When Economists Go Wrong

From the Federal Reserve Bank of SF Working Papers Series on Basic Economic Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

Relative Status and Well-Being: Evidence from U.S. Suicide Deaths (pdf) by Mary C. Daly, Daniel J. Wilson, and Norman J. Johnson. From the abstract:

We model suicide as a choice variable, conditional on exogenous risk factors, reflecting an individual's assessment of current and expected future utility.

Of course. Last time I calculated the present value of my expected future utility, I made a rational choice not to end my life. Thank goodness for neoclassical economics.

More likely is a grad student killing themselves because they are sick of solving the Hamiltonian a person would need to compute in order to decide whether to off one's self or not, according to the rational actor model of Mary Daly, et. al.