Comment by goodbyesf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by goodbyesf | Hacker News Reader

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In comparison to ww2, the fall of the soviet union was worse than ww2.

https://www.rferl.org/a/life-expectancy-cis-report/24946030....

To put it into perspective, after ww2, the russian population recovered in a few years. The russian population today is still below their 1990 levels. In terms of population, life expectancy, quality of life, etc, ww2 (as horrible as it was ) was an insignificant blip. The fall of the soviet union has been a generational catastrophe for russia. A funk they seem unable to get out of demographically, economically, politically, etc.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/RUS/russia/population

In the US, our population has grown 50% since 1990 ( almost 150 more people ). The russian population has dropped 5% since 1990. After ww2, russia had major population growth like the US. After germany and japan lost ww2, their population, economy, etc improved drastically. For some reason, losing a hot war ( japan, germany ) turned out to be much better than losing a cold war ( russia ).

Think about it, we are nearly 2 generations into the post-soviet world and russia still hasn't recovered their population. After ww2, russia almost doubled their population in 2 generations. Losing the cold war appears to have demoralized the russian elite and people far more than losing ww2 did to germany and japan. Why? Who knows.

I disagree on how you scoped the discussion on the fall of communism. Why are we scoping down to just Russia? If you scoped broader to include the other post-Soviet counties you’d include all the countries where life expectancy has significantly increased since then.

There’s also the matter of scoping WW2: I would argue that WW2’s direct effects on thousands of millions of people deserve more weight than the fall of communism, which affected hundreds of millions. If we don’t take this type of scoping into effect I could claim that one person’s cancer diagnosis was a worse quality of life drop than WW2, and the discussion gets a little absurd.

> Why are we scoping down to just Russia?

Because the soviet union was russia. Russia is the successor state of the soviet union. Which country would you use? Moldova? Estonia?

> If you scoped broader to include the other post-Soviet counties you’d include all the countries where life expectancy has significantly increased since then.

Even russia's life expectancy improved after the initial disastrous decline. My point was that overall population hasn't recovered since the soviet collapse. This is true for ukraine, moldova, russia, estonia, most former ex-soviet nations. The only one to buck the trend are muslim ex-soviet nations.

> I would argue that WW2’s direct effects on thousands of millions of people deserve more weight than the fall of communism, which affected hundreds of millions.

WW2 didn't affect 'thousands of millions'. The world population in 1940 was around 2 billion. Also we are talking about the effects of the fall of the soviet union. Why I limited it to russia/soviet union.

> If we don’t take this type of scoping into effect I could claim that one person’s cancer diagnosis was a worse quality of life drop than WW2, and the discussion gets a little absurd.

Maybe it's a language issue. You don't seem to have a solid grasp of the english language. My point was that the fall of the soviet was worse FOR RUSSIA than ww2 was FOR RUSSIA. I'm not saying that the fall of the soviet union was worse overall than ww2. That's another discussion. So no. One person's cancer diagnosis isn't worse than ww2. One person's cancer diagnosis is worse than that person's diagnosis of ankle sprain. You see. You have one person and two bad events. You have one russia and two bad events. You compare the bad events on the one person or one russia.

You are being very disingenious here. I can't for the life of me understand why.

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