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Ukraine SitRep: Bad Demographics – End of Support
Via a Responsible Statecraft piece I came onto a EU study that tried to predict the future demographics of Ukraine's population.
The War and the Future of Ukraine’s Population
The study is from early 2022 and is based on Ukrainian casualty numbers from only the very first month of the war. Their worst case scenario was this:
Our third and fourth scenarios assume that the war will continue for a month or longer so that further casualties and refugees are expected. We assume the following casualties: 5,000 deaths among soldiers and 1,500 civilian deaths based on the current trends. There will be 5 million refugees, which is an estimate by UNHCR (UNHCR 2022a)
The real refugee numbers are twice as high and the casualty numbers, wounded and dead, are of course about 100 times higher than the study assumed. It was thus not worth the money that had been spend on it.
Still, some graphs in it are usable.
Yesterday I shortly discussed the op-ed by the former British Minister of Defense Ben Wallace in which he asserts:
The average age of the soldiers at the front is over 40.
He then urges the Ukrainian government to throw more young men into the meat grinder.
My response to Wallace was this:
The young Ukrainians are gone. They either have fled from Ukraine or are wounded, disabled or died. You can not mobilize what is no longer there.
Unfortunately the real situation is worse then I had thought. The EU demographic study included this graph:
Ukraine’s population by age and sex in 2020
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The 'age pyramid' in Ukraine isn't a pyramid. In 2020 there was a huge lack of 15 to 20 years old people. They were simply not there. They never existed. The number of newborns around 2000 must have been horribly low.
The reason for that was likely the serious downturn of Ukraine's economy after it had separated itself from the Soviet Union.
Ukraine’s GDP(PPP)
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It took a decade long severe recession for Ukraine to find a bottom for its economy. Bad economic times and low expectations of betterment had influenced the desire of its people to procreate. Two more downturns followed during the global recession around 2008 and due to the 2014 Maidan coup and the civil war following it.
Thus when the war started there were only half as many people of 20 year age than 40 year old ones. It is no wonder then that few of younger age are seen at the front line.
There is still one measure Ukraine might take to increase the numbers of young soldiers. There currently are exemptions from mobilization for those who study at a university. If Ukraine would draft these if could probably find a few ten-thousand additional soldiers. But it would also strip itself of its future elite.
The already bad demographic prediction some 20 years out would then look even worse than they currently do.
Early this year Ukraine's birthrate had hit a new low:
To keep a population steady, research shows it's necessary to have an average of about 2.1 babies per family — known as a replacement rate. In Ukraine, fertility rates have remained under that threshold since 1990. Over the last two decades, the rate has often dropped below what experts call a "very low" fertility rate of 1.3, when a population begins to shrink at an ever increasing rate. In January 2021, a year before Russia's full-scale invasion, the fertility rate was 1.16, according to national statistics.
The birthrate has since dropped further and is now the lowest one in the world:
Birthrates in Ukraine have fallen by 28% in the first half of 2023, compared to the same period prior to the war, marking the most significant drop since Ukraine gained its independence in 1991, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sept. 25.
…
Due to the ongoing war, millions of Ukrainian women with children were forced to leave the country, while men aged 18 to 60 were prohibited from leaving. As a result, many couples were physically separated, while others delayed starting families, the report says.
In the first half of 2023, there were 96,755 children born in Ukraine. Since 2013, the country's fertility rate has been dropping by approximately 7% per year.
The population of Ukraine will shrink further. In 1990 Ukraine had a population of more than 50 million people. Twenty years from now the country will have less than maybe 25 million inhabitants. This even if all refugees return. A large if that this is unlikely to happen.
Support for Ukraine is shrinking:
As Russia has become more bloodyminded, Ukraine’s allies seem caught in their own conflicting boundary conditions. There is no willingness to mobilize to defend Ukraine. There isn’t even a serious effort to ramp up military production to an adequate level to match, let alone surpass, Russia’s output.
And that’s before getting to the fact that Ukraine as a county has become a very costly ward of all its backers.
Yesterday a meeting of the EU's foreign ministers on further military assistance for Ukraine ended without results (machine translation):
The foreign ministers of the EU countries at today's summit in Kiev could not agree on the allocation of military assistance to Ukraine in the amount of 5 billion euros for 2024.
This was announced at a press conference following the event by EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrel.
The EU's budget for 2023 was €168.6 billion. €5 billion are peanuts but the EU countries could not unite over it. The senseless generosity has reached the end of the possible.
Borrel predicted the inevitable outcome:
Earlier, EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrel said that the cessation of military support for Kiev from the West will lead to a quick end to the conflict in Ukraine, but as a result, the country will lose its independence.
A quick end to the conflict is what all sane people should hope for.
Look at the demographics and economics above and ask yourself what 30 years of 'independence' have done for Ukraine.
To end it could well be the best that could ever happen to it. Unfortunately for it Russia is unlikely to step in and to subsidize its further existence.
Regarding population, 60 years ago when Paul Erlich wrote The Population Bomb, it was believed that rapid population growth would overwhelm the ability of societies to cope. Today, all that is going into reverse.
While the population continues to grow slightly, it is actually falling in many countries, and everywhere the total fertility rate (TFR=number of children per woman) is dropping, even in Niger, the country with the very highest rate. No country today has the historic rate of 8 or more that was the case before widespread birth control. It is expected that the continuing decline in fertility rates everywhere will lead after not too many years to an actual decline in population, eventually enveloping every country.
This is entirely bad news for capitalism because of this simple syllogism:
Capitalism requires continues growth for profits to exist.
The space and the resources of the earth are finite.
Therefore, capitalism cannot continue.
My late capitalist acquaintance, confronted with this, said to me, “Oh, but the possibilities of expansion have not nearly been reached!” OK, but ultimately they are a limitation.
Now, because of the slowing of population growth and incipient population decline, it seems the gotterdamerung of capitalism may be sooner than he was expecting.
So this raises a couple of questions. First, why is this decline in fertility occurring? It is manifestly NOT because of policies deliberately imposed by governments and elites (though economic conditions are surely but unintentionally contributing to it). Rather, many governments now offer incentives to have more children. While this has worked a little, it has not by any means stopped the massive downward trend.
I myself think, based on interactions with my students, that a major factor is that the young everywhere see their future as bleak. In Egypt, my wife’s original home, with a crashing birth rate, one of her twin nephews said, “Eighty percent of the youth want to emigrate.” Not missing a beat, his twin corrected him, “NO, one hundred percent want to!” Here in the US, I find the university students I teach have a very bleak outlook on the future, not seeing much hope in a world of corporate feudalism and decline. They certainly shy away from marriage and any kind of commitment or responsibility. And I can’t blame them: It is the hand they have been dealt. I think it is possible that in the near future there could occur a much greater crash in the total fertility rate, say to 0.5 children per women. Such a rate would cause the population to shrink so fast, it would be like committing national, or even human-race-wide, suicide.
At the same time, there is this migration problem, with hordes of people on the move, leading to a crisis that has been aired in this thread. Are those people fleeing overpopulation in their own countries? Not really, because the TFR is collapsing. But they see only a bleak future, and further population collapse will only expand the bleakness. Another part of it is the urbanization: In many places, especially the US, the countryside is being emptied of its population. Meanwhile, people get further sundered from growing their own food, leading to dependence on the exploitative system we all are complaining about.
As for the elites themselves, for those following actual capitalist tradition, they cannot possibly welcome the incipient population decline that will undermine and destroy their whole way of doing business. But some of them seem to be looking ahead to a postcapitalist world where they rather envision some kind of feudalism with themselves in control. That would go far in explaining Klaus Schwab and the depopulationist position some of the elite seem to be adopting. But no one has ever been where the world is today, so the elite, like everyone else, are also divided and confused, and in that are the seeds of their downfall and hope for a better future for whatever may be left of the human race after the radical upheavels and changes that are surely in the offing.
Posted by: Cabe | Oct 4 2023 1:47 utc | 369
Regarding population, 60 years ago when Paul Erlich wrote The Population Bomb, it was believed that rapid population growth would overwhelm the ability of societies to cope. Today, all that is going into reverse.
While the population continues to grow slightly, it is actually falling in many countries, and everywhere the total fertility rate (TFR=number of children per woman) is dropping, even in Niger, the country with the very highest rate. No country today has the historic rate of 8 or more that was the case before widespread birth control. It is expected that the continuing decline in fertility rates everywhere will lead after not too many years to an actual decline in population, eventually enveloping every country.
This is entirely bad news for capitalism because of this simple syllogism:
Capitalism requires continues growth for profits to exist.
The space and the resources of the earth are finite.
Therefore, capitalism cannot continue.
My late capitalist acquaintance, confronted with this, said to me, “Oh, but the possibilities of expansion have not nearly been reached!” OK, but ultimately they are a limitation.
Now, because of the slowing of population growth and incipient population decline, it seems the gotterdamerung of capitalism may be sooner than he was expecting.
So this raises a couple of questions. First, why is this decline in fertility occurring? It is manifestly NOT because of policies deliberately imposed by governments and elites (though economic conditions are surely but unintentionally contributing to it). Rather, many governments now offer incentives to have more children. While this has worked a little, it has not by any means stopped the massive downward trend.
I myself think, based on interactions with my students, that a major factor is that the young everywhere see their future as bleak. In Egypt, my wife’s original home, with a crashing birth rate, one of her twin nephews said, “Eighty percent of the youth want to emigrate.” Not missing a beat, his twin corrected him, “NO, one hundred percent want to!” Here in the US, I find the university students I teach have a very bleak outlook on the future, not seeing much hope in a world of corporate feudalism and decline. They certainly shy away from marriage and any kind of commitment or responsibility. And I can’t blame them: It is the hand they have been dealt. I think it is possible that in the near future there could occur a much greater crash in the total fertility rate, say to 0.5 children per women. Such a rate would cause the population to shrink so fast, it would be like committing national, or even human-race-wide, suicide.
At the same time, there is this migration problem, with hordes of people on the move, leading to a crisis that has been aired in this thread. Are those people fleeing overpopulation in their own countries? Not really, because the TFR is collapsing. But they see only a bleak future, and further population collapse will only expand the bleakness. Another part of it is the urbanization: In many places, especially the US, the countryside is being emptied of its population. Meanwhile, people get further sundered from growing their own food, leading to dependence on the exploitative system we all are complaining about.
As for the elites themselves, for those following actual capitalist tradition, they cannot possibly welcome the incipient population decline that will undermine and destroy their whole way of doing business. But some of them seem to be looking ahead to a postcapitalist world where they rather envision some kind of feudalism with themselves in control. That would go far in explaining Klaus Schwab and the depopulationist position some of the elite seem to be adopting. But no one has ever been where the world is today, so the elite, like everyone else, are also divided and confused, and in that are the seeds of their downfall and hope for a better future for whatever may be left of the human race after the radical upheavels and changes that are surely in the offing.
Posted by: Cabe | Oct 4 2023 1:47 utc | 370
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