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gwern comments on Open Thread: July 2010 - Less Wrong
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Quite right. Suicide rates spike in adolescence, go down, and only spike again in old age, don't they? Suicide is, I think, a good indicator that someone is having a bad life.
(Also, I've seen mentions on LW of studies that people raising kids are unhappier than if they were childless, but once the kids are older, they retrospectively think they were much happier than they actually were.)
Suicide rates start at .5 in 100,000 for ages 5-14 and rise to about 15 in 100,000 for seniors.
Interesting. From page 30, suicide rates increase monotonically in the 5 age groups up to and including 45-54 (peaking at 17.2 per 100,000), but then drops by 3 to 14.5 (age 55-64) and drops another 2 for the 65-74 age bracket (12.6), and then rises again after 75 (15.9).
So, I was right that the rates increase again in old age, but wrong about when the first spike was.
Unfortunately, the age brackets don't really tell you if there's a teenage spike, except that if there is one, it happens after age 14. That 9.9 could actually be a much higher level concentrated within a few years, if I understand correctly.
Suicide rates may be higher in adolescence than at certain other times, but absolutely speaking, they remain very low, showing that most people are having a good life, and therefore refuting antinatalism.
Suicide rates are not a good measure of how good life is except at a very rough level since humans have very strong instincts for self-preservation.
My counterpoint to the above would be that if suicide rates are such a good metric, then why can they go up with affluence? (I believe this applies not just to wealthy nations (ie. Japan, Scandinavia), but to individuals as well, but I wouldn't hang my hat on the latter.)
Suicide rates are a measure of depression, not of how good life is. Depression can hit people even when they otherwise have a very good life.
Yes yes, this is an argument for suicide rates never going to zero - but again, the basic theory that suicide is inversely correlated, even partially, with quality of life would seem to be disproved by this point.
I think the misconception is that what is generally considered “quality of life” is not correlated with things like affluence. People like to believe (pretend?) that it is, and by ever striving for more affluence feel that they are somehow improving their “quality of life”.
When someone is depressed, their “quality of life” is quite low. That “quality of life” can only be improved by resolving the depression, not by adding the bells and whistles of affluence.
How to resolve depression is not well understood. A large part of the problem is people who have never experienced depression, don't understand what it is and believe that things like more affluence will resolve it.
I suspect the majority of adolescents would also deny wishing they had never been born.