[matterhorn]

Certainly, when individuals vote to turn over personal responsibilities to the the government, things will turn out badly in the end. However, the break down of personal responsibilities within families is not the result of economic success. Has the article's author considered their implied message - that if only Koreans had experienced economic failure, then everybody would just happy as pigs in slop? That's absurd, of course, as their northern neighbors provide the perfect example for the comparison. If there is a breakdown in familial responsibilities, it is not likely to be the result of economic success. Many people around the world work not just in a distant city, but in a distant country in order to send the fruits of higher earnings home to family - so it is not reasonable to assume that moving to a different city somehow forces a person to lose their sense of familial responsibility. If such a breakdown is occurring, the explanation for its cause lies somewhere other than economic success.

[anigbrowl]

So why don't EU countries have a very high suicide rate, since they have even more pervasive welfare states? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3134928/pdf/jivr...

[uvdiv]

Your paper shows that some of them do. In all four tables (age/sex subgroups), the top quartile includes France, Belgium, Austria, and Switzerland, as well as South Korea. Germany is in the top quartile for females.

[anigbrowl]

It's the ones that don't which disprove the hypothesis. Ireland and the UK both have pervasive public health systems, with nursing homes being a more common destination for the aged than living with children, but are only in the second quartile.

[old-gregg]

> turn over personal responsibilities to the the government

Sounds like the modern states are doing a much poorer job caring for their members than a prehistoric tribes used to. At least the tribes provided their members with 4 basic benefits like to hunt together (defense), resolve disputes (justice/law), care of elderly (pensions) and wounded (healthcare).

It absolutely blows my mind that someone would consider any of the 4 to be "personal responsibility". Frankly, I find it absurd to pay money for a lawyer to win in court. In my mind that's an equivalent of out-spending your opponent on a personal army and just taking what you need by force.

Pensions are not personal responsibility. And California state workers are happy to agree with me, that's why they tax pensionless private sector workers to help themselves with a "state pension". And nobody is protesting against this outrageous behavior... Weird. Where are the burning cars and shattered storefronts?

[WalterBright]

Prehistoric societies would send their elderly out into the snow to die once they were no longer productive members of the tribe. Nomadic tribes would simply leave behind the elderly who couldn't keep up any more.

It wasn't so much that they were heartless - they simply did not have the resources to do otherwise.