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Old April 20th, 2009, 12:09 PM
James Brody James Brody is offline
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Exclamation Russia Done, Maybe for the Same Reasons

What would Malthus have said? Of for that matter, Chuck and Tom Henry?

George Will observes: "Nicholas Eberstadt's essay "Drunken Nation" in the current World Affairs quarterly notes that Russia is experiencing "a relentless, unremitting, and perhaps unstoppable depopulation." Previous episodes of depopulation -- 1917-23, 1933-34, 1941-46 -- were the results of civil war, Stalin's war on the "kulaks" and collectivization of agriculture, and World War II, respectively. But today's depopulation is occurring in normal -- for Russia -- social and political circumstances. Normal conditions include a subreplacement fertility rate, sharply declining enrollment rates for primary school pupils, perhaps more than 7 percent of children abandoned by their parents to orphanages or government care or life as "street children."

Furthermore, "mind-numbing, stupefying binge drinking of hard spirits" -- including poisonously impure home brews -- "is an accepted norm in Russia and greatly increases the danger of fatal injury through falls, traffic accidents, violent confrontations, homicide, suicide, and so on." Male life expectancy is lower under Putin than it was a half-century ago under Khrushchev.

Martin Walker of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, writing in The Wilson Quarterly ("The World's New Numbers"), notes that ..."Russia is suffering a demographic decline on a scale that is normally associated with the effects of a major war."

Russia, he (Eberstadt) writes, "has pioneered a unique new profile of mass debilitation and foreshortened life previously unknown in all of human history.

"History," he concludes, "offers no examples of a society that has demonstrated sustained material advance in the face of long-term population decline."

More at http://www.realclearpolitics.com/art...sia_96058.html
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