While upwards of 1.54 TFR is much lower than replacement rates, in Europe this number is beaten only by Scandinavian countries, Netherlands, Belgium, UK, France, Ireland, couple of Baltic countries, and Serbia. The rest of Europe has it worse.

So, the demographic trends are unambiguously positive, unlike in many other places. On immigration – whatever the way local population looks at it, this is fact of life. Immigration-related tensions are causing the rise of right wing parties across the whole of Europe, which makes Russia not exceptional at all. A normal (and improving) country.

They are not here legally, which is why they aren’t counted. We can use Uzbek and Tajik immigration to argue that Russia is not facing a demographic problem, but we would be looking at the problem in a manner which is, let’s say, very different from the way the Russians look at it.

@ Matthew Saroff- the RTS trades at a p/e of 5. Is that usually the price earnings multiple that you find in a theme that is “played out”?

@MalcolmGladwell- is that the real Malcolm Gladwell who wrote a book about not thinking? The World Bank puts Russia’s fertility per woman at 1.54. I guess that’s not “unusually low” because a lot of European countries have fertility rates below replacement?

@DCWright both the Bolotnaya and Sakharova protests were organized on Facebook. No firearms were present at either event BTW

@Realist50 Does Russia censor the Internet? Okay then. Why are you here

Russia has produced fantastic, wire-and-duct-tape engineers since early soviet times, and it never did much to produce a civil society. If anything, engineers tend to be susceptible to technocratic, top-down, command-and-control ideas of societal optimization.

I have no doubt that, when the next Russian revolution comes, the revolutionaries will use social media. They will also use telephones, printing presses, and probably guns. But that doesn’t mean that social media are culturally transformative in the way the techno-utopians like Dyson seem to imagine.

It hasn’t exactly made California heaven for everyone but the golden few who either 1) held equity or 2) held real estate.

And no, high tech does not lead to greater “freedom.” It just makes young white guys overconfident about the future before they are riffed at age 42 and replaced by low cost Asian workers.

But there is never a shortage of Esther Dysons suggesting that Russia, or Singapore, or Seattle, or Sheffield, adopt the “Silicon Valley Model.” And then they get back on their planes and head back to their weekend places in Half Moon Bay….

She ain’t Goldman, by which I mean that she doesn’t short what she recommends to her clients, but when she goes bullish on something, I figure that it’s pretty much played out.