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Comment by fsloth | Hacker News Reader

The statistic you want for russia is the life expectancy. Russians are dying very young. The situation got worse after 1990s.

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Why is this relevant? The proximate cause for the decreasing life expectancy is massive alcohol consumption. You could assign the blame by drawing long, tenuous chains of social causation from policies you don't like. Or, not unreasonably, you could just fault those destroying their bodies through substance abuse.

Well, my first hypothesis for rampant alcoholism - cultural background nonwithstanding - would be the lack of options in the social environment.

Indirect harm is no less harm than direct harm. If life expectancy plummets after capitalism takes effect then yeah, capitalism is probably to blame.

Anyway, I don't think anyone excuses dictatorships in this thread.

why the need to narrow complex set of factors affecting each other into a single bullet point? it doesn't work, not only in this scenario. General Russian mentality is a prime example of one f*ed up beyond repair, for quite a few generations to come unless some miracle happens (and Putin is making sure it won't happen during his reign).

"General Russian mentality is a prime example of one f*ed up beyond repair"

What do you mean?

I wouldn't say that's the main cause. It's more about the collapse of the previous infrastructure than the particulars of what came after.

http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

> Why is this relevant? The proximate cause for the decreasing life expectancy is massive alcohol consumption.

IIRC, this is not true. It's a contributor, certainly, but Russian life expectancy is substantially lower than other nations with similar alcohol consumption.

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