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TotallynottheCCP t1_isdh724 wrote

Interesting that you correlate higher GDP with lower suicide rates and somehow completely ignore the fact that the lower left corner shows a great deal of countries with significantly lower GDP than say, the US, somehow have even lower suicide rates...

It's almost as if...wait for it....it's almost as if there are dozens of other factors that determine a country's suicide rate OTHER than GDP and those factors should be given credit for their influence on suicides too instead of just "rich countries have less suicides".

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denseplan t1_isebb71 wrote

There's no country in the upper right corner, so we could say that any country could have low suicide rates but a high GDP per capita precludes high suicide rates.

That in itself can be a useful conclusion, even if there is no correlation.

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jwd1066 t1_isecile wrote

Useful how? there are only 8 candidate countries in the lower right, and only three in the upper left.

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denseplan t1_isecqro wrote

I agree it's weak.

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jwd1066 t1_isixjvg wrote

Ya, the 'the aren't any outliers of type x' type of "analysis" using scales just isn't really a thing.

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ankuprk OP t1_isj4d1n wrote

Yeah this is pretty much what I wanted to say: very high income countries don't have very high suicide rates.

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jwd1066 t1_isnccvz wrote

But practically speaking, they do. The US has comparatively high income and high suicide rates. More than Double Mexico in both, so the relationship between the two points doesn't have much meaning. It just happens there is no data point outlier in the chart's upper right of these two metrics if scaled this way.

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jwd1066 t1_isixyjs wrote

Oh ya, and they give as much weighting to tiny countries as they do to large ones ugh

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ankuprk OP t1_isj490m wrote

I think equal weighing is okay, because we have everything in per capita?

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jwd1066 t1_isnbvpy wrote

It's a 'by country' chart The data points forming the "relationship" are still weighted by country, each country is one datapoint. So in the visualisation suicide/gdp by capita for the US, has as much influence on the observed relationship as suicide/gdp for Barbados. Even though Barbados is less than 1/600th the size.

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B-Knight t1_iseff84 wrote

> Generally, an increase in GDP per capita results in a decrease to suicide rates

OP did make a correlation? It's right there in the title.

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denseplan t1_isei2sc wrote

Oh, how did I manage to only read half a headline... I edited my response.

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Arronax50 t1_iseqmzm wrote

There are mathematical formulas for computing correlation that are more useful than just looking at the raw data. And to be more specific, the correlation is in fact the opposite, though very small. https://uca.edu/cahss/files/2020/07/03-King-CLA-2020.pdf

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denseplan t1_isevq59 wrote

I meant correlation is not the only thing you can get from a plot, there are other things to note.

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ankuprk OP t1_isdhzt3 wrote

I am not implying a negative correlation. The plot looks like a 'lower left triangle' not like a line with a negative slope. I am just saying that 'upper right triangle' is mostly empty.

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random_user_11 t1_ise3zal wrote

You imply causation, which is the actual problem, by phrasing that 'higher gdp results in...'.

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ankuprk OP t1_isj50si wrote

I am only saying 'higher GDP per capita with higher suicide rates' doesn't seem to happen. To which one person gave a valid argument, that there are only 9-10 countries with high income to begin with. But yeah, that's all I was trying to say in the title of the post

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