Население России скатывается в демографическую яму — Transcript

Fill your gap! Over the past 25 years, the world's population has grown by 2 billion people, from 5.7 to 7.8.

The growth has been just over a third. But balance is not inherent in this topic, because the populations have grown differently from country to country.

Canadians grew by 8.5 million, Brits by 10 million, but the Chinese, Indians, and Nigerians worked hard for the rest of the planet.

The Chinese are up 16%, which is 200 million. The Indians are up 43%, which is a whopping 416 million. The Nigerians have had more people than the current German population—plus 98 million, which is almost double the population growth in 25 years.

So where does the star of our programme, Russia, stand? Its population has fallen by 2.3 million over the past 25 years, a decline of 1.5%.

The topic of population growth is multi-faceted. It doesn't end with breeding only. Each country has its own reasons and consequences of the current situation, so sit back.

We are about to enter the territory of the immoral, somewhere even eugenic, not to be confused with eugnial.

"- I'll destroy you." We will derive the coefficient of how many children women should give birth to, whether there is a demographic pit, and what the economy has to do with it.

"Let’s put emotions aside." Let's put aside all those pompous speeches about how each individual is a person with a deep inner world, a unique character, and unique experiences.

There will soon be nine billion of us, so for the most part, each of us is just a grain of sand on the coast. We can get in the right frame of mind with Henry Ford, who saw man in a special way... as a tool for production.

"Of these 7,882 specialized jobs, 949 required 'strong, able-bodied, and practically physically perfect men,' 3,338 needed men of merely 'ordinary' physical strength, most of the rest could be performed by 'women or older children,' and we found that 670 could be filled by 'legless men,' 2,637 by one-legged men, two by armless men, 715 by one-armed men, and 10 by blind men." In the economic system, a human appears as such an instrument, which can be divided into three stages: dependent, worker, and retiree.

And in the wet fantasy of economics, a person should be born immediately 16 years old and go to create added value, buy goods on the market, and pay taxes to the state.

But unfortunately, this does not happen, and the economy tolerates the first 16 years of a person’s life for the sake of the next 50 years of working age, where a person benefits society.

The age after 60 is perceived as a reward for the working-age period. So it turns out that this man in the middle takes care of two categories at the same time: their dependents, who are also called ‘children,’ as well as their work provides payment to current retirees.

And this is the cycle every person goes through, from birth to death, and only the system remains eternal.

So, for the system to function properly, it needs a balance, which means that the population of the country must strive for a normal distribution, that is, when people of all three categories are equally distributed, with preferably men and women equally represented,

and somewhere towards the end of the life cycle of the product... oops, I mean of the human, the number decreases.

In reality, this is not possible, so there may be slight variations. For example, these are now in the USA, these are in England... see small pitfalls here and here.

But what is the West to us? Let's see what we have in Russia. It’s something like this.

Well, apart from the obvious fact that men are dying like flies dramatically after 65, and after 40 there are far more women than men, here you also see a phenomenon called the demographic pit.

Here it is. What exactly is the whole point? Let's first turn the graph around to make it easier to understand.

It feels feeble at the moment, but in 20 years, when this mountain of workers starts to turn into retirees, we will simply have no new workers to support these retirees and the economy as a whole...

You as viewers of our channel already know that people are the new oil. They are the generators of all kinds of direct tax, like personal income tax, contributions to medical, insurance, retirement funds, and indirect ones like VAT, MET, excises,

In other words, as the working-age population declines, so will the state's budget revenues, and so will the burden on retirees.

This means that the state will then either cut its spending... "- Yeah, the hell it will!" or raise the retirement age, stop indexing pensions and freeze them, cancel welfare benefits, and most importantly, raise taxes to compensate for the decline in income.

This, in turn, strikes even harder at purchasing power, thereby driving the economy into a long era of economic impotence...

Therefore, any country should aim for a normal distribution of the three categories of population.

If the country does not aim for this, then the population will aim to another country. And in fact, it is normal for a person to look at the state as a service provider.

And it is normal if a person wants to change the provider. *Ad segment, skip to 8:01 to continue watching the video.* And we get to the main question: how did we get to the demographic pit in the first place and how many people do we need to produce to get out of it?

In other words, how many children do we have to give birth to? "- Boo, how immoral!" "Everyone complete the plan by tomorrow!" One of the key problems in Russia is that for a long time there have been more people dying than being born.

And in June 2021, there were one and a half times as many dead as born.

In the eyes of the statistics, it looks like this. Here you see the number of deaths, but the number of births is noticeably lower.

There's a big hole in between. The bigger it is, the worse it is. You can see, there have been only 5 years when these two indicators were equal during the whole existence of modern Russia.

All the rest of the time... we work... so to speak, in deficit. "- And what do you suggest?" Give birth, ladies, give birth as much as possible!

To be precise, we need a total fertility rate of 2.1. That means that, on average, a woman of childbearing age should give birth to 2.1 children.

That being the case, in 30-35 years, when the working-class crest starts to turn into retirees, they will be picked up by the children born today.

Why today? Well, the idea is to do it right now; the working people are not getting younger every day.

Meanwhile, Russia’s fertility rate is in trouble. Check it out. They had the right coefficient about 60 years ago, and that's probably taking into account all the Soviet republics, and the rest of the time... they're... shrinking.

By the way, pay attention to the small rise after 2006; we will come back to it.

In the meantime, the Russian population is getting thinner. And according to World-o-meter forecasts, in 30 years there will be 10 million fewer Russians, and they will be 1.4% of the total population of the Earth, down from 1.87% today.

Lancet scientists are extending the negative trend to 2100 and say that the number of Russians will be even less than 90 million, which means that we will fall below a single percent.

"Who dug this pit?" So how did Russia end up in a situation where Russians start to reproduce less and less?

Often the authorities blame the 90s and... There is some truth in this. "- A sellout!" Let's take a closer look at the demographics.

Here is this pit—World War II. This is an echo of the war and the natural transition from high to low birth rates in all developed countries.

Another important event happened closer to us, the second half of the 1990s, when the default occurred. With it came poverty, unpaid wages, hunger, devastation, and the deepest collapse in the population.

The death rate exceeded the birth rate by a factor of 1.5. So in June 2021, we're back in the '90s, so to speak.

This is how Professor Oleg Matveichev of the Higher School of Economics de-

This is how Professor Oleg Matveichev of the Higher School of Economics describes the consequences of 1998: "How was it possible to have children when people were basically just trying to survive, when salaries were not paid for six months straight, when businesses were going bankrupt?

What was there to raise and support children with? Now let's do the math. We had the 90s 25 years ago The generation born in the 1990s is now entering its childbearing years.

But this generation is thin in numbers. So, it is only natural that if there are few of these people themselves, they have significantly fewer children." Besides, democratic and capitalist values came from the West right after the collapse of the USSR,

Russians, following the example of European families, started having children after the age of 25-30 and were accumulating more and more savings before having a child.

Then there is education, the trend towards strong, independent women, waves of feminism, awareness, self-reflection, the emergence of concepts such as abusiveness, toxic relationships - in general, the traditional ideas somehow began to lose ground.

All right, if one can't solve the issue on their own, let's ask other countries about their experience...

I'm talking about migration. Every year, millions of people from the former CIS countries are sent to our country, especially from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, but unfortunately, their efforts are not enough either.

Look, this is how Mother Russia grew at the expense of immigrants, and there were so many more deaths than children born.

That is for 27 years we should say thanks to 9 million migrants, without them the picture would have been worse.

While we can only omit the question of qualification and education of such personnel. Unlike in the United States, where people migrate to stay, Russian migration is seasonal; Russian labour migration does not involve resettlement – it’s mainly seasonal workers who come to us.

They come to us to send money back home rather than to settle here. And here’s a little pause.

Which country do you think people send the most money from Russia to? You have 5 seconds to think, say the name of that country in your head.

"Which country people send the most money from Russia to?" So, the biggest favourite to receive Russian capital is...

SWITZERLAND "- Whaaaaaaaat???" And only then comes Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. This is the full list.

Well, I understand that it’s seasonal immigrants who send money to Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

But I wonder what kind of immigrants send such sums to Switzerland, the US and the UK...?

For Russia, of course, it would be better for the money to stay inside the country, because less money - less welfare - less population - less money, and it is a vicious circle.

By the way, the data is as official and open as possible from the Central Bank itself, so they know it all well.

All right... apart from money matters, to all the reasons listed, we also add his majesty COVID.

"- Oh, for fuck's sake!" "All mouth and no trousers" So, let's say it straight. No country shows a reliable number of covid deaths.

NOT A SINGLE ONE Well because only God knows the exact number, BUT, regardless of the numbers the authorities report, we have one way to figure it out.

And that way is called excess mortality. These two scary words combine with each other to create this uncomplicated formula.

There is a simple concept behind this unpleasant formula. We take periods, average out how people died, and then just compare them to each other.

Like if from 2015 to 2019 there was an average of 100 people dying and from 2020 to 2021 there was an average of 150, then there has to be an explanation as to why all of a sudden there are one and a half times as many people dying.

Also, this very thing will give an indirect indication of how many covid-associated deaths the authorities have missed.

Not in exact numbers and roughly... but... nevertheless. For example, there was a real crackdown in Mexico, where people were dying at two and a half times the rate.

And here is Singapore, which after the lockdown and the introduction of mass vaccination was holding steady at 7%.

Or Israel, which was basically the first to massively ‘chip’ everybody, was able to stop the peak and went down from 40 percent to about 15 percent.

By the way, the Russian authorities were saying, like "look at the crap going on in the US. But we are doing great." Well, let's check out the US.

Yes, here's a graph of the US. Yeah, it’s really nasty, the number goes up to 52%...

If we put Russia on top... it's the same, somewhere more and somewhere less... although with the latest data we're up sharply from the bloody Americans...

Anything else? These are the much-loved Russian official statistics. We cannot say that the authorities are lying.

No... let's say that based on the excess mortality data we have scepticism about the consistency between official statistics and reality.

And there is scepticism about many countries, mind you. Germany, for example, seems to have undercounted 20%, Poland - 190%, the US - 30%, and Russia... 550%.

One can dig into this scepticism and inconsistency of figures for a long time, we can remember how in 2020 for some reason there was a sharp 2.4 times increase in deaths from pneumonia, and not from COVID, according to the Federal Statistics.

But the whole point can be summed up in a couple of sentences COVID was really hitting the demographics by increasing the mortality rate.

The excess death rate for the entire period was 665,097 people. And it's not even that falsification was being exposed, it's that another covid could be coming later, and countries need to be prepared for not how to disguise the real situation, but how to deal with it.

Because otherwise the extinction of the country's population is imminent. "Regulation of unique personalities" The population of countries is changing all over planet Earth in different ways and for different reasons.

It is decreasing in developed countries as well, due to the development of contraceptives and women's education.

There is even an interesting case in Iceland with only 341 thousand people of population It is about the same as some New Orleans.

Iceland is trying to increase its population via immigrants, 11 percent of which live there.

And it is understandable - you go out with a girl and she turns out to be your cousin...

nature does not approve of such mixtures. Central Africa, on the other hand, is quite the opposite, with no education or contraceptive factors, so it is predicted that by 2050 40% of all children on Earth will be African.

Despite falling birth rates, diseases and migration, the average projection by 2100 indicates a potential population of 4.2 billion on the continent, or about 38% of the world's population.

In Russia, there are many more reasons for extinction than have listed in this video.

But if we try to create some general idea - again, the economy is to blame.

Just as it was the main cause of the demographic pit in the 90s, we were experiencing something similar in 2021.

Remember we were looking at the fertility rate, which has been going up rapidly since 2007.

And the reason for such a rise is… “The only reason for the increase in the birth rate of third children was the introduction of the 450 000-ruble ($5 800) payment for a mortgage.

The birth rate of second children has also stopped falling and has slightly increased due to the increase in the federal subsidies for multiple-child families from 483 000 to 639 000 rubles ($6 200 - $8 200)”.

Yes, the allocation of money has some effect, but it is not a systematic approach.

Firstly, we have not touched the conditions in which this child appears at all. That is, the level of education and the level of income of the parents.

And believe me, I'm not saying that all parents should have academic degrees, two businesses and 4 cars.

All I'm saying is that if a one-time payment of half a million rubles, which is like $6500 is the decisive, I emphasise here, the decisive factor for a parent to conceive a child, then I have serious doubts about the family's favourable conditions.

Secondly, even with good education and income, there is a downward trend in the birth rate.

You just have to look at the birth rates in rural and urban areas. Look at it - city dwellers are giving birth 40 percent less often.

In traditional agrarian societies, children were seen as an additional labour force on the farm, so having children made economic sense.

Also, having a large number of children was a guarantee of reproduction in the context of a relatively high infant mortality rate.

Thirdly, the birth rate could now stimulate confidence in the future. In the meantime, all we are sure of is that prices will rise in the shops and some person will be recognised as a foreign agent for having an alternative point of view.

After all, the right one sounds something like this: “After the revolution of 1917 the Russian Empire ceased to exist, and then came the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Had they not happened, we would now have a different country. The population would now be nearly 500 million people.

If these tragedies had not happened, there would be about 500 million people” Although more than 30 years have passed since the last such event, that is the collapse of the USSR, and in 30 years Russia's population has only shrunk and continues to shrink,

both quantitatively and in relation to the world population from 2.6% to 1.9%. Don't get me wrong, it's not a hate speech.

It's just a vicious circle emerges - the richer and more developed a country is the richer and more developed it needs to be in order to continue to be rich and developed.

After all, from a certain level of prosperity, people start looking for even higher prosperity.

The threshold for having more children, so to speak, is raised. The subject of demography itself is very complex, there are no direct correlations.

Underdeveloped and poor countries have growing populations due to lack of education, contraception, consumer economics.

But when culture and education appear, people start to think about the sufficiency of economic goods to produce offspring - will the child be able to live better than the parents?

When this need is closed as well, confidence in the future appears, and with it comes the quintessential question of whether I need a child at all and... what for?

Maybe I'll get a cat instead? In addition to personal questions, there are global ones as well.

When the world's population reaches 11 billion, what will be the composition of that population?

What is the proportion of educated and not-so-educated? The rich and the poor? Will there be enough jobs and resources for everyone?

It turns out that behind the boring word ‘demography’ there are a lot of interesting pandora's boxes...

quite a few immoral and unethical ones at that. And now we’re finishing this video.

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