normal, law-abiding gun ownership, because there's a gun in their house when their depression gets the better of them one day and they decide to shoot themselves, or because there's a gun in their house when they get in a big argument with someone who can't control their temper, and who goes and gets the gun and shoots them. As I said earlier, every gun owner is a law-abiding gun owner until they break the law. The only way to actually prevent the vast majority of gun deaths, which result from unspectacular moments of everyday life, poor mental health, and poor impulse control, is to make it so that there aren't guns in people's houses when those moments occur, and that means heavily restricting or outright banning legal gun possession as well as cracking down on illegal gun possession.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2019 21:29

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Furnaceface posted:

Why is CBC even letting her near a camera? Why is CBC so trash now?

e: I really loving hate how JOBS are now used to justify every evil regressive lovely idea to ever fart out of a conservative mouth

Never forget that one of the things JWR was told when they were pressuring her was "we can line up op-eds from here to the moon saying you did the right thing".

Furnaceface posted:

Helsing or vyelkin probably have a way more accurate/concrete time frame but Im old and it feels like something that really picked up at the end of the Reagan/Thatcher era of politics.

I've no idea actually. From personal experience I'm young and I don't think I ever remember it being a different way. My hunch would be the same as yours, that it's something that came with neoliberalism and love for "job creators". Certainly the narrative from the wealthy has been that by providing jobs they're immune to all criticism for a lot longer than that, but before the advent of neoliberalism it seems there was a much stronger counter-narrative saying jobs aren't the be-all and end-all and in fact our end goal should be no one having to work at all.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2019 05:44

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

zapplez posted:

And I am curious which studies you reference that the suicide rate decreases if you remove a common method of suicide. Everything I've seen says theres conflicting evidence if the removal of firearms leads to an increase of attempts of suicide in different methods, negating the savings.

I'm sorry but what you've seen is wrong according to scientific literature. It's been repeatedly shown by empirical studies that means restriction is an effective way of lowering the suicide rate overall.

Here's an article from the Lancet in 2012: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)60521-2/fulltext

quote:

Summary
Limitation of access to lethal methods used for suicide�so-called means restriction�is an important population strategy for suicide prevention. Many empirical studies have shown that such means restriction is effective. Although some individuals might seek other methods, many do not; when they do, the means chosen are less lethal and are associated with fewer deaths than when more dangerous ones are available. We examine how the spread of information about suicide methods through formal and informal media potentially affects the choices that people make when attempting to kill themselves. We also discuss the challenges associated with implementation of means restriction and whether numbers of deaths by suicide are reduced.

Here's an article from the Journal of Accident Analysis and Prevention from 2005: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0001457505000400

quote:

Abstract
The effectiveness of restricting access to certain means of committing suicide has been demonstrated, at least as regards toxic domestic gas, firearms, drugs and bridges. At the individual level, studies tend to indicate that many persons have a preference for a given means, which would limit the possibility of substitution or displacement towards another method. Similarly, the fact that suicidal crisis are very often short-lived (and, what is more, influenced by ambivalence or impulsiveness) suggests that an individual with restricted access to a given means would not put off his plans to later or turn to alternative methods. This has been more difficult to demonstrate scientifically in population studies. Nevertheless, it appears that, should such a shift occur towards other means, it would be put into effect only in part and over a longer term.

Here's an open-access article from the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health from 2011: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3290984/

quote:

Abstract
Background: Restricting access to common means of suicide, such as firearms, toxic gas, pesticides and other, has been shown to be effective in reducing rates of death in suicide. In the present review we aimed to summarize the empirical and clinical literature on controlling the access to means of suicide. Methods: This review made use of both MEDLINE, ISI Web of Science and the Cochrane library databases, identifying all English articles with the keywords �suicide means�, �suicide method�, �suicide prediction� or �suicide prevention� and other relevant keywords. Results: A number of factors may influence an individual�s decision regarding method in a suicide act, but there is substantial support that easy access influences the choice of method. In many countries, restrictions of access to common means of suicide has lead to lower overall suicide rates, particularly regarding suicide by firearms in USA, detoxification of domestic and motor vehicle gas in England and other countries, toxic pesticides in rural areas, barriers at jumping sites and hanging, by introducing �safe rooms� in prisons and hospitals. Moreover, decline in prescription of barbiturates and tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs), as well as limitation of drugs pack size for paracetamol and salicylate has reduced suicides by overdose, while increased prescription of SSRIs seems to have lowered suicidal rates. Conclusions: Restriction to means of suicide may be particularly effective in contexts where the method is popular, highly lethal, widely available, and/or not easily substituted by other similar methods. However, since there is some risk of means substitution, restriction of access should be implemented in conjunction with other suicide prevention strategies.

And that's just what popped up on the first page of Google.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2019 07:07

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Postess with the Mostest posted:

Adam Smith had that poo poo pegged down in the 1700s.

Jobs are good because they add profit and growth, otherwise the companies wouldn't survive having jobs like that so the default is that all jobs are good because they are good for the national economy. When was the strongest counter narrative saying that our end goal should be no one having to work at all? Genuinely curious

It was automation. Keynes, for example, in the 30s, thought that over time automation would mean people would be more and more productive for each hour they spent at work, which would lead to reductions in the workweek. He thought by the 21st century we'd all be working 25-30 hour weeks, and those workweeks would continue to shrink as productivity continued to increase through automation. When you look at a job through that lens the individual job suddenly becomes much less important when the end result is going to be fully-automated luxury gay space communism.

And for a while it looked like he was right. Automation and increases in productivity led to either decreased workweeks or increased wages (or both) up until the 70s and the advent of neoliberalism, when globalization, the deregulation of capital, and all the other stuff we talk about in here all the time meant productivity became decoupled from wages and labour conditions. Since then real wages have stagnated and workweeks, iirc, have actually gotten longer, even though productivity has continued to increase. The difference is that we've eroded the power of labour so much that we're no longer able to negotiate for higher productivity translating into decreased workweeks or increased wages, so instead all the benefits of that increased productivity have flowed to capital instead of labour. And under those conditions, capital has used its increasing dominance and the increasing insecurity of work to make us all think that they're the ones wonderfully bestowing jobs upon us, instead of the ones exploiting our labour.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2019 07:15

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

zapplez posted:

I hate to be a big stickler on this stuff but yes, the overwhelming amount of gun homicides in Canada are gang/drug related. The amount of homicides that are caused by legally owned guns in Canada is something like 10 or less a year. It is not common for a typical gun owner in Canada to shoot their family members.

Oh and I also have to push back here. Gangs are not insignificant but they're not the overwhelming majority of gun homicides in Canada.

Here's a recent Statscan report on homicides in Canada in 2017.

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2018001/article/54980-eng.htm

In 2017 there were 266 homicides by firearm in Canada, and 137 of those were gang-related. So it's not the overwhelming majority, it's half.

When you take the other half and combine it with the overwhelming majority of gun deaths that are suicides, I'm standing by my statement that the vast majority of gun deaths in Canada are people who lose control one day and either kill themselves or someone they know with a legally-owned firearm.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2019 07:25

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

zapplez posted:

From a vox article
https://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11120184/gun-control-study-international-evidence

"This helps explain some unusual results. For instance, some data from Quebec found that a Canadian law reducing access to firearms led to an increase in suicides by hanging � a large enough increase to offset the decline in suicides by firearm that followed the law. Other studies, from Australia and New Zealand, found a similar substitution effect."

Its hard to find recent suicide studies in Canada, doesn't seem like we have good stats since 2009. Thanks Harper?

But yeah, if you limit access to firearms it can help a bit, but the determined ones will just figure out another way.

Sorry for arguing about this, but as someone thats done plently of shifts for a suicide hotline, I am kind of a bugaboo on this issue because what we need is way more funding for mental health, banning guns wont solve (or help a ton) just like banning the sale of rope at home hardware won't fix things either.

also lol that you quoted that one paragraph from the Vox article but left out the next two:

quote:

This helps explain some unusual results. For instance, some data from Quebec found that a Canadian law reducing access to firearms led to an increase in suicides by hanging � a large enough increase to offset the decline in suicides by firearm that followed the law. Other studies, from Australia and New Zealand, found a similar substitution effect.

However, there is very good evidence � some of it from the same countries � that reducing access to guns reduces overall suicides. Indeed, Santaella-Tenorio himself believes that despite those three studies, limiting access to guns is very likely to reduce suicide rates overall.

"There's some other evidence that we didn't include in this review," he says, that finds attempting suicide is an impulsive decision that people regret (if they fail) and thus don't repeat. Firearms, because they're much more effective than taking pills or slashing your wrists, don't give people that option. Thus, reducing access to guns should (and empirically generally does) reduce the overall suicide rate.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2019 07:30

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

My only hope is that this brings us one step closer to QS doing a hostile takeover of the federal NDP.

# ¿ Mar 12, 2019 13:49

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

EvidenceBasedQuack posted:

I really like how Eric Grenier doesn't provide any of his methodology for seat projections or probability of winning.

what methodology

# ¿ Mar 12, 2019 21:00

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Blood Boils posted:

Just in case some of you political junkies have some love left in your hateful hearts:

Lowtax discussing SomethingAwful Money Problems

You can donate the usual way, or support the patreon, or buy some poster you think is really cool/stupid an AV that says "yo i'm cool/stupid as hell"

and also there is apparently a store where you can buy the worst looking t shirts but the other options are better imo

I bought archives and donated before even seeing this post because if the forums die I'll lose all my friends by ranting at them about Canadian politics instead of doing it in this thread.

Postess with the Mostest posted:

To put probability into practical context, a party with a 25 per cent probability of winning has as much of a chance of winning the election as someone does of flipping a coin twice and getting "heads" both times. Unlikely — but still very possible.

The actual most revealing part is when he says that a "star candidate" gives a flat 15% boost.

Like the fact that it's such a nice round number says so much about how he just picked a number at random instead of bothering to look at whether or not running a high-profile candidate actually makes any difference.

"Star candidate = +15%" is the kind of thing you would expect to see in a bad computer game about running an election, not in a supposedly serious poll tracker and election predictor.

# ¿ Mar 12, 2019 22:26

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

The Freedom Conservatives

# ¿ Mar 14, 2019 17:20

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

https://twitter.com/AlexCKaufman/status/1105853650432225280

Somebody tell Doug Ford, maybe we can build a ferris wheel at the north pole to attract tourists to our new beachfront resorts.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2019 17:48

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

No the actual response is we need to build more pipelines because boomer jobs are on the line

# ¿ Mar 14, 2019 17:55

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

*in extremely trump voice* you'd better believe it folks, some people, and I'm not going to say who, but some people are saying we should just arrest all the homeless

# ¿ Mar 14, 2019 20:54

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

patonthebach posted:

I'm pretty fed up with this poo poo and shared the same kind of sentiment after the Quebec shooting, but honestly the next 4chan psycho virgin who wants to get famous on CNN will just a shotgun instead and have similar causalities. And if somehow he cant get a shotgun, he will just rent a uhaul like the other incel guy.

I'm more leaning towards crazy big brother monitoring at this point. Have a bigger team of CSIS monitoring 4chan and reddit incel etc and identifying the obsessive fantasy shitposters and finding out if they actually have the ability or resources to carry out attacks and start monitoring them more.

The incel guy killed 10 people with his van.

The death count in New Zealand so far is 49.

If banning guns means cutting mass murder fatalities by four fifths while also getting the related benefits like declines in suicides and a generally less violent society with less murders, it's absolutely worth it.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2019 15:11

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

flakeloaf posted:

How many greasy incels do you think could be turned into armed maniacs for $25 million?

I think Lowtax has other plans for his windfall

# ¿ Mar 15, 2019 16:51

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Conservatives: vote for us for a poorer and more atomized society

Boomers: gently caress yeah how do I get a lifetime membership?

# ¿ Mar 17, 2019 08:41

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Syfe posted:

I contend that there should be a maximum wage, and also that worker wage is then tied to how much the CEO makes, so if your CEO makes x amount more, every employee must make x amount more too. If the company is doing well, everybody should benefit goddamnit.

There needs to be something other than the vacuum to the top with many companies not even bothering to reinvest into the company itself. (I'm actually somewhat lucky in that the company I work for, does reinvest in it's workers and structure somewhat, but this is also a first for my employment history.)

Some proposals I've seen for maximum wage tie it directly to the income of the lowest worker in the company. So to use a random number, no one in the company can make more than 20 times the lowest wage. Then if you're employing someone at minimum wage, $15/hour, ~30k a year, no one in the company can make more than $300/hour or ~600k a year. If the people at the top want to give themselves raises, they have to also give the people at the bottom raises.

Of course actually enforcing this policy would be insanely difficult because of all the accounting tricks big corporations use. Oh whoops it turns out our lowest-paid workers are actually all freelancers working for Taskrabbit, and also our CEO is paid entirely in charitable contributions and the CFO's wage is stock options but because our stock is currently listed on the Dublin Stock Exchange and the value of our company is negative because of all the debt we took on, that means the CFO is actually paying to work here, and don't pay any attention to the offshore bank accounts registered to a numbered holding company that happens to gain a billion dollars every quarter.

It's much simpler to just socialize the ownership of the corporation and let the workers themselves decide who should get paid how much.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2019 18:40

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Helsing posted:

This is like saying that you want to raise a Bengal Tiger to have a vegetarian diet. I just don't think you can take a contemporary capitalist organization, tweak one or two rules, and suddenly produce a socially conscious and equitable vehicle for wealth redistribution.

This is something that the read really doesn't like to engage with but the deep problems of capitalism come from the social structure of our workplaces, not the electoral system. It's the relationships between bosses and workers that structures our system not the relationship between voters and politicians. Without fundamentally changing the inner culture and structure of our big corporations I do not think you could ever achieve any substantial changes to the distribution of wealth in society.

You need some catchy terms to explain this, like, I dunno, just throwing this out there, base and superstructure.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2019 20:10

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

ChairMaster I know you probably won't read this but I really hope you don't kill yourself.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2019 07:18

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Wistful of Dollars posted:

Is the emphasis on "Party" or "hq"

It's a party in 4K which coincidentally is also the amount of money in the NDP's bank account

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 15:29

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

1500quidpoocati posted:

People have said that the previous two elections about Wildrose. Then the candidates start saying crazy poo poo.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 15:53

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

1500quidpoocati posted:

What�s your point here? We should all just not vote because the UCP has a large lead?

When people said Wildrose was a sure thing, there was another conservative party splitting the vote. Now there isn't. 50% of Alberta voters, if not more, are reliably conservative and will vote for the UCP even if they have scandals and white nationalist candidates.

I'm not saying don't vote or don't try. Get out there and do what you can, but don't be surprised when in the end Kenney wins an overwhelming majority despite scandals that would sink Notley in a instant.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 16:36

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

The last Alberta election where the conservative parties didn't get over 50% of the popular vote was 1993, and even in that election Klein won 44% and formed a majority government.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 16:39

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

DariusLikewise posted:

When the Wildrose and PC parties merged Notley's fate was sealed, it's over for the NDP this time. The focus in Alberta should be promoting progressive ideas locally and working bottom up and organizing people. There is a large dedicated base of people who do believe in progressive ideas in that province, but this election will not go their way. They need to continue to add membership and work towards shifting the balance of power over the next several years.

This is pretty much my feelings. By all means get out and vote, fight as hard as you can. But do so in the knowledge that the overwhelming probability is that Alberta continues its 25-year trend of the right getting over 50% of the vote and Kenney wins a resounding majority. That doesn't mean your work is for nothing, it means you're fighting the good fight in the long run instead of the short run.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 17:29

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Silver Spooner posted:

Hey fun fact (that everybody in here probably already figured): Ontario doesn't have a spending problem, it has a revenue problem.

This has been the case since the Harris government, all those fun charts and graphs that compare spending and revenue across provinces consistently have Ontario at or very close to the bottom of the pack.

The big problem narrative-wise is that Ontario is simultaneously the biggest province with the largest population and GDP, and the province with more or less the lowest levels of per-capita spending and revenue. This makes it really easy for opponents of "big government" to pull out huge numbers and say "look how big Ontarios debt/deficit/spending is! We need to cut cut cut" and the numbers are billions of dollars so people get scared without realizing that those billions of dollars are actually pretty small compared to Ontario's economic base, and on a per-capita level are significantly below comparable provinces.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2019 17:08

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 10:31

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

PT6A posted:

I think social isolation is a huge problem, but I disagree with the idea that poverty is a causal factor. It's happening to people across the socioeconomic spectrum, and while poverty exacerbates the negative effects without question, we need only look at other societies where poverty exists in far greater magnitudes but the social isolation does not, to realize that the problem with social isolation goes beyond simple economic insecurity.

I mean, poverty is absolutely a cause, but you're also right that this is happening to people that aren't poor as well. Because the answer is inequality.

Kate E. Pickett and Richard G. Wilkinson, "Inequality: an underacknowledged source of mental illness and distress," The British Journal of Psychiatry 197, no. 6 (2010), 426-428 posted:

The burden of mental health problems in the UK today is very high. For example, estimates suggest that one million British children � one in ten between the ages of 5 and 16 � are mentally ill and that in any secondary school with 1000 students, 50 will have severe depression, 100 will be distressed, between 10 and 20 will have obsessive�compulsive disorder and between 5 and 10 girls will have an eating disorder.9 Among UK adults, in a national survey conducted in 2000, 23% of adults had a mental illness in the previous 12 months, and 4% of adults had had more than one disorder in the previous year.10 In the USA, one in four adults have been mentally ill in the past year and almost a quarter of these episodes were severe; over their lifetime more than half of US adults will experience mental illness.

But are such levels of mental illness an inevitable consequence of modern life in high-income societies? Not at all. Rates of mental illness vary substantially between rich societies. Comparable data on the prevalence of mental illness � free from cultural differences in reporting, diagnosis, categorisation and treatment have only recently become available. In 1998, the World Health Organization (WHO) established the World Mental Health Survey Consortium to estimate the prevalence of mental illness in different countries, the severity of illness and patterns of treatment. Although their methods do not entirely overcome worries about cultural differences in interpreting and responding to such questions, at least the same diagnostic interviews are used in each country.

We used these data as part of our investigation into the impact of income inequality on health and social problems; we examined the prevalence of mental illness in the WHO surveys from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and the USA,11,12 and from three national surveys using similar methodology from Australia,13 Canada14 and the UK.10

Figure 1 shows the association in rich countries between income inequality and the proportion of adults who have been mentally ill in the 12 months prior to being interviewed. This is a strong relationship (r = 0.73, P50.01), and clearly a much higher percentage of the population have a mental illness in more unequal countries; only Italy is somewhat of an outlier, with lower levels of mental illness than we might expect on the basis of its level of income inequality. Inequality is associated with threefold differences in prevalence: in Germany, Italy, Japan and Spain, fewer than 1 in 10 people have been mentally ill within the past year; in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK it is more than 1 in 5 people, and in the USA more than 1 in 4.

Among the nine countries with data from WHO surveys, we can also examine subtypes of mental illness, specifically, anxiety disorders, mood disorders, impulse�control disorders and addictions, as well as a measure of severe mental illness. Anxiety disorders, impulse�control disorders and severe illness are all strongly correlated with inequality, mood disorders less so. Anxiety disorders represent the largest subgroup in all these countries, and the percentage of all mental illnesses that are anxiety disorders is itself significantly higher in more unequal countries.

As a separate test of the hypothesis that greater income inequality leads to an increase in the prevalence of mental illness, we repeated our analysis within the 50 states of the USA. State-specific estimates of mental illness are collected by the United States Behavioural Risk Factor Surveillance Study.15 We found that state-level income inequality is significantly associated with mental illness in adult women and with the percentage of children in each state with �moderate or severe difficulties in the area of emotions, concentration, behaviour, or getting along with others�.16 However, we found no association for adult men. This may be related to gender differences in willingness to report mental illness in the USA, as these data are self-reported mental illness rather than being derived from diagnostic interviews. Among other US-based studies none have used diagnostic interviewers, however studies have shown that state-level17 and county-level18 income inequality are associated with a significant increased risk of reporting depressive symptoms, and state-level inequality with self-reported mental health.19 Only one study found no effect for depressive symptoms.20

Why do more people tend to have mental health problems in more unequal places? Psychologist Oliver James uses an analogy with infectious disease to explain the link. What James terms the �affluenza� virus is a �set of values which increase our vulnerability to emotional distress�, and he argues that these values are more common in affluent societies.21 They entail placing a high value on acquiring money and possessions, looking good in the eyes of others and wanting to be famous. He goes on to argue that these values increase the risk of depression, anxiety, substance misuse and personality disorder. Philosopher Alain de Botton claims that our anxiety about our social status is �a worry so pernicious as to be capable of ruining extended stretches of our lives�.22 When we fail to maintain our position in the social hierarchy we are �condemned to consider the successful with bitterness and ourselves with shame�. Economist Robert Frank calls the same phenomenon �luxury fever�.23 As inequality increases and the super rich at the top spend more and more on luxury goods, the desire for such things cascades down the income scale and the rest of us struggle to compete and keep up. Advertisers play on this, making us dissatisfied with what we have, and encouraging invidious social comparisons � more unequal societies spend more in advertising.6 Economist Richard Layard describes us as having an �addiction to income� � the more we have, the more we feel we need and the more time we spend on striving for material wealth and possessions, at the expense of our family life, relationships and quality of life.24

Although not all these authors make the link specifically with income inequality, it is not surprising that the tendencies they describe are stronger in more unequal societies. Our impression is that greater inequality increases status competition and status insecurity. Internationally and among the 50 states of the USA, income inequality is strongly related to low levels of trust, to weaker community life and to increased violence. Mental health is profoundly influenced by the quality and sufficiency of social relationships and all these measures suggest that both are harmed by inequality.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2019 18:44

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