[ceejayoz]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn

920,000+ employees, "almost a dozen" suicides

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra..., China 13.85 per 100,000.

Foxconn should have 127.42 suicides per year. "Almost a dozen" means they have one tenth the per-capita suicide rate of the rest of the country.

[skore]

Different dataset - For starters: "all of china" includes a lot of unemployed people. "All of Foxconn" includes only employed people.

[ceejayoz]

Unemployment rate in Chinese urban areas: 14% http://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/members/albert.park/papers/une...

Study indicating double suicide risk in unemployed: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessio...

Even if you posit that 100% of China is unemployed and thus causes double the normal suicide rate, you'd still expect ~60 suicides at Foxconn in an average year.

[spacefungus]

I've said this on other comments, but comparing an uncontrolled environment like and entire society (China) to a semi-controlled environment like Foxconn is bad statistics and foolish.

[ceejayoz]

And "Foxconn gets 1/10th the suicides of China as a whole, which I shall treat as if it were shockingly high" is good statistics and non-foolish?