Bob, I think that you mix two issues. The first is the reason for suicide; it can also be linked to a mental disease, inability to adapt to stress, not only to economic problems.

The second issue is linked to global economic problems and a good theory that not only describes them but also gives a remedy. As for Marxism, I think that its followers were too dogmatic and no good book elaborating Marx in a proper way has emerged in the 20th century. (If I am wrong, please correct me.) As for the recent crisis of 2008, many authors made an attempt to adapt economic theory in order to find out why it was unable to predict this.

I can recommend the following article by D. Helbing and A.Kirman: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2292370

I also worked a bit on that issue: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272380285_About_Origins_of_Financial_Crisis_2008

Conference Paper About Origins of Financial Crisis 2008

Dear Yuri, Many thanks for sharing your kind thoughts. [email protected]

- Certainly I think I used smart enough freedom and the resources that we had available. We have very little time to reconsider and change course paradigm

Suicide denies society of the contributions the person who committed suicide , could have made.   Suicide is a health issue and  depression  can be treated if one gets medical help.  I have lived din China and America , two somewhat different societies.  Mental health issues arise  in both places, when people need medical help.  The reason fewer per capita people are in mental institutions for long term care taking is precisely because of medical advancements.  Neither Smith nor Marx were physicians and so I think you worry about the medical part instead..  If economists are scientists , we should also respect other scientists , such as physicians.

[Q1] Capitalism, free economy, financial economy, stock exchanges, etc., have all changed so much - if I may say, probably since 1980s, and especially in this new information age?

Yes, information age developments have transformed banking and financial institutions, especially in terms of the infrastructure available for real economy financing and payment transactions. These are institutions embedded in the "bubblenomic" dynamic of the unreal economy of financial markets, which was simultaneously transformed by information age technological development. The problem is that new technological development has been applied within a redundant economic and monetary paradigm, which amplified and accelerated the inherent contradictions of "financial capital". As a result, these institutions of the unreal economy of financial markets are irrecoverably insolvent, and will crash along with the financial markets, which are nothing more than an interlinked series of hyper-inflated "financial asset" bubbles, in search of the final pin that will burst them.

The same information age developments could also free the real economy from the sinking self-torpedoed ship of financial markets[1], by enabling a social accounting[2] based financing and payment system infrastructure, for the real economy, to be established outside of and independent of the financial market system[3].

Here are some papers that might give you an idea of what I mean:

[1] Mostafa Moini (2001), Toward a General Theory of Credit and Money - https://is.muni.cz/el/1456/podzim2007/PETMI/Moini__2001_.pdf

[2] Dirk J Bezemer (2008), Banks As Social Accountants And Social Controllers: Credit and Crisis in Historical Perspective - http://www.uclm.es/actividades/2009/workshopESHET-UCLM/Bezemer_-_Banks_as_social_accountants.pdf

[3] Raymond Aitken (2016), Money: a social contract or an “invisible hand” of inverted totalitarianism? -https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305432515_Money_a_social_contract_or_an_invisible_hand_of_inverted_totalitarianism?ev=prf_pub

[Q2] Can we say then we are entering (or already entered since four decades ago) an era where suicides are mainly caused by economic system or economic factors (or by-product of the economic system) ... and Durkheim's sui generis sociological analysis may loose more ground? Or we are slowly seeing a resurgence of interest of these fundamental sociological thoughts like Marx, Weber, Durkheim?

As I wrote above, in answer to your first question [Q1], it is not the real economy, but the unreal economy of financial markets, which is causing the societal suffering that provokes certain vulnerable individuals to suicide. The root problem is that currently the real economy depends 100% on the unreal economy of financial markets, for the provision of a financing and payment transaction infrastructure. The parasite of rentier-finance has got so big it is killing its real economy host, leading to a catastrophic breakdown in socio-economic conditions, which impacts suicide vulnerable groups. Durkheim's framework of “social integration” and level of “moral regulation” (through certain mix of religion, laws, social norms, etc) is still relevant to sustaining a healthy society. At the time and conditions of the industrial revolution, unreal (fictitious as Marx called it) financial capital, more or less served to enable real productive capital. Information age developments and conditions, trapped in the fallacious paradigm of commodified monetary instruments, inevitably enabled financial capital to divorce itself totally from the constraints of real economy production, and produce internally, on a massive hyper-inflationary scale, counterfeit debt claims on real economy production and resources. The greater the inflationary counterfeiting of financial capital (including QE), the greater the shrinkage of the real economy.

[Q3] Will we see a research paper one day that may say: Suicide: From an Economic Perspectives?

That would certainly be interesting. As you say, "There have been very established studies to link economic recession or depression to suicide.".

For any that doubt, a quick Internet search reveals the following papers and articles (including a paper posted on ResearchGate[4]:

[4] Nikolaos Antonakakis, Webster University Vienna (2013), Fiscal Austerity, Unemployment and Suicide Rates in Greece - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235959952_Fiscal_Austerity_Unemployment_and_Suicide_Rates_in_Greece

[5] BMJ-British Medical Journal. "2008 economic crisis could be to blame for thousands of excess suicides worldwide." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 17 September 2013. .

[6] University of Oxford. "Recession linked to over 10,000 suicides across Europe, North America." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 12 June 2014. .

[7] University of Portsmouth. "Male suicide on rise as result of austerity, report suggests." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 6 October 2015. .

[8] BMJ-British Medical Journal. "UK recession may be to blame for over 1,000 suicides in England." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 14 August 2012. .

[9] University of Portsmouth. "Suicide rates soar in Greece as economic cuts hurt citizens." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 22 April 2014. .

[10] Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "Sharp, sustained increases in suicides closely shadowed austerity events in Greece." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 2 February 2015. .

[11] Corcoran et al (2015), Impact of the economic recession and subsequent austerity on suicide and self-harm in Ireland: An interrupted time series analysis - http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/44/3/969

[12] University of Zurich. "One in five suicides is associated with unemployment." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 10 February 2015. .

[13] Stockholm University. "A strong welfare state mitigates the impact of the Great Recession." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 23 October 2014. .

[Q4] Do we have a good author who provide comprehensive thoughts of capitalist system besides Adam Smith (of which many areas he spoke about may not be as applicable in the current financial economic system)?

There are two good authors I can think of who provide "comprehensive thoughts of the [financial] capitalist system" that is "applicable under the current financial economic" conditions:

(1) Ismael Hossein-zadeh:

Website: https://ismaelhossein-zadeh.com/

Recent article: Ismael Hossein-zadeh (2016), Marx on Financial Bubbles: Much Keener Insights Than Contemporary Economists - http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/01/marx-on-financial-bubbles-much-keener-insights-than-contemporary-economists/

One of his books: Ismael Hossein-zadeh (2014), Beyond Mainstream Explanations of the Financial Crisis: Parasitic Finance Capital (Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy) Hardcover – https://ismaelhossein-zadeh.com/beyond-mainstream-explanations-of-the-financial-crisis/

(2) Michael Hudson:

Website: http://michael-hudson.com/

Recent interview: Michael Hudson on Debt Deflation, the Rentier Economy, and the Coming Financial Cold War - http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-hudson-on-debt-deflation-the-rentier-economy-and-the-coming-financial-cold-war.html

One of his books: Michael Hudson (2015), Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy - http://michael-hudson.com/2015/09/killing-the-host-the-book/

[Q5] Do we have an equally good author to provide some comprehensive thoughts about communism (and what really is communism?)

I don't know of any. If anyone else does, I certainly would be interested to know. My present understanding is that the conflict between capitalism/conservatism and communism/socialism represents a false dichotomy, which becomes a useful tool for the "divide and rule" strategy for the elites of financial capitalism. Both sides have been funded by the same despotic financial power. It is fallacious to make individual and social well-being mutually contradictory opposites. as Steiner correctly explained: "A healthy social life arises when the whole community finds its reflection in the mirror of person’s soul, and when the virtue of each person lives in the whole community.". It takes a free and healthy society for each of us to realise our full individual potential. As the saying goes: "It takes a village to raise a child".

It seems to me that both capitalism and communism are systems for despotic elite social control. While both are in a stage of mutual competition, core populations are kept quite by a relatively benign exploitation, especially under capitalism, as exploitation is overwhelmingly directed towards populations in periphery/client countries. Since the economic collapse of the Soviet Union, and claimed triumph of capitalism, there hasn't been a need to appease domestic populations, who now experience conditions of austerity to that financial capitalism can transfer increasing flows of real wealth to its beneficiaries. Communist China survived because they managed to harness capitalism in service of the communist elites. This new materialistic hybrid between two alternative tyrannies seems poised to outdo classic western capitalism. Unlike many Western economists, the Chinese ones make a clear distinction between the real economy and the unreal economy of financial markets, which they refer to in Marian terms as the "Fictitious Economy". See the paper posted on ResearchGate: Yingying and Chuanzhe (2010), Coordination State of China's Fictitious Economy and Real Economy - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251988289_Coordination_State_of_China's_Fictitious_Economy_and_Real_Economy

The Chinese have even established a research center specifically to harness financial capitalism, called: Fictitious Economy Research Lab - http://www.feds.ac.cn/index.php/en/research-lab/research1

One of the research projects linked to the Fictitious Economy Research Lab, seems to take an Orwellian social control/engineering dimension: the "China's national personal credit scoring system: a real-life intelligent knowledge application" - http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2339596&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID=815835588&CFTOKEN=81292315

Here is the abstract:

Credit Reference Centre (CRC) of People's Bank of China (PBC) has built a big data: the largest personal credit database in the world with 800 million people's accounts collected from all commercial banks in China since 2003. From June 2006 to Sept 2009, Research Centre on Fictitious Economy and Data Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASFEDS) and CRC jointly developed China's National Personal Credit Scoring System, known as "China Score", which is a unique and advanced KDD application under intelligent knowledge management on this big data. The system will be eventually serving all 1.3 billion population of China for their daily financial activities, such as bank accounts, credit card application, mortgage, personal loans, etc. It can become one of the most influential events of KDD techniques to human kind. This talk will introduce the key components of China Score project that includes objectives, modeling process, KDD techniques used in the projects, intelligent knowledge management and experience of the project development. In addition, the talk will also outline a number of policy recommendations based on China Score project which has been potentially impacting Chinese Government on its strategic decision making for China's economic developments.

As the French writer, Jean Giono warned in 1938: “… man needs spiritual comfort. Beauty is the backbone of his soul. Without it - tomorrow - he will commit suicide in the palaces of his automatic life.”[14]

[14] Here is the full quote: “It is not true that all we have need of is sturdy steel, automobiles, tractors, refrigerators, electric lighting, scientific comfort. I know that all these robots make life easier, I use them myself as extensively as anyone. But man needs spiritual comfort. Beauty is the backbone of his soul. Without it - tomorrow - he will commit suicide in the palace of his automatic life.” - Jean Giono (1938), "Lettre aux paysans sur la pauvreté et la paix".

http://data.over-blog-kiwi.com/1/56/96/02/20160418/ob_40d44e_lettre-aux-paysans-sur-la-pauvrete-et.pdf

It is interesting to note that the triumph of US capitalism over Soviet Union communism was largely due to the world reserve currency status of the US dollar, which enabled the US during the "cold war", through the export of petro-dollar inflation, to get other national economies to finance the US military arms race, whereas the Soviet Union had to sacrifice its domestic economy for this purpose. Another strength of capitalism relative to communism, is that whilst the communist state exercises direct control over productive capital, as well as through inherently catastrophic attempts at economic central planning; capitalism indirectly controls real economy production, through financial capital engineering and manipulations. This obfuscated form of social control is more powerful, and allows a wider real/perceived innovative initiative, in the hands of real producers, who will always outperform overtly controlled ones.

https://is.muni.cz/el/1456/podzim2007/PETMI/Moini__2001_.pdf

http://www.uclm.es/actividades/2009/workshopESHET-UCLM/Bezemer_-_Banks_as_social_accountants.pdf

https://ismaelhossein-zadeh.com/

http://michael-hudson.com/

http://www.feds.ac.cn/index.php/en/research-lab/research1

Conference Paper Money: a social contract or an " invisible hand " of inverte...

Article Fiscal Austerity, Unemployment and Suicide Rates in Greece

Article Coordination State of China's Fictitious Economy and Real Economy

Dear Raymond, Many thanks for your time and effort in sharing your thoughts and experience with me. It's definitely useful and inspiring. I was from economics and capital markets background, before currently switching to Sociology & Suicide. I think your continuous work on this concept of "money", "financial wealth", "paper wealth", speculative funds, viz real economy will be very helpful to mankind. I think capitalism/free economy has many of its good points; but some of their bad points can be catastrophic. So, I decided to stop my investigations into macro-economics and the financial markets, and spend my time on Sociology. Regards. [email protected] 

Dear Raymond and Bob, you put many important statements. But Raimund's post is very long, and thus few people can read and respond. I just found this one after reading Raimund's recent important comment in one of today's discussions regarding publication policy.

I will not try to answer your complex questions, but just put my comments (self-perception) about the changes in economic world since 1980s. If you remember that time, people were concerned, on one side, about pollution and overpopulation (see works of Club of Rome in 1970s) and on extreme dependence of economies (also in US) on resources and oil prices. I found this well cited and important publication (but there are not many today): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235236267_Energy_and_the_US_Economy_A_Biophysical_Perspective

As you know, since 1990s we entered the world of digitization and financial pyramids. And the real problems (they are not solved even today, but simply it became not popular to talk about them) became hidden in financial complexity. Bubble in dot.com (NASDAQ) was preceding overall financial crisis of 2008, starting in housing markets. Indeed, very few understand how it all functions. And there are even fewer publications on that. The issue is indeed very complex. In some of my conference papers I tried to investigate how crises can emerge, but I was not successful in my 1st attempt to publish this in refereed journals, and did not persist later in such attempts. You can see those works here on RG, they are incomplete and can be easily criticized, but they contain some pieces of ideas that are difficult to find in published works.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272380285_About_Origins_of_Financial_Crisis_2008

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272356140_Dynamics_of_Interest_Rate_and_Spanish_Housing_Markets

Well, I was happy to find that I am not alone in such research. See this paper by 2 famous researchers who disagree with status quo: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272241774_Rethinking_Economics_Using_Complexity_Theory

Article Energy and the U.S. Economy: A Biophysical Perspective

Article Rethinking Economics Using Complexity Theory

Conference Paper Dynamics of Interest Rate and Spanish Housing Markets

Conference Paper About Origins of Financial Crisis 2008

Many thanks, Yuri.