Russian Demographics at a Glance

This one actually belongs over at Demography.Matters but since there are so many interesting posts up and running over there at the moment I thought I would use Alpha.Sources as a venue of the tale of the sorry state of Russian demographics. I have reported before on this over at DM invoking The Demise of Russia's Far East. This time I am looking at the country as a whole and my source is an article in the recent edition of the Economist print edition which paints a telling picture of a country with serious demographic issues.

(bold parts are my emphasis) 

The rope is tightening in both ends, i.e both in terms of low fertility and high mortality ...

'Mr Putin's aim is to boost Russia's birth rate, which plummeted after the late Soviet period and has stabilised well below replacement level. His ultimate goal is to arrest and reverse Russia's headlong population decline. Despite a large influx of ethnic Russians from elsewhere, the population has fallen by 6m since the Soviet Union collapsed, to 143m. It is falling still, by around 700,000 a year. There may be fewer than 100m Russians left by 2050.

(...)

But the bigger reason for scepticism is that Russia's truly startling demographic problem is its amazing death rate, which has leapt as fertility has crashed, and is now more than twice western Europe's. Most of the leap is accounted for by working-age men. At less than 59, male life expectancy has collapsed in a way otherwise found only in sub-Saharan Africa. It is around five years lower than it was 40 years ago, and 13 years lower than that of Russian women—one of the biggest gaps in the world.'

The story of a Vodka drinking nation ...

'There is an obvious culprit: booze, especially the Russian taste for strong spirits, sometimes not fit for human consumption and often moonshine. Heart disease and violence, the two biggest factors in the mortality surge, are strongly alcohol-related. Alcohol poisoning itself killed 36,000 Russians last year; in America, it kills a few hundred.'

Searching for a cause for the Russian demographic horror story. And to add to the perils, AIDS is becoming an issue as well ...  

'But the obvious culprit is only part of a complicated, self-destructive syndrome. Other factors include smoking (among the highest rates in the world), pollution, including radioactivity, and a grim and corrupt health system. Alcoholism itself is a symptom. Some see the stress and inequality brought on by the Soviet Union's fall as the cause.'

(...)

Whatever its causes, and shocking though it already is, Russia's national sickness is now likely to worsen, because of AIDS. Since the disease arrived so late, the Russians ought to have been ready. Instead, out of prudishness, intolerance and Soviet-style pig-headedness, the response was criminally lackadaisical. This year the federal AIDS budget is around 3.3 billion roubles ($124m) with extra funding coming from abroad: it was a big increase, but it is piffling by international standards.'

And the far east is in fact shrinking and fast;

'In Irkutsk the big fear is the “yellow peril”. As people quit cities that should never have existed, the population of Siberia and the Russian far east has shrunk faster than the rest of the country's.'

The bottomline ...

'The immediate result of all this is a huge toll of tragic and needless early deaths. But its health and demographic malaise will also warp Russia's future. The army is struggling to find as many healthy recruits as Russian generals say they need. The population is ageing and sickening: behind the headline death rates is a secondary plague of incapacity. The workforce is shrinking. Yet, as a racist bombing at a Moscow market last month and a near-pogrom against Caucasians in a northern town this week both suggest, Russians are ill-disposed towards the new immigrants their economy increasingly needs.'

This is worrisome indeed and the problem is that Eastern Europeans are far more likely to migrate to the west than to the east if at all since fertility rates in Eastern Europe itself are plummeting seriously impeeding the so-called Lynxes to become more than puppies. On a more general note I would like to refer to an exchange in the comments section over at Demography.Matters (linked above) between regular commenter S.M. Stirling and Edward Hugh ... First off let us begin with Stirling pointing out the obvious;

(the full exchange can be found in this post)

'Countries with declining populations should face up to the fact that if their problems are to be solved, it'll have to be internally, by changing their reproductive habits.'

In the long run, sub-replacement fertility is not sustainable; simple arithmetic makes that plain. (...) Unless the human race is going to become extinct, which I think we can rule out!' (...) Genetic and cultural evolution will select for people with a high propensity to reproduce.'

Moving on to Edward ...

'I think this is extremely unrealistic Stirling [responding to the first quote by Stirling]. Ex US and Israel there is very little even prima facie evidence of this happening, and even in the US case, as you know, I don't accept your interpretation. But leaving that on one side, if the reproductive process isn't going to adapt, the economic one will have to'

(...)

I' think you and I would agree that at the moment most of the world is in denial that this is any kind of problem. At some point, somewhere, some kind of s**t is going to hit some kind of fan.'

We should not kill off the human race just yet I think which is the first lesson here but with Edward's idea of the sh't hitting the fan Russia could very well fit into that equation in the short to medium term.

Comments

[ZF]

A useful parallel here can be found in the many, predominantly male, private clubs in London. Their history goes back a couple of centuries.

There is a well-documented record of problems arising in these clubs if the average age of the members is allowed to rise too far. Beyond a certain point the existing membership is no longer prepared to encourage the relatively active, noisy presence of younger people, so few younger people join. In almost every case the result has been a long decline which gets even more difficult to reverse with each passing year, leadng eventually to closure or often merger with other equally moribund (even if financially well-endowed) clubs.

One might describe this phenomenon as the 'whirlpool of advancing gerontocracy' (the clubs are generally self-governing, electoral bodies). The parallel is illuminating but I'm afraid offers little encouraging to say about the prospects of countries with the sort of demographic problems you describe in your post.

We (and young people today in particular) are I believe beginning to confront the problems of electoral gerontocracy, something which has of course never before been seen in human history solely because enough people didn't live long enough. In the end the surviving societies will have discovered that they need to rebalance the proportion of total societal resources and support which young families get, in order to make having families once again attractive.

My own expectation is that, exactly as it has over the past couple of thousand years at least, migration of young people interested in having families to a more favorable jurisdiction will play at least as large a part as voluntary concessions from the old.

This process in the United States, by the way, has been continuous from the earliest settlers pushing West to the young adults moving in their millions to affordable suburbs in the 'Red states' today.

[CV]

Hi ZF,

I sure do not hope that you are right in the long run and that the scenario you describe can be applied to countries as well. However, an interesting piece of Evidence here is how migration flows and general demographic tend to shape also the regional disparities within a country ... we see this at lot of places;

India
Italy
Germany
The US
And Canada as well actually ... (see this one by Randy http://demographymatters.blogspot.com/2006/09/alberta-advantage.html)

The worrying thing here is that we need to see some kind of reverse to this at some point. In Russia's case there are a lot of potential solutions and/or mitigating factors but they have not begun to kick in yet. On an even more pessimistic note I guess many would also argue that population trends largely are exogenous to the long term growth ... this is to say that policy makers lack the tools to make it endogenous.

[ZF]

I do think a lot can be done if and when older people decide to forgo the opportunity to vote themselves whatever privileges they want, at the expense of younger people. The parallel I referred to simply suggests it's going to be difficult, and is in fact getting insidiously more difficult each year as opportunities to adjust are allowed to pass by.

Making it more difficult still is that we are dealing to a great extent with the generation of '68, possibly the most determinedly narcissistic elite in history (I suppose the late Roman aristocracy or some of the medieval Popes might be comparable in their resolute ands self congratulatory parasitism). I migrated from the UK to the US. Many young people today are migrating from France to the UK and (distinctly more difficult) to the US.

I think that a pattern of accelerating out-migration is the only event capable of bringing this older generation to their senses (collapsing birth rates visibly is not provoking the necessary changes).

It is interesting to note that in this respect countries with federal or meaningfully decentralized systems of government (such as the US) have an immense advantage, because young people can migrate to a more welcoming economic environment without necessarily having to leave the country. Countries with unitary systems, in which the economic autonomy of local government's is a pathetic joke (such as the UK and France) are at a disadvantage.