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Russia Appears to Be in Very Bad Shape
Recently Dr. Bastiat initiated a discussion about Russia with this post titled “Pretending to Be Mystified by the Obvious.” Nicholas Eberstadt was mentioned in the post and this reminded me of a podcast that Eberstadt participated in about a month ago.
In that podcast, Eberstadt mentioned that Russia has managed to have a society with European levels of education and Haitian levels of life expectancy, at least for 15-year-old males. I looked up an article Eberstadt wrote last November titled “Russian Power in Decline.” Here is an excerpt that I found just as surprising as the demographic comparison between Russia and Haiti:
“Over the years, we have often heard a refrain about Russia’s enormous leverage over the global economy. Yet for all its oil and gas, Russia’s total exports in 2021 fell short of Belgium’s ($550 billion vs $680 billion).
Let’s get back to demographics. Here is another excerpt from Eberstadt’s article:
“While Russia’s childbearing patterns look European, its mortality patterns look Third World – actually, worse than Third World. Compare the Russian population’s survival trajectory with that of the rest of the world in 2019. That year was a good one for life expectancy in Russia – indeed, the highest ever recorded. But drill a bit deeper, and the rot appears: according to World Health Organization estimates, life expectancy in 2019 for 15-year-old Russian males was essentially indistinguishable from 15-year-old males in Haiti.
“That is not a typo. The estimate for both Haiti and Russia was 53.7 years. That teenage Russian male stood worse survival chances in Russia than 23 of the 46 countries the United Nations categorizes as “least developed” – among them Mali, Yemen and even war-decimated Afghanistan.
Consider that 2019 was a few years before Russia started piling up lots of military casualties among young males in their “special military operation” against Ukraine. Also consider that there are estimates that 500,000 to 1,000,000 Russians have fled Russia since the start of the February 2022 war with Ukraine and many of those who left Russia are highly skilled tech workers.
In 2020, the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, Russian life expectancy declined by 1.6 years, according to Eberstadt’s article. In 2021, according to Eberstadt, “life expectancy may have dropped by another 1.6 years.”
This isn’t to say that Russia will cease to exist as a country in our lifetimes. However, the challenges Russia faces do seem formidable.
Published in General
Russia is the sick old man of wannabe Europe.
So much for universal healthcare.
Am I the only one who sees that and thinks that what the author is really trying to say is, “Russia is so bad it might as well be run by Black people.”
For some additional context, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
There has been much “news” from various sources recently indicating that Russia is not suffering much from the Western sanctions, contrary to what was predicted. India and China are taking up the slack by importing more from Russia. However, I’ve been suspicious of the rosy outlook on Russia’s economy, based on some economic principles. Nobody gets rich by trading with poor countries unless you use them for your manufacturing base, like America and Europe does with China. China doesn’t have the greatest products to trade with, but they’ve got almost unlimited cheap manpower to staff factories to produce Western goods. Russia doesn’t have any great entrepreneurial enterprises that is looking for cheap manpower. I see Russia’s economic relationship with China and India as reaching a very low prosperity plateau over which they cannot climb unless each of those countries drastically change their culture.
The reason why I found the 2021 export comparison between Russia and Belgium shocking is that this was a year before the Western nations imposed tougher sanctions in response to the February 2022 full invasion of Ukraine.
Sure, there were some sanctions placed on Russia after the 2014 conquest of parts of Ukraine. But I did not realize that Russia had such a small amount of exports before the more robust sanctions were put in place.
Hmm. I did not at all get that. Haiti is a common example of X gone wrong. Certainly many people use that fact, but I didn’t get that sense from the excerpts provided in this post.
But I haven’t read the whole thing.
I’ve appreciated Eberstadt’s work in the past, but this looks like balderdash. What sort of statistics are these? Cherry-picked, strange measures to make Russia look bad?
I mean, seriously. You’re going to evaluate the strength of an economy based on exports, not based on GDP? Why would one do that? And, of course, comparing Russia to Belgium is absurd by this measure, as Belgium is a tiny country that must import and export quite a bit, while Russia has a huge internal market. American foreign trade is quite small, in percentage terms, though the massive size of our economy makes the absolute figure pretty large.
Or, consider life expectancy. Why use life expectancy at age 15, rather than life expectancy as, say, birth? Birth is the normal figure given. Indeed, it seems to me that a country might well be better off, from the position of economic and military strength, if old people don’t live quite as long. Care for the very old is a burden to others. In any event, this is a strange statistic to pick, and my guess is that this was done in order to make Russia look bad.
Why would AEI want to make Russia look bad? Well, they’re neocons, for the most part. Russia is the current bogeyman, and there’s an incentive to supply information to support the narrative that Russia generally is in bad shape, and that this is Putin’s fault.
But Russia has done very well under Putin. I’ll put the figures in the next comment.
Here are more relevant statistics on the Russian economy and life expectancy. My source is the World Bank graphs for life expectancy at birth (male here and female here) and GDP per capita (at purchasing power parity, inflation-adjusted) here. I’m going to report data from 1999 to 2019, as Putin took office in 1999, and ending in 2019 eliminates any effects of Covid.
Comparing Russia to Haiti and the US in life expectancy at birth
All of these have increased, and Russia is quite a bit above Haiti. With Russian life expectancy increasing by 8 years for males and 6 years for females, between 1999 and 2019, it’s rather absurd to argue that Russia is collapsing in this regard.
While Russia is gaining on the US — generally faster than Haiti, by the way — putting the figures side-by-side illustrates how Russia is more comparable to the US than to Haiti in life expectancy. Here are the figures showing life expectancy for Haiti, Russia, and the US:
Here is the data on GDP per capita (PPP, inflation-adjusted):
In percentage terms, from 1999 to 2019, GDP per capita increased by:
Another way of looking at it is to calculate Russian GDP per capita as a percentage of the comparison country — in this case Belgium and the US. These figures are:
So Russia isn’t falling behind. Russia is doing well, and is gaining ground on both Belgium and the US economically.
Beware statistics. The old line is that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. This doesn’t mean that all statistics are lies, but one can cherry-pick data to paint an inaccurate picture, which seems to be what Eberstadt has done, at least for the strange statistics reported in the OP.
From the OP:
“Over the years, we have often heard a refrain about Russia’s enormous leverage over the global economy. Yet for all its oil and gas, Russia’s total exports in 2021 fell short of Belgium’s ($550 billion vs $680 billion).”
I have no earthly idea where in the world Eberstadt (highly credentialed political economist) pulled the $680 billion number for Belgium’s exports. It exists nowhere in any of the reports/databases from the World Bank, CIA Factbook, IMF, etc., etc., etc., that I’m aware of. Belgium has NEVER gotten anywhere close to that level of exports, which would put it in South Korea territory, for goodness’s sake. Here’s a Belgium vs. Russia comparison table ($billions in exports, as per World Bank):
2012: 399 vs 594
2013: 414 vs 592
2014: 427 vs 558
2015: 360 vs 391
2016: 378 vs 330
2017: 418 vs 410
2018: 451 vs 510
2019: 442 vs 481
2020: 417 vs 381
2021: 516 vs 549 (the reverse of Eberstadt’s comparative claim)
Links:
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/BEL/belgium/exports
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/RUS/russia/exports
Mr. Eberstadt’s prognostications regarding Russia’s imminently reaching a catastrophic demographic tipping point and some such go back to the turn of the century, with roughly semi-decadal frequency. To wit:
2000: “High Death Among Russian Males Predates Soviet Union’s Demise”.
2005: “Russia the Sick Man of Europe”.
2011: “The Dying Bear: Russia’s Demographic Disaster”.
2014: “Putin’s Hollowed Out Homeland”.
And so on, the piece in the OP being the latest example.
PS:
He reminds me of Gordon Chang, who’s been prognosticating China’s pending decline with perhaps even greater frequency over the past 20 years.
I do think that there’s something to the demographic concerns, though they unfold slowly. Singling out Russia or China isn’t accurate, though. There are a great many countries facing this problem, including ourselves, most or all of the Europeans, the Japanese, and the Koreans.
Fully agree with each and every statement you made above.
Here is a YouTube video of Nicholas Eberstadt providing an analysis of the demographics of Russia and China. This is from about ten months ago.
Could you give us a summary of this? It’s an hour and a half.
I do agree that Russia and China face demographic challenges, but if you look at the population pyramids, they look essentially the same as most First World countries, like Germany or Japan or Italy.
Even France doesn’t look very good, though it is a bit better than the others — but I think that this is the result of a different problem in France, which has a large Muslim population with a higher birthrate than the non-Muslim French.
I have not watched the entire video yet. I will try to summarize it once I have finished viewing it.
Eberstadt has mentioned that about 70 percent or more of the world is below replacement in terms of its birth rate.
So, the entire world is having some sort of demographic challenge.
Factoid from Mr. Eberstadt’s AEI bio page, FWIW:
“Member, Global Agenda Council, World Economic Forum, 2008–12”
https://www.aei.org/profile/nicholas-eberstadt/
At about the 22 minute mark, Eberstadt shows a graph of life expectancy of Russians at birth. Clearly life expectancy has increased in Russia. But life expectancy in Russia is still lower than in, say, Argentina.
Then Eberstadt shows a comparative graph of countries and their life expectancy of males at age 15. That’s where Russia’s number looks shocking.
At the 27 minute mark, Eberstadt shows a survival schedule graph for Russian men and men from the continent of Africa. They are almost identical.
Perhaps Eberstadt was not accurate with Belgium’s export figures, I’m no expert myself. But the figures you have presented show that Russia had only marginally more valuable exports than Belgium did in 2021, and in the year before that, as in some other years, Belgium indeed had higher exports than Russia. Now Belgium is a tiny country with a little short of 12 million people, about the same as Ohio. Russia has 147 million. That is more than 12 times the population.
I think Eberstadt’s comparison is abundantly clear even if his figures may be off by about 25%. He would have to be off by 1,200% to even put Russia on an even playing field with Belgium.
One would think that Russia’s oil and gas exports would be fairly large, larger than anything Belgium could offer.
After all, you need oil and gas to run your economy. You don’t need Belgian waffles or Belgian chocolate to run your economy, as delicious as those items are.
At the 1 hour mark of the Eberstadt video, they discuss the Russian brain drain, hundreds of thousands of people leave Russia in the first few weeks of the Russian-Ukraine war.
Highly talented Russians say that when they complete their education in Russia, the Russian economy will only pay them a very modest wage unless they have connections to people in government.
Russians tend to be very productive outside of Russia, in places like Israel, Germany and the United States.
Okay, in 2021 the Belgian GDP was 594 Billion Dollars. In the same year, Russia’s was 1,780 Billion Dollars. That is three times larger than Belgium’s GDP, yet Russia’s population is 12 times larger. The dreaded “fractions theory” from our high-school days tells us that Belgium is producing exactly four times as much GDP per person than Russia is.
By that logic, China’s exports would have to rise from about $3.5 Trillion currently to about $56 Trillion before you would deem it “on a level playing field with Belgium”.
You might wish to rethink.
According to the World bank, Russia’s life expectancy at birth is just about at the World average (in fact one year lower than World average). This would not be expected for a first-world country. If you scroll down past the individual countries, they provide some interesting groups like overall world regions, like Europe and Asia, and demographic groups like high and low incomes. Russia’s life expectancy falls short of Europe’s by 9-11 years, East Asia & Pacific by 6 years, high income countries by 9 years, upper-middle income countries by 5 years, and they are behind middle-income countries, Latin America & Carribean, Middle-East & North Africa, and are exactly in line with the Arab World.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations=RU
Only you could find the bright side of a nation’s people dying early.
You are right. The average Belgian makes 5 times the per capita income than the average Chinese. Just because China is a big country doesn’t mean that its citizens are doing better than the little countries.
I didn’t think we were talking about a country’s overall economic strength, based on mere numbers of citizens. I thought we were talking about economic conditions within a country for the average citizen. The whole point was that Russia, despite its enormous size, is only producing as much goods and services as much smaller countries. In the case of Belgium, Russia’s exports are about the same value despite having more than 12 times the number of people.
I don’t suppose this has anything to do with Russia invading a peaceful country on bogus pretexts and killing tens of thousands of people, would it?
The Russians who aren’t going to be productive probably stay in Russia.
Oh, and Mark Steyn covered a lot of this very well in the Best Interview Ever, Of Anyone, On Any Subject(s):
https://www.adrive.com/public/RaM8Mj/NARN%2012-02-06%20NARN%201%20Hour%202%20Mark%20Steyn.mp3
The West’s animosity toward Russia precedes the Ukraine War. It goes waaay back. The last time the West “liked” Russia was during the Yeltsin Era, when the country was wide open to be sliced, diced, and looted by Western banks and hedge funds partnering up with the initial batch of Russian oligarchs, before they were chased out by Putin.
Russia starved to death several million Ukrainians during the 1930’s, killed more than 20 million of their own people either by execution or working them in Gulag camps, invaded and conquered some 17 countries in Asia in the 1940’s, took over all of Eastern Europe forcing millions into abject poverty and death, supported Communism in all parts of the world, and supported all the terrorist nations.
Is it improper to hold animosity towards them? The idea that Western banks looted Russia is ludicrous. Russia was a third-world country with no wealth to be “looted.” Willie Sutton could have pointed that out.