Did Privatization in Russia Lead to a Higher Mortality Rate?
On January 16, 2009, an article by staff writer Judy Dempsey titled “Study Looks at Mortality in Post-Soviet Era” appeared in the New York Times.
Dempsey and the Times breathlessly touted the conclusion of Oxford sociologist David Stuckler in the British medical journal The Lancet that the speedy adoption of capitalism had caused the mortality rate among Russian men to spike horrifically upwards. Freedom, liberty, and democracy, Stuckler claimed, were literally killing off the population of Russia.
The complex scientific report had been available for public perusal less than 24 hours before Dempsey was shouting its conclusions to the world.
It turns out that there was just one small problem with Stuckler’s conclusion: it was absolutely false. On January 30, 2010, a second article appeared in The Lancet. This article, written by John S. Earle and Scott G. Gehlbach, was titled “Did Mass Privatization Really Increase Post-Soviet Mortality?” The answer: no!
Oops. Do you think the report got next-day trumpeting from the Times? Best think again.
The noted Russian economist Konstantin Sonin of the prestigious Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University calls Earle “one of the world’s leading specialists in analyzing data from businesses in transitional economies.” Stuckler? Not so much. Sonin ridicules the Times for impulsively announcing the far less qualified Stuckler’s conclusion, which of course falls right in line with the Times’ neo-socialist worldview, while ignoring those of Earle.
Sonin says that Earle and Gehlbach used “more accurate statistical methods and data” and subjected their work to “stricter review prior to publication.” They could not duplicate Stuckler’s results, proving that those results were so much ideological claptrap.
Ironically, just the day before Dempsey’s article came out the Times own blog, Economix, had reported on the reaction of Jeffrey Sachs, who had been the architect along with Russia’s Yegor Gaidar of the “shock therapy” high-speed transition to capitalism. Sachs called Stuckler’s conclusion “completely wrong.” And Earle himself published a comment on The Lancet a few months after Stuckler’s article appeared calling his results rubbish.
But the Times didn’t care about any of that. Nor did the Times pause to consider the fundamental assumption underlying Stuckler’s work: that the pre-Soviet population growth records he relied on to compare to democratic Russia’s performance were accurate. In other words, Stuckler assumed that the Communist overlords of Soviet Russia wouldn’t lie and understate the mortality rate among Russian men, not even if it made them look bad.
Russia has descended into a semi-fascist criminal state w/ Pootie Poo & his bud at the top. This is what happens when you kill off all of the opposition, free press & anyone else whom you don’t like. 10 yrs. from now Russia will be a totally mafia state period. May the good Lord help the people there!
I suppose because the religion of socialism fancies itself to be based solely on science and reason, the Old Marxist Media loves nothing more than publicizing the flawed or fraudulent statistical results of a pro-state study. I am reminded of the old computer joke regarding people relying too heavily on numbers of unknown origin: Garbage in, gospel out.
Most of the mortailty and morbidity studies involving various countries are at the very least flawed due to government cooking of the numbers. Differeing definitions make country-to-country comparisons pointless. For instance infant mortality statistics that use different definitions of when an infant dies, and whether said event ought be counted.
Mark Adomanis on Russian demographics:
What you can’t truthfully say, what is in fact a baldfaced and quite easily refutable lie, is that Russian demographics are in an “accelerating” death spiral, i.e. that not only are they bad, but they are rapidly getting worse. But as anyone with an elementary school education can see, they aren’t getting worse. They are slowly getting better…
Russia’s demographics have been improving for several years and have continued to improve over the past 12 months despite a poor economy. The second and more important reason is that if you take Steyn’s advice and you formulate your Russia policy based on the assumption that the Russians are all going to die, your policy is going to be really stupid and ineffective because the Russians, in fact, will not all die and will (shockingly!) not react positively to a policy which is premised on their complete irrelevance/extinction. The Russians are going to be around for awhile: depending on your view of them this is, to varying degrees, either a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s not really up for discussion
http://trueslant.com/markadomanis/2010/02/11/mark-steyn-and-russian-demographics/
LISA:
Kim Zigfeld on Mark Adomanis –
The “actual decrease in Russia’s population under Putin” that Mr. Adomanis refers to is based on number reported by Mr. Putin himself, a proud KGB spy and a professional, pathological liar. Isn’t that a problem for Mr. Adomanis? Apparently not. Guess he thinks it’s impossible that Putin could be lying. I, respectfully, choose to consider that possibility.
Nor does Mr. Adomanis face honestly the startling statistic that Russia does not rank in the top 130 nations of the world for adult lifespan. He glosses it over with the word “embarrassing” (see below).
Mr. Adomanis’s qualication as a “Philadelphia-based writer” don’t really place him in the same company as, say, Murray Feshbach, whose opinion differs from Adomanis’s rather markedly:
http://larussophobe.wordpress.com/2008/10/07/russia-collapsing/
Kim Zigfeld on Lisa’s quote –
It would have been nice if you’d included this rather enormous qualification from Mr. Adomanis: “Please note that I’m not suggesting that everything is OK, and that Vlad and Dima should start chest-bumping about their success in rescuing the glorious Russian people from extinction. The death rate, particularly among men, remains embarrassingly high, and Russia has a very long way to go if it ever hopes to “solve” its demographic problems.”
Only embarrassing? Perhaps that’s rather too soft a word for a country that claims the right to sit on the G-8 and the UN Security Council but don’t rank in the top 130 for lifespan.
3. Say what you will, a country with 1 child per woman is a country that is dying out.
The collapse of the rouble preceded the Catholic mafia takeover. Within a year Moscow had 19,000 new black mafia bimmers, each with two teenage boys carrying arms. They threw pensioners from their windows and flipped the apartment scoring an easy $50K in the process. 30,000 went missing in Moscow while USA imported their advisers to fully create a third Rome under the the Vatican’s watch.
kochevnik, I have no idea what you are smoking or drinking, but you really should stop it immediately. Thanks for providing my Russian sweetie and I with a laugh, however.
In 1981 I read an astonishing article titled “Health Crisis in the USSR”, by Nichola Eberstadt, in the New York Review of Books. It was comment on a brief report by Murray Feschbach, a demographer at the U.S. Census, on rising infant mortality in the USSR. For instance, by the standard of infant mortality the USSR was no longer a developed country since its infant mortality rate was greater than that of Third World countries like Honduras. Yet, while infant mortality in Third World countries was falling, in the USSR it was rising, and the USSR’s definition of live birth made his conclusion conservative. Thirty years later, Eberstadt used now-revealed data to confirm his original conclusion of declining vital statistics in the former Soviet Union.
However, Eberstadt now says that he was wrong to attribute the health crisis to Soviet rule in itself, since the health statistics he reviewed have declined even farther after the USSR has dissolved. In other countries freed of Communist rule, such as East Germany, the health statistics briefly declined, then improved. Not in Russia.
I hazard to guess that the collapse of the CPSU didn’t fundamentally change government in Russia. The replacement of one oligarchy by another oligarchy doesn’t bring democracy or freedom. All that changed for the average Russian was whose foot was on his neck and sometimes even that stayed the same.
Russia suffered from American imported shock therapy to which the shambolic Yeltsin gave consent. The Americans implemented the same thing in Iraq after they occupied it. In both cases this led to a total collapse and chaos. You can try free market experiments in a country where free market is well established but Socialism is harder to undo.
The truth is that whatever Russia experiences now is a legacy of those times.
“You can try free market experiments in a country where free market is well established but Socialism is harder to undo.”
Actually the old USSR had some very efficient pockets of free markets. What may well be the myth is that the fall of the USSR led to free markets, which is hardly the case. Calling what Russia has after 1991 “free markets” is absurd. You are somewhat correct in that a nation that lived under socialism for four generations was not ready for free markets/capitalism as they didn’t have a grasp of the idea of property rights, entrepreneurship, self-direction.
Many Russians “got it”, just like a lot of Iraqis “got it”; trouble is most missed the boat entirely.
7@Lili von Shtupp
So you married a mafia moll, I take it? You want me to rattle off a list of dead people for you? I think she will be enough for you. Nice that you can laugh at 30,000 disappeared people a year. You deserve each-other.
10@Sharpshooter
Your quaint notion of “free-market” is an oxymoron. No sooner will it exist then it will vanish, as a structure will form. What can work is a level playing field, which can be imbued in a system with large and small players. Note that exists more in Russia and less in USA which each passing year.
Ziggy you’re not one to talk about anyone’s qualifications. When were you in Russia? And when did you become an expert on it? Even Eberstadt has admitted Russia’s demographics are slowly starting to turn around.
Before endlessly lecturing Russia, perhaps Ziggy should be more worried about the demographic consequences of 20% unemployment in America for a decade. That was what Russia went through in the 90s and now America is headed for its own version of the 90s.
Ziggy, do you have a job? Don’t you have better things to do? Or does the Jamestown Foundation or some other anti-Russia lobby front group keep greasing your palm?