An alarming new word has been born. It is "hypermortality," which might be defined as an extraordinary tendency toward death. It jumps from the first page of the U.N. Development Program report entitled "Demographic Policy in Russia."
"The Russian phenomenon of hypermortality comes to be observed primarily in working-age populations," it says."Compared to the majority of countries that have similar levels of economic development, mortality in Russia is 3-5 times higher for men and twice as high for women."
What this means, the report says, is that the size of the working-age population "will fall by up to 1 million people annually already by 2020-25."
The effect of this will be to raise the dependency load (the number of young and old people dependent on those of working age) to 670 to 750 per thousand by 2020 and to 900 to 1,000 per thousand by 2025.
"This will inevitably influence economic growth rates," the report notes."At the moment, there are no grounds to believe that the crisis will be overcome and the size of the population will be stabilized," it adds.
Russia is drunk on an oil revenue binge and stumbling about Eurasia shouting angrily at shadows. But Russians are drunk and driving their country into an abyss that no amount of oil revenue will be able to counteract.
Russia could have joined the West after the Soviet Union fell apart, claiming they were victims of Soviet communism as much as Eastern Europeans. We wanted Russia to join the West. But no, Russia abandoned that sensible policy and instead antagonizes the West.
I have little doubt that the end result at some point in the future will be a Russia that is exclusively a European state, with Russia east of the Urals falling to the Chinese or breaking away from Russia to cut deals with China and become satellite nations of the new power in East Asia. Some of those states will be majority Moslem as Russians die off. Perhaps Russia will try to disguise their decline by adding Ukraine by force to mother Russia, but this may just make matters worse in the long run given Ukraine's own demographic decline.
It's amazing to see a nation committing suicide before our eyes. But drunks will do that.
Good luck with that path, Moscow.
