A Low Birthrate Was Supposed to Weaken Russia. What Happened?

Pundits like to say demography is destiny, but the people who know the subject best — demographers — don’t entirely agree. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an example of how a purely demographic analysis can be more confounding than clarifying, says Jennifer Sciubba, the author of a forthcoming book, “8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death and Migration Shape Our World.”

After the breakup of the Soviet Union, many experts viewed its remnant, Russia, as a lessened threat because of its low birthrate and high death rate, says Sciubba. In her book she cites Robert Gates, who served as secretary of defense under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama from 2006 to 2011. In a 2009 article in Foreign Affairs, Gates, who has a doctorate in Russian and Soviet history from Georgetown University, wrote that Russia’s nonnuclear forces were weaker than those of the Soviet Union and “adverse demographic trends in Russia will likely keep those conventional forces in check.”

Sciubba, who has a doctorate from the University of Maryland and teaches at Rhodes College in Memphis, had heard that argument before. “When I worked in the Pentagon in the mid-2000s, people were eager to write off Russia because of its ‘dire demographics,’” she writes in “8 Billion and Counting.” (President Vladimir Putin of Russia himself said in 2006 that population decline was the biggest crisis facing the country.)

Doubters about Russia were right about the demographics: Before its breakup, the Soviet Union was more populous than the United States, but Russia alone is considerably smaller, and its population is on a slow downward trajectory, while the U.S. population is expected to keep growing, according to United Nations projections.

But the invasion of Ukraine, which began after Sciubba finished the book, shows that demographic liabilities haven’t sidelined Russia. “Perhaps,” Sciubba writes, “we should recalibrate our expectation of the relationship between aging and national security. One relevant theory does come to mind: Power transition theory, which argues that a state with declining power will act aggressively while it still can, would explain Russia’s actions as a last gasp and shed light on why rapidly aging China is doubling down on its military.”

Sciubba warns policymakers against letting their hopes influence their predictions. For example, she writes: “China’s population growth and high fertility were criticized as a huge weakness, sure to undermine any of the communist government’s efforts at global domination. Now, its aging population and low fertility are criticized as a liability. Can both criticisms be valid?”

I interviewed Sciubba ahead of the book’s publication date, which is Tuesday. “There’s a lot of desirability bias” in demographic analysis, she said. “People see what they want to see.” Used incorrectly, a demographic analysis can put a sheen of scientific credibility on what’s essentially a guess about the future.

“Demography,” she writes in the book, “is not destiny.”

Elsewhere

The decline in labor’s share of national income in the United States is sometimes portrayed as a defeat for the proletariat in the kind of power struggle that Karl Marx wrote about. That’s not completely wrong. But tax policy, starting with the Tax Reform Act of 1986 signed by President Ronald Reagan, accounts for about a third of the decline of labor’s share of corporate-sector income, according to research by Matthew Smith of the Treasury Department; Danny Yagan of the University of California, Berkeley; Owen Zidar of Princeton; and Eric Zwick of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

“Entrepreneurs have flexibility to characterize their income as labor payments or as profits” and, to minimize tax rates, are choosing to label the income as profits, the authors write in the latest version of a paper that’s forthcoming in American Economic Review: Insights. Also, they write, “many labor-intensive firms are now organized outside the corporate sector as tax-preferred partnerships.”

Zwick told me he’s “definitely sympathetic” with the view that capitalists are winning against labor. But he said that highly paid consultants, lawyers and others whose compensation is being relabeled as profit instead of wages don’t fit the picture of exploited workers: “They’re the bourgeoisie in the Marx story.”

Quote of the day

How beauteous are rouleaus! how charming chests

Containing ingots, bags of dollars, coins

(Not of old victors, all whose heads and crests

Weigh not the thin ore where their visage shines,

But) of fine unclipt gold, where dully rests

Some likeness, which the glittering cirque confines,

Of modern, reigning, sterling, stupid stamp: —

Yes! ready money is Aladdin’s lamp.

— Lord Byron, “Don Juan,” canto 12, stanza 12 (1819-24)

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