
Drunken Nation: Russia’s Depopulation Bomb - rglovejoy
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/2009%20-%20Spring/full-Eberstadt.html
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lisper
This article is complete and utter bullshit.

"history offers no examples of a society that has demonstrated sustained
material advance in the face of long-term population decline"

Of course it does: Russia, from 1999-2007. For most of the last decade, Russia
was the fastest growing economy in the G8. And it may have been growing even
longer than that if you discount the contribution of the sudden drop in
weapons production after the fall of the Soviet Union.

~~~
mattobrien
Much of this growth came from spiking commodity prices, particularly oil and
natural gas. That's not long-term sustainable. High energy prices masked the
structural problems Russia faces. Now that's over.

~~~
lisper
Does anyone bother to even look up the most basic facts before making
proclamations any more? Oil prices were prety much flat through 2003. The rise
of oil certainly helped, but you can't explain eight years of growth starting
in 1999 with four years of oil price rises starting in 2003.

~~~
mattobrien
Two things. Developing economies generally have higher rates of growth than
more advanced ones, so the fact that Russia had higher rates of growth than
the seven most advanced economies in the world is fairly meaningless. In fact,
there was debate at the time about whether the G7 should expand to include
Russia, since Russia's profile didn't match the others'.

And second, how much of the cumulative growth from 1999-2007 was due to
astronomical energy prices? I don't think it's absurd to point out that for
half of the period you mention, energy prices made Russia's economy appear
much stronger than it was in reality. The same happened in the late 1970s and
the early 1980s with the USSR. Many attribute the USSR's implosion in large
part to the collapse in energy prices in the late 1980s/early 1990s, since the
failings of their centrally planned economy couldn't be concealed any longer.

~~~
lisper
> Developing economies generally have higher rates of growth than more
> advanced ones, so the fact that Russia had higher rates of growth than the
> seven most advanced economies in the world is fairly meaningless.

Not when the thesis on the table is that "relentless, unremitting, and perhaps
unstoppable depopulation" is "a bomb" that "amounts to an ethnic self-
cleansing" and "carries with it grim and potentially disastrous implications."
Since depopulation began in 1992 Russia has enjoyed eight years of
extraordinary economic growth, not all of which can be accounted for by rising
oil prices. That is a salient fact, which the article completely ignores. At
_best_ it's shoddy journalism.

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vetinari
Crap article, intended to put down Russia. It plays on stereotypes and parrots
"popular opinion" of Russia.

It is opinion article. It does not cite any sources for its data, for example
birthrate grows since 2005 (according to CIA factbook). And please stop the
vodka/drunken nation thing, the rest of the world does not write articles that
British have problem with gin anymore.

~~~
jibiki
> for example birthrate grows since 2005 (according to CIA factbook)

Since 1999, in fact, as the article acknowledges: "Russia’s post-Communist TFR
hit its low—perhaps we should say its low to date—in 1999, when it was 1.17.
By 2005, the total fertility rate in the Russian Federation was up to about
1.3".

Some of its conclusions require more evidence (the contention that Russian
standard of living will decline, the attribution of increased accidental
mortality to alcohol problems instead of more people driving, etc.) But I'm
not sure why you doubt the actual statistics.

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amix
Depopulation isn't a bad thing and I think it's much better than
overpopulation in an already overpopulated world.

~~~
JulianMorrison
The world is overpopulated? News to me. The way I see it, it's under-producing
food, largely because of irrational resistance to modern techniques.

~~~
Femur
>The way I see it, it's under-producing food, largely because of irrational
resistance to modern techniques.

While I do agree that the planet can sustain a much higher population, modern
farming practices are causing problems and not necessarily sustainable in the
long term. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intensive_farming#Disadvantages>)

Properly thought out food production that utilizes under-used resources (vast
swaths in Russia for instance!) is the key.

~~~
JulianMorrison
GM is a modern farming practice that is horrendously underused, and GM can
wipe out most of the disadvantages of intensive farming - GM crops can fix
their own nitrogen and repel pests without pesticide. They can also be
designed to grow well in 3rd world climates and contain extra nutrients.

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Semiapies
"thus it is impossible to predict when, or whether, it [the shrinkage of
Russia's population] will finally come to an end"

That's some loopy hyperbole, right there. Babies are still being born in
Russia. Even a shockingly huge drop in population due to low replacement will
eventually end in a stable population size.

~~~
nkurz
I don't understand your math. If the birth rate stays lower than replacement,
and the average life span does not increase, at what point would the
population stabilize?

~~~
Semiapies
At the point in which the _number_ of births constitutes replacement. We're
not talking 5 babies born annually in the Rodina, we're talking a small number
of babies born compared to Russia's population.

Births aren't evenly-distributed. The population segments that are having more
births now are the segments likely to have more births down the road. Death,
on the other hand, is much more evenly distributed, and the number of deaths
per year is directly related to population. As the population shrinks, you
have a smaller number of deaths, but births don't decrease as quickly.
Eventually, you hit a new equilibrium.

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mynameishere
Eh. The people with a natural desire to have children will breed and pass on
their natural desire to have children. In the past, the desire for sex alone
was sufficient. Those people will die out everywhere over the next decades...

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catz
> To make matters worse, almost half of Russia’s treated tubercular cases over
> the past decade have been the variant known as extreme drug-resistant
> tuberculosis (XDR-TB). This can not be right. XDR (Extreme Drug Resistant
> TB) is fairly rare (definitely not 75,000 a year). Multiple Drug Resistant
> TB (MDR TB) is a lot more common. Most people with XDR TB die in a month.

>Russia’s patterns of death from injury and violence (by whatever provenance)
are so extreme and brutal that they invite comparison only with the most
tormented spots on the face of the planet today. The five places estimated to
be roughly in the same league as Russia as of 2002 were Angola, Burundi,
Congo, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.

Congo? Which one?

Russia's murder rate (while appalling) is below Colombia, South Africa,
Jamaica and Venezuela:.

~~~
JulianMorrison
In context, I think they were including slips and falls, traffic accidents,
etc.

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c00p3r
That is merely soft and polite description. In fact there is literally
humanitarian catastrophe. This article is focused mostly on physical heath of
society and death rates, while there is a second side of the coin - a
unprecedented rate of alcohol, drugs and stress related mental deceases which
no one can count.

And precision statistics is not required anymore - just step down into any
station of Moscow's or Saint-Petersburg's subway at friday's night and take a
look at the faces. Everything is visible with naked eyes.

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ilyak
So yeah, we're all going to die. So what?

