The Nightmare that is Vladimir Putin's Russia
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The charts above and below, from a great long long economics article on the Fistful of Euros blog (hat tip: Robert Amsterdam), show that during the first two terms in office of Russian "president" Vladimir Putin, the lifespan of an average adult male fell from 59.75 to 58.5 and the working-age population plunged from a hight of 102.5 million to 100.5 million. In just a short period of eight years, the country lost 2 million workers and 1.25 years from the average male lifespan. The blogger, Edward Hugh, explains how the infusion of oil-related capital combined with Russia's ever-decreasing production capacity is poised to fuel a vicious cycle of inflation that may well usher in a nighmarish period of economic decline.
And what is Putin's response? Is it open discussion and promotion of the flow of information, searching for solutions and new ideas? No, it's the opposite. In the recent parliamentary elections he squeezed out every last voice of opposition from the legislature, filling the body with a mindless hoard of sycophants (a stunning YouTube video emerged recently showing the stuffing of ballot boxes; nobody disagrees that Putin resorted to amazing new levels of vote fraud to assure his party an overwhelming command of the parliament). And as I report on my blog La Russophobe today, he has just embarked on a new round of crackdowns on the last remaining vestige of real information in Russia, the country's Internet resource.
Welcome back to the USSR. Economic failure, and the solution is to simply sweep the problem under the carpet by destroying any who would dare discuss it. We know what happened to the USSR because of that policy. How can we expect anything different in Russia's future?
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