Russ Roberts: belief

Transcript context

…Are there ways to use incentives to lower the rate of suicide, which is, today, a rising epidemic? Or is that a hopeless battle? I’m going to pick on your question, if I could. I think the natural impulse of many economists is to look at a symptom of a problem and figure out a way to play with that. For example, some workers don’t have enough skills. They don’t get enough education, so they have a low market wage. How do we fix that? Well, we either pass a law that says they have to earn a certain amount, or we give them a subsidy to that. We don’t spend as much time, I believe, thinking about how would we improve the education, the skill set. People worry about that, but that’s not necessarily the central worry, and I think it should be the central worry. As you know, there’s a number of people talking now about the failure of SSRIs — the drugs that try to fight depression — to be effective. A recent article — a recent book, I think; people are writing about that book — I think the author is Ann Harrison — are making the point that in the old days, psychiatrists had this model that mental illness was a chemical imbalance, and this drug — this psychiatric attempt to fix it — repairs the imbalance. Turns out, it’s not true. We don’t have any clinical measures of imbalance that are responsible for mental illness. Some of the drugs might work. There’s debate about how effective they are, of course, but they’re definitely not doing what they claim to do. When you ask psychiatrists, “What about that claim that things are out of balance?” They say, “Oh, it’s just a metaphor.” Suicide is a symptom of something horrible, something very, very wrong with people’s lives. You called it an epidemic. I looked at the data recently. It’s hard to believe the increase over a very short period of time. Often, that’s due to a change in the way data is collected or a change in the way data is collected across states — that different states are reporting it in different ways. The fact that it’s going up nationwide — if it’s really true and it’s not a data compositional issue — is quite striking. It should be almost all we’re talking about, trying to figure out why that is. What are the characteristics? I think the rate’s growing quite rapidly among younger people. That’s correct.…

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