Natalism, Alcoholism, & Public Health

Many tittering newscasters reported on a recent Russian initiative to shore up a declining population by encouraging workers to take a day off to "make babies:"

Today has been declared the Day of Conception in Ulyanovsk, Lenin's birthplace, when couples are told go to home and multiply. If they succeed they could win a car, cash or a fridge. Under the city council's "Give Birth to a Patriot" scheme, those who give birth on June 12, Lenin's birthday, will get a prize.

I guess the Putin Youth needs new members. The story reminded me of Vichy France's natalist policy, as related in Paul V. Dutton's book on the US and French health care systems. Apparently the political class there was deeply upset by "decadent" urban regions' failure to keep up with the birth rate in rural areas.

A recent story in The Lancet* suggests another approach to increasing Russia's life expectancy--reviving the anti-alcohol policy of the Gorbachev years. As I recall from a podcast on the article (sadly, no ungated version is up), Gorbachev's initiative probably increased life expectancy by 2 years.

Expect to see more disputes over "biopolitics" in coming years. As Jed Purdy notes, In India and China, a population gap has opened between young men and women. There are now about 100 million more men than women in those countries and a few of their neighbors. Many of the "missing women" either were never born because of sex-selective abortion or died in childhood because families devote more medical and other resources to boys. "Missing women" mean men who will never marry. Socially unintegrated young men are associated with a variety of social pathologies; most importantly, they are the prime recruitment targets of nationalist and fundamentalist political groups.

Conservatives . . . have always argued that society and the state have an interest in individual reproductive decisions; liberals have answered that reproduction belongs to a zone of personal autonomy. These crises demonstrate that individual choices do have systemic consequences in which society has to take an interest.

For instance, one commentator (I believe Herbert Meyer) suggests that China and India may eventually invade Russia for its resources, given their rising and its now declining population. I hope that "doomsday scenario" gets discounted, and Russia supplements its natalism with some concern about improving the lives of those most affected by the alcoholism crisis.