One of the reasons I think demographic factors aren’t as important over the long term as some say they are is that an estimated 50% of the population of Europe died (from the plague) from 1346 to 1353 and yet not long afterwards Europe started pulling ahead the rest of the world, with Gutenberg inventing movable type in 1450 and the Renaissance having spread throughout Europe by 1500. Admittedly the Renaissance’s beginning (in Italy) predate the plague, but the point is that the loss of about 50% of the population did not prevent those beginnings from spreading to the rest of the Europe and did not prevent Europe from becoming the most influential region of the world (with the European discovery of the New World in 1492, with the European Magellan making the first circumnavigation of the globe between 1519 and 1522 and with the scientific and political advances, e.g., the empirical method and liberalism, of the European Renaissance having tremendous global influence to the present day).
And even if I were not able to cite the example I just cited, the track record of the class of experts (geographers, political scientists) who maintain that demographics is national destiny is that they are often wrong. Less Wrong does well in general, but could do better at resisting false information and information of unknown truth value that gets repeated over and over on by the internet.
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.)
One of the reasons I think demographic factors aren’t as important over the long term as some say they are is that an estimated 50% of the population of Europe died (from the plague) from 1346 to 1353 and yet not long afterwards Europe started pulling ahead the rest of the world, with Gutenberg inventing movable type in 1450 and the Renaissance having spread throughout Europe by 1500. Admittedly the Renaissance’s beginning (in Italy) predate the plague, but the point is that the loss of about 50% of the population did not prevent those beginnings from spreading to the rest of the Europe and did not prevent Europe from becoming the most influential region of the world (with the European discovery of the New World in 1492, with the European Magellan making the first circumnavigation of the globe between 1519 and 1522 and with the scientific and political advances, e.g., the empirical method and liberalism, of the European Renaissance having tremendous global influence to the present day).
And even if I were not able to cite the example I just cited, the track record of the class of experts (geographers, political scientists) who maintain that demographics is national destiny is that they are often wrong. Less Wrong does well in general, but could do better at resisting false information and information of unknown truth value that gets repeated over and over on by the internet.
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.)