Category Archives: Demographics

Old Man’s War

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Ukraine as a culture and a people are going to cease to exist in a couple of generations regardless of what Russia does. It was for this reason that I did not believe that Ukraine would fight so hard against the Russians. Why would a nation that was going extinct voluntarily react so strongly to the loss of their sovereignty? I never figured that so many only sons would lay their lives down with their soon to be childless mothers cheering them on. This was one of the things on my mind when I stated in my last post that I have been almost completely wrong about the human element of the Ukraine War.

But being wrong about the human element does not change the underlying demographic realities that I based my opinion on. And those demographic realities have consequences even if people don’t react to them like I think they will.

Below is the what the current demographic structure of Russia looks like (you can click on the picture to get a bigger view). Pay careful attention to how many people are between the ages of 16 and 26 compared to the number of people between the ages of 30 and 40.

By Rickky1409 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

Compare the above graphs with the one below (again you can click on it to get a better view). The below graph is what Russian demographics looked like before the Germans invaded. You can see they had a large cohort of young people just waiting to come on-line and get thrown into the meat grinder.

By Rickky1409 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

But the above demographics are still messed up. That is because Communists are bad people and they had a great famine followed by a great terror. The below is a more natural population pyramid and it comes from 1929 which is just before the commies really messed things up with famines and terror. It still has a gap in it from Word War 1, but it is the type of population pyramid that the idea of mass conscription was built around.

By Rickky1409 – From excel file, CC BY-SA 3.0

We have been looking at Russia because it is easier to get historical data. But Ukraine is practically the same. If anything the disappearance of the youngest children is even more pronounced but that may be because Russia has more ethnic minorities still having kids.

By sdgedfegw – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

If you really want a dramatic demonstration of the destruction of the Ukrainian nation (prior to anything the Russia did) click on the below GIF.

By Kaj Tallungs – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

This is why when you see videos of the combatants in this war it is striking how many of them are in their 30s or 40s. Neither nation has a choice. If they sent masses of 18 year old’s like the US did in Vietnam, they would not have enough to make a proper army. Even Russia, with its much bigger population, would be at risk of destroying its future if it only sent young people to battle. And Ukraine likely has to destroy its future and pull in older men just to have a chance at staying in the fight.

Long term, it really don’t matter what happens on the battle field. Neither nation is going to be around (at least as we know them today) for very much longer. If you look at the very bottom of both countries population pyramids, there is next to nothing there and that will carry forward into the next generation after that and so on on and so forth. It will only take a couple of generations of that for both nations to have next to nothing in terms of population. And the war will only speed that process along.

Common Demographic Errors Committed During Debates On Gun Laws

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Debates about gun laws are largely a waste of time because everyone pretends they are about facts when really they are about values. Having said that, there are many common errors repeated by both sides on a gun debate that trigger my “somebody on internet is wrong reflex.” One of the most common set of errors relates to comparing differing countries or states without accounting for some basic demographic facts that mean the comparison that on the surface seems compelling is actually misleading or at least not as straight forward as it seems. Since this set of errors also impacts other less emotionally driven arguments, I will indulge myself and point out some of these common errors.

Error Number #1: Failure to account for age structures of the countries or states that are being compared.

Brazil has a murder rate of 20.9 people per 100,000. That is pretty high but it is still lower than 18 other countries such as Venezuela (36.7) or South Africa (33. 5). Compare to Brazil, the USA’s murder rate of 6.3 per 100,000 does not look so bad. But USA rate is worse than any European country except Russia at 7.3 (Ukraine’s murder rate was basically the same as the US before the war started). On the other hand, Switzerland and China (if you believe their statistics) come in at .5 per 100,000. That is so much lower then the US rate as to make them seem almost murder free by comparison. But if we focus on Switzerland and Brazil for a bit, we can see why a countries murder rate is impacted by a lot more then just guns.

Brazil has far tougher gun laws then the US but it has a far more murders then the US. Switzerland has some of the most liberal gun laws in the world (stricter then some parts of the US but you can own rifles in Switzerland that would be illegal in New York or California) and they have one of the lowest murder rates in the world.

If you read gun debates, you will see endless attempts to score points off of figures like this. Pro-gun people will bring up Switzerland so often you would think it was a utopia and anti-gun people will pound home the fact that US murder rates are far above any other “First World” country as proof that its gun laws are to blame.

In all that sound and fury, you will rarely see discussed the other factors besides guns that go into influencing the murder rate. One of the simplest of these factors is age. Young males under thirty commit the vast majority of violent crimes. So all things being equal, we should expect the country with younger population to have more crime. Brazil’s average age is 33.5. The US average age is 38.6 years. In Switzerland the average age is 43.1 years. In the EU as a whole, the average age is 43.9 years. Those average age differences might not seem like a lot, but when your average age is 33.5 you have a lot bigger part of your percentage of your population in the prime crime committing ages.

For example, 62% of Brazil population is 29 or under (and those is prime crime committing ages). By contrast, Switzerland only has about 30% of its population under 30 (I only found figures for Switzerland from 2014 and at that time they were 34% but the Swiss population on average has gotten older since then so I rounded down to 30%). So Brazil has more than twice the percentage of people in the prime crime committing demographic then Switzerland does even though Switzerland’s average age is only 10 years greater then Brazil’s. So even if all other things were equal, you would expect Brazil’s murder rate to be twice as high as Switzerland’s due to demographic reasons alone (for this statement to be even roughly true, the under 30 crowd has to be more then 10 times as likely to commit murder then the over 30 crowd. I believe this to be the case but can’t find a source that breaks it down nice and neat and I am too tired to do all the math to collate the various sources to check my figure).

Granted, Brazil has way more than twice the Swiss murder rate so obviously there is more going on in Brazil then just a younger population. But the point is that anyone (Pro or anti gun) that you see comparing crime rates between countries without accounting for the differing age structure between countries is making bogus use of statistics.

Error Number #2: Failure to account for economic inequality.

The age gap is only one of the things that you need to account for when considering crime statistics. Another thing you should look at is the level of economic inequality. All other things being equal, a country with higher levels of economic inequality has a much higher crime rate then countries are more equal.

The reason for this correlation can be debated endlessly and I will not get into that debate here. The only thing I will note is that countries with high inequality also tend to have high rates of single motherhood, drug use, and other social issues associated with crime. They also tend to be far more diverse and there is evidence that suggests that people are more willing to commit violent crime on people perceived to be part of the “other” group.

Regardless of the reasons, the fact remains that high inequality corresponds to higher crime so strongly that I am not aware of anyone (left, right, center) who doubts that the two things go together. The main problem is that measuring inequality precisely is a lot harder and more subject to dispute then talking about the age structure of a country. Comparing Switzerland to Brazil both shows how inequality tracks with crime and how those measure can be murky.

The most common way of measuring economic inequality is via the Gini index. A Gini index of 0 represents perfect equality, while an index of 100 implies perfect inequality. Using that measure, Brazil had a index of over 53 in 2019 and Switzerland had an index of just over 30 in the same year. So if you go by the index, Brazil is almost twice as unequal as Switzerland. Now you can question how accurate those figures are. For example, do those figures accurately capture the much larger grey/black economy in Brazil then in Switzerland? On the other hand, is the Swiss figure overstated (in the practical sense that matters to us) due to the large number of wealthy people who visit/keep a lot of money in Switzerland?

But regardless of such questions, everyone familiar with both countries would agree that Switzerland is a lot more equal then Brazil is. And for that reason, making arguments about gun laws by comparing Switzerland to Brazil without taking that inequality into account is silly. In the case of this particular example, the only one who would do it would be pro-gun people since Switzerland has vastly more permissive gun laws then Brazil does. But it is just as silly when the anti-gun people try to make comparisons between countries without taking this into account.

For example, in 2019, the US had a GINI index of 41.5. Japan had an GINI index of 29.9 and a much older population. But anti-gun groups will compare the two countries murder rates all the time without even attempting to take those two things into account. More commonly, the US is compared to Europe where the average EU Gini index was 30.2 (and also with a much older population then the US). The fact that nobody should expect Brazil to be like Switzerland regardless of what you think the ideal gun laws are is obvious to all the anti-gun types. But somehow they expect that US can become like the EU even though by all measures there is the same type of difference between US and EU (albeit not as extreme) as there is between Switzerland and Brazil.

The Bottom Line: The US is more like a Latin America country then it is a European one.

All the chattering classes of either side of any political debate in the US tend to start from the presumption that we naturally should be compared to European countries. I think that this is in larger part because most of the chattering class in this country is overwhelming white. But the country as a whole is not.

In fact, if you look at most demographic measures (Age structure, ethnic makeup, economic equality, crime rates, church attendance and other measures of religiosity, and so on and so forth) the US is more like Latin America then it is Europe. The only leg people have to stand on in terms of thinking that the US should be compared to Europe is in income per head. But there is no good evidence that income per head has anything to do with the murder rate regardless of gun laws. There are really poor countries that have a much lower murder rate then countries that are much wealthier countries. (Nepal being one example of a country with a relatively low murder rate compare to much wealthier countries).

Ironically, there is one way in which most Latin American countries are more like Europe then the US. And that is regards to gun laws. It is harder in most Latin American countries to legally own a gun than it is in many European countries like Finland or Switzerland to name just a couple. But that does not stop Latin America from being even worse on average then the US when it comes to the murder rate.

In my personal opinion, if the US had European style gun laws, we would have the same situation as most Latin American countries. In other words, we would still have high rates of murder but only the privileged and the criminals would have guns. But that is impossible to prove in this life and even if you could, it would not make any difference.

The blunt fact is that the gun debate will always ultimately boil down to values. In particular, how much you trust the government and how much you value personal freedom? If you pay attention, you will notice that in general, people’s opinions regarding what they are willing for the Government to do to protect them to from Covid also track what they are willing to have the government to do to protect them from guns. Just like with guns, people argue back and forth about the how “effective” various Covid measures are. But if you really dug down, the real difference is not around fact, but around what people value more, their safety or their freedom.

And that is not a trade off you are going to resolve with facts and figures.

A Rant On Japan’s Demographics.

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The end of the modern culture is one of those things that most people can see coming but few want to acknowledge. Our culture’s ending is guaranteed by college educated populations failing to reproduce at rates sufficient to sustain the population. In the end, this failure means that modern culture must end, unless it can sustain itself parasitically on a non modern culture that is fecund enough to both sustain itself and the burden of a modern culture. But based on all available evidence, modern culture is very successful at supplanting whatever traditional culture it comes across if given a level playing field. For this reason, it seems unlikely that modern culture will ever be able to moderate its own success in a manner that would enable it to be successfully parasitical.

Granted, that message of doom and gloom is not mainstream. But it is the only conclusion supported by simple math and observing what is going on around us in the world. Anyone who is capable of understanding basic logic and is aware of the world around them should be able to understand it for themselves. At least, that is what I would like to think.

In reality, it is apparent the people struggle mightily with basic logic and they are not at all keen on observing the world around them. This has recently been rubbed into my face by the reaction to Tyler Cowen’s recent musings about how the world might “stop depopulating.” Cowen’s musing are banal and even a little delusional. But at least his musings acknowledged the basic mathematical fact that this has to stop at some point or the human race will cease to exist. Nonetheless, his comment section was overrun by people mocking or otherwise uncomprehending why Professor Cowen thought “depopulating” was a problem. Apparently, simple math is a form of logic too deep and complicated for most of his readership to comprehend.

One point that was repeatedly made in the comment section particularly got under my skin and is the occasion for tonight’s rant. And that is the idea that people have been predicting for a long time that demographic issues were going lead to an economic catastrophe for Japan and yet Japan is still going strong. I have seen this argument advanced many times over the last few years and yet rarely do I see anyone explain why this is logically and observationally an absurd argument.

To rectify that, I thought I would throw together a brief explanation of why the idea that “Japan shows the demographic decline is not a problem” is absurd.

Continue reading →

COVID Deaths and Demographic Realities

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Let’s try to only use data from sources that are pro-covid apocalypse, to try to offset my personal bias somewhat:

USA Deaths per 1,000 people in the USA

Note the data for 2020 (8.88) is a pre-covid projection – we should expect it to be higher when the real numbers come in. The question is, how much higher? According to The Conversation, which is using CDC data, in July deaths of any cause were 8-12% higher than it was projected. That was in July – should we assume that death rate continues for the rest of 2020, or did the death rate from COVID decrease over the year? Well, according to NBC, it dropped off heavily for the rest of the year, even during the fall “surge”. This shouldn’t be surprising given widespread reports from the medical establishment that the death rate is falling across all age brackets.

Notably, NYS did it’s best to spread the disease rapidly, getting most of their cases over with in the beginning of the year and mostly avoiding the 2nd season surge:

OK, so how should we estimate the percentage of increase in deaths over the whole year? Well, if you eyeball the chart, it looks like the later half of the year had about half as many Covid deaths. Let’s pick mid-range of The Conversation’s estimate of 8-12%, and say we had a 10% increase in deaths in the first half of 2020, and 5% in the 2nd half. Average that out over the whole year, and you have 7.5%. Let’s assume a grim Nov/Dec round that up to 8% for the whole year. According to the UN estimate for the USA in 2020, they were thinking we’d have 8.8 deaths per thousand. If you increase 8.8 by 8%, you get 9.5 deaths per thousand. This is a “normal” death rate when my parents were growing up. It’s only a bit higher than when I was growing up:

Now consider demographics. Obviously your deaths per 1,000 will be expected to be higher in a group of 1,000 elderly people than it would be in 1,000 people who are young. There has been huge increase in the ratio of people 65 years old and older since the time of our parents, see below. You’ll notice the age projections on this graph closely align with the death rate projections from the UN above.

So what does this all mean? It means that with a even with an older population, and a global pandemic, folks in general no more likely to die in the USA today than they were in our parent generation. In fact, it’s only because we have such a high percentage of elderly that the death rate even manages to match the 1970’s. According to data from the CDC, (and many other sources), the vast majority of deaths have occurring in individuals over 65 years old:

Using the data provided by pro-covid apocalypse sources, it’s reasonable to believe that “the world we live in today” is actually still much safer than it was in our parents’ generation, and that disease-related fatality surges are an unavoidable consequence of having an aging population. Diseases like COVID-19, which disproportionately impact the elderly, would have had almost half the impact in the 1950’s than they have now. They likely would not have even caused a ruckus.

Right now the percentage of the population over 65 years old is at about 17%. As that number continues to climb, it means that the percentage of deaths increase for even milder illnesses will go up. If our nation has become so soft that we are no longer able to tolerate the death rate that our parents grew up with, we should keep in mind that the death rate is projected to climb much higher than it currently is over the next 50 years, even discounting pandemics. If you feel this warrants drastic changes to society, you should plan on having to make the same sacrifices from now on until the end of your life.