Carl Beijer

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Of course capitalism is making people kill themselves

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Of course capitalism is making people kill themselves

Why are our pundits taking aim at a claim that's completely uncontroversial in the scholarship?

Feb 22, 2023
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I don’t think anyone will confuse Lorenz’s “late stage capitalist” complaint as anything resembling some kind of rigorous scholarly analysis. Still, it’s bewildering that so many people are criticizing this when it is, setting aside the hyperbole, substantively correct. And not just substantively, but intuitively.

Click through this thread, for example, and you’ll see Eric Levitz declaring that “there just doesn't seem to be a straightforward connection between one's objective level of material security and one's susceptibility to suicide”. But here’s the conclusion of Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior’s review of 15 years of sociological literature on this exact topic:

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