I don’t feel like the results of the Black Death situation generalizes to Russia’s current demographics. Medieval Europe was near its carrying capacity given the technology of the day. The plague injected some slack into the system to allow for progress. That’s really not the situation in Russia, is it? Food isn’t the limiting factor.
Furthermore, Russia’s population is aging on net, and the war is exacerbating the problem.
On the contrary compared to Medieval Europe, this would tend to remove slack from the system as the working age Russians have to spend more of their resources to support the elderly while at the same time they’re burning resources to fight the war and growing less than they could otherwise due to sanctions.
Did the Black Death have that effect? I couldn’t find any information on age demographics during that period, but on priors, I’d expect disease to affect the old as well, if not more, in most cases. (What I did find suggested that the poor were disproportionately affected due to their living conditions.)
I don’t feel like the results of the Black Death situation generalizes to Russia’s current demographics. Medieval Europe was near its carrying capacity given the technology of the day. The plague injected some slack into the system to allow for progress. That’s really not the situation in Russia, is it? Food isn’t the limiting factor.
Furthermore, Russia’s population is aging on net, and the war is exacerbating the problem. On the contrary compared to Medieval Europe, this would tend to remove slack from the system as the working age Russians have to spend more of their resources to support the elderly while at the same time they’re burning resources to fight the war and growing less than they could otherwise due to sanctions.
Did the Black Death have that effect? I couldn’t find any information on age demographics during that period, but on priors, I’d expect disease to affect the old as well, if not more, in most cases. (What I did find suggested that the poor were disproportionately affected due to their living conditions.)