Researchers say there’s a simple way to reduce suicides: Increase the minimum wage

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/04/30/researchers-say-theres-simple-way-reduce-suicides-increase-minimum-wage/?fbclid=IwAR1ZGKxim1L5yykJBy_2bOriEhneUu8FUn6__IXAUf3Lr23ByIcP0gvcBiI

By Andrew Van Dam
April 30, 2019 at 12:28 p.m. EDT

Since 2000, the suicide rate in the United States has risen 35 percent, primarily because of the significant increase in such deaths among the white population.

There are hints that these deaths are the result of worsening prospects among less-educated people, but there are few immediate answers. But maybe the solution is simple: pursue policies that improve the prospects of working-class Americans.

Researchers have found that when the minimum wage in a state increased, or when states boosted a tax credit for working families, the suicide rate decreased.

Raising the minimum wage and the earned-income tax credit (EITC) by 10 percent each could prevent about 1,230 suicides annually, according to a working paper circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research this week.

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Raising the minimum wage and increasing the tax credit help less-educated, low-wage workers who have been hit hardest by what are now known as “deaths of despair,” according to the analysis of 1999-2015 death data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by University of California at Berkeley economists Anna Godoey and Michael Reich, as well as public-health specialists William Dow and Christopher Lowenstein.

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Although raising the minimum wage led to an immediate decrease in suicides, raising the EITC had a delayed effect, resulting in fewer suicides the following year, once the tax change came into force. In both cases, it appears as though taking home more money had a positive effect.

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The effect was strongest among young women and others who were most likely to have minimum-wage jobs. Among men, black and Hispanic Americans saw the largest effect.

A March study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine also found that a one-dollar increase in the minimum wage was associated with a 1.9 percent decrease in suicides, and that the association was strongest between 2011 and 2016, the most recent year studied.

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In a paper to be published in American Economic Review: Insights, David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, David Dorn of the University of Zurich and Gordon Hanson of the University of California at San Diego drew on data from between 1990 and 2014 to find that the death rate among men tended to rise in cities where jobs were vanishing because of competition from cheap foreign goods.