iStockphoto/Björn Kindler

Ever since the days of the famous British political economist Thomas Robert Malthus
[1766-1834], demographic commentators have been faulted in some corners for
excessive pessimism and despondency: that is to say, for being overly ready to find ubiquitous "population problems" in virtually every new demographic development. Be that as it may, serious or even disastrous population problems can still threaten real existing countries--even today. In fact, we are currently witnessing a demographic crisis of historic proportions before our very eyes.

The crisis, to which we refer, however, is not ravaging an illiterate and impoverished Third World country. Instead, it is unfolding in that particular European state which sent the first cosmonaut into space: the Russian Federation. Russia is in the grip of startling and anomalous demographic tendencies, trends whose humanitarian and economic consequences are not only self-evidently adverse, but quite arguably dire.

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Nicholas Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at AEI. Hans Groth is a visiting lecturer on demography and health at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, and a member of the board of directors of Pfizer Switzerland.