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Crémieux Profile picture
@cremieuxrecueil
Jun 1, 2023 • 8 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
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American military veterans have a suicide problem.

Some have theorized the reason is deployment-related trauma.

Leveraging the random assignment of new soldiers to units with different deployment cycles, Bruhn et al. found that was wrong.

Deployment did not increase suicides. Image
Looking only at violent deployments (ones with peer casualties), there aren't noncombat mortality effects either.

What explains veteran suicide rates? Image
The reason seems to be that the proposition is wrong: veterans do not have increased suicide risk.

This may seem surprising, but it's not. Their suicide rates are elevated over the general population because most of them are young White men. That group has a suicide issue. Image
There are good and bad parts to this observation.

On the one hand, it means that there is not selection of suicidal people into the military.

On the other, demographic selection makes this problem into one that agencies like the VA will probably not be able to fix on their own
because it's not a soldier problem, it's a young White male problem.

I don't know how this can be fixed, but presumably tackling opiate use would help.

Soliman (2022) found that DEA crackdowns on overprescribing pharmacies resulted in fewer local suicide deaths. Image
Soliman also found that sanctioning specific doctors affected opioid-related mortality more generally without impacting suicide rates. Effects were generally larger for males than females and they were larger for people aged 30-49 than those aged 15-29 or 85+. No race data.
Kennedy-Hendricks et al. found that Florida's pill mill crackdown reduced opioid overdose mortality considerably.

Their supplement contained details on the characteristics of the people who died from opioid overdoses, but I wasn't able to access it.

Regardless, this problem can Image
probably be helped to some degree.

Sources:

nber.org/papers/w30622

fivethirtyeight.com/features/suici…

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.21…

More:

bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/resear…

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More from @cremieuxrecueil

Crémieux Profile picture
Jan 13
American military veterans have a suicide problem.

Some have theorized the reason is deployment-related trauma.

Leveraging the random assignment of new soldiers to units with different deployment cycles, Bruhn et al. found that was wrong.

Deployment did not increase suicides. Image
Looking only at violent deployments (ones with peer casualties), there aren't noncombat mortality effects either.

What explains veteran suicide rates? Image
The reason seems to be that the proposition is wrong: veterans do not have increased suicide risk.

This may seem surprising, but it's not!

Their suicide rates are elevated over the general population because most of them are young White men. That group has a suicide issue. Image
Read 8 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Jan 12
That aspect is probably not that unrealistic, unfortunately.

Across the OECD, on average, just 55% of 15-to-16-year-olds got this question right, and no country saw 80% get it.

Most people globally *do* struggle even reading simple tables. What else?

Thread.🧵 Image
That table-reading question is "Level 3", which, amazingly, corresponds to an already-high level of ability, by global standards.

This is a simpler Level 1 question, but with this, 92% of the OECD got it, including just 65% of Brazilians and 53% of Peruvians. Image
Level 2!

Just 77% of the OECD got this, with less than half of the Mexican population being up to the task.

In fact, only Asian countries got over 90% on this trivial question. Image
Read 9 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Jan 10
Credit card rewards are a great way to redistribute billions of dollars from people who are bad with money to people who are good with it.

With the advent of rewards cards (red), there's lots of cross-subsidization of people with high credit scores by people with low scores. Image
Curiously, the degree of cross-subsidization is not just an income thing.

People with high incomes (green) and moderate incomes (yellow) take fewer rewards at low credit scores, although they take more at high credit scores. Image
What does this do demographically? Spatially?

Credit card rewards transfer money from uneducated to educated, poor to rich, Black to White, and rural to urban. Image
Read 5 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Jan 7
The host of NPR's This American Life once tried to raise a pit bull with his now ex-wife.

He let the dog ruin his life🧵

He ended up getting it on Prozac and Valium, feeding it kangaroo and ostrich, and making excuses for the many times it would attack people.Image
Ira Glass' wife had a dog before they got married, but it died right before the ceremony.

That dog was a pit bull and it was a rescue, so they decided it would be good to rescue another one.

Per him, it originally came with the "slave name" Marley, which he changed to Piney. Image
Shortly after taking him home, Piney seemingly developed severe allergies to whatever he was eating.

So, Ira and his wife got him set up with a doctor. In fact, they got him set up with four doctors.

And they started spending more time cooking for the dog than for themselves. Image
Read 18 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Jan 5
Pit bulls were bred to fight.

Animals in nature are not like that. Tigers and lions? They don't seek out combat. Nature doesn't seem to want to breed them into unrelenting killers.

This is why Britain banned the sport of "lion baiting"🧵 Image
The nature of "baiting" is torment.

The idea is to put large, powerful animals like bulls or lions in the ring with several dogs, and the winner lives.

The sport has existed for thousands of years. One of our first records is of Indians showing it to Alexander the Great. Image
The first record in England comes from 1610 and features King James I requesting the Master of the Beargarden—a bear training facility—to provide him with three dogs to fight a lion.

Two of the dogs died and the last escaped because the lion did not wish to fight and retreated. Image
Read 18 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Jan 4
There are ZERO rich countries that haven't embraced markets. Image
You could say something like 'Ah, but this is just because the economic freedom index is constructed that way.'

No, it's not. We can all go and read how it's made. It's detailed every year. Failed excuse. Moreover, this has unintended predictive power:

fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/…Link: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/09/29/a-study-of-lights-at-night-suggests-dictators-lie-about-economic-growth
You could say 'Ah, but this is about sanctions.'

That makes no sense.

For one, there's no supportive pattern of sanctions. For two, you can develop in near-autarky, and before post-WW2, that was comparatively what the most developed countries were dealing with. Link: https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief
Read 4 tweets

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