Drunken Nation: Russia’s Depopulation Bomb

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/2009%20-%20Spring/full-Eberstadt.html

by rglovejoy • 17 years ago

31 27 17 years ago

vetinari• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

> 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.

kingkongrevenge• 17 years ago

> British have problem with gin anymore.

The British don't have a problem? I thought it was the consensus that British cities are descending into alcoholic loutish hell holes.

http://ajanlo.kapu.hu/pics.php?d=cardiff

lisper3• 17 years ago

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.

mattobrien2• 17 years ago

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.

lisper3• 17 years ago

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.

amix• 17 years ago

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

alecco• 17 years ago

Yes. With the current system an aging population can't be supported for long. There isn't yet a solution for that.

Femur2• 17 years ago

>There isn't yet a solution for that.

There isn't yet a pleasant solution for that.

Unfortunately, segments of population have been reduced before.

JulianMorrison3• 17 years ago

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.

boris• 17 years ago

Yes, we need more "techniques" such as those that lead to an infection of spinach with some bacteria that is later traced to a gut of a wild boar used as a fertilizer.

Femur2• 17 years ago

>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.

soldarnal• 17 years ago

Your comparison of depopulation to "overpopulation in an already overpopulated world" is hardly just. Really you are comparing population decline with population growth, but with the latter in a very particular context in which it is known to be harmful. In contrast, nobody is concerned about population growth among polar bears (but many seem concerned about their potential depopulation).

Regardless, the concern of the article isn't even whether or not depopulation is bad; in fact it states: "In the modern era, population decline itself need not be a cause for acute economic alarm." Rather the concern is that Russia's depopulation is fueled by increases in illness and mortality. Just my personal opinion, but death and disease are bad things. The article claims that, furthermore, they are bad things for economic growth over the long term.

ilyak• 17 years ago

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

catz• 17 years ago

> 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:.

JulianMorrison3• 17 years ago

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

mynameishere• 17 years ago

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...

c00p3r• 17 years ago

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.

Semiapies2• 17 years ago

"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.

nkurz2• 17 years ago

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?

Semiapies2• 17 years ago

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.

Drunken Nation: Russia’s Depopulation Bomb

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