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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2608 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 17, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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In the US, men kill themselves about 4 times more often than women. Why? One can argue that men have it harder in life than women (although I'm not sure that's true), but my anecdotal experience of observing people certainly does not suggest that women are 4 times more happy than men on average.

Men have lower inhibition, higher time preference and take more risks than women. Suicidal ideation is therefore more likely to be followed through by men.

That is interesting. If men have higher time preference than women, why do men make up the majority of successful investors? Is it because the lower inhibition and higher risk-taking somehow make up for the higher time preference? Or something to do with more men being on the high tail of the intelligence bell curve?

Men are higher variance, fewer women are interested in finance, and success in the markets often involves an element of risk-taking where women might be by nature more conservative.

In general, men do save more than women even though research has repeatedly demonstrated men have generally higher time preference. There are several potential evo-psych explanations for this interesting observation, but little real evidence for any.

Got it, thanks for the explanation. Given that you are a woman in finance, whether it is rational for me to do so or not I take your opinion on this matter more seriously than I would the average person's.

There has been some research conducted on portfolio management, afaik on average female fund managers don’t do much worse than the men, and indeed do better in some years. Extreme outliers who see the highest returns or implode in a year are almost all men, so I think a greater range of male performance is a good explanation.

Is this data on attempts or on successes? The data may suggest a much smaller gap once the different success rates of typical gendered methods are considered. Few women blow their brains out, many men do.

Even in countries with very few firearms men more commonly commit suicide than women:

South Korea: men 29.9, women 13.4

Japan: men 17.5 women 6.9

Men are also more likely to be passionate about their pursuits, including suicide, so they are more likely to search for more effective methods of ending one's life rather than going with the one which first comes to mind.

Sure and I would bet in those cultures men are more likely to use mechanical methods than eg pills relative to women. Hanging yourself is a good method too.

Successes.

The proper comparison isn't between the happiness of the average man and the average woman, but of those truly miserable how many are men.

If happiness of men and happiness of women both follow the normal distribution with average happiness of men and women being equal, but happiness of women having a smaller variance, the number of men below any value smaller than the mean, will be greater than the number of women below the same value.

Good point!

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