This article is complete and utter bullshit.<p>"history offers no examples of a society that has demonstrated sustained material advance in the face of long-term population decline"<p>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.
Crap article, intended to put down Russia. It plays on stereotypes and parrots "popular opinion" of Russia.<p>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.
"thus it is impossible to predict when, or whether, it [the shrinkage of Russia's population] will finally come to an end"<p>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.
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...
> 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.<p>>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.<p>Congo? Which one?<p>Russia's murder rate (while appalling) is below Colombia, South Africa, Jamaica and Venezuela:.
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.<p>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.