Russia Overtakes Germany To Become Europe’s Largest Economy

This about Economy, tagged , , , was written by for on July 12, 2013

See data. For real, this time.

russian-gdp-overtakes-germany

While it is perhaps a big strange to start thinking of Russia as a high-income economy, it’s not so surprising when looking at concrete statistics such as vehicle consumption, Internet penetration, etc. – all of which are now at typical South European and advanced East-Central European levels (even if there’s still some way to go to converge with the likes of France or the US).

In per capita terms, this means that the average Russian is now about as rich in terms of real goods he can buy on domestic markets as a typical citizen of Portugal, Greece, Estonia, Poland, or Hungary (though with the caveat that most of the latter places have a lot less income inequality). Below is a table showing the GDP per capita, PPP (current international $) of Russia and comparable countries:

  2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
Czech Republic 25,885 25,645 25,300 26,209 26,426
Portugal 24,939 24,892 25,547 25,586 25,305
Slovak Republic 23,210 22,546 23,149 24,112 24,896
Greece 29,604 29,201 27,539 25,859 24,667
Russian Federation 20,276 19,227 20,770 22,408 23,549
Lithuania 19,559 16,948 18,120 21,554 23,487
Estonia 22,065 19,470 20,092 21,996 23,024
Chile 16,435 16,190 18,607 21,001 22,655
Poland 18,021 18,796 20,036 21,133 21,903
Hungary 20,432 20,249 20,734 21,455 21,570
Latvia 18,090 15,928 15,944 19,103 21,005
Croatia 20,215 19,158 18,546 19,817 20,532
Turkey 15,178 14,578 15,965 17,242 17,651
Brazil 10,393 10,357 11,187 11,634 11,909
China 6,202 6,798 7,569 8,408 9,233
Ukraine 7,311 6,312 6,691 7,215 7,418

Furthermore, it’s looking as if Russia might have a real chance of overtaking Portugal next year. Just as Putin promised in 2003! (Double GDP; overtake Portugal in 10 years). But even if that fails, at least overtaking Greece is all but assured, so even if Russia misses out on Portugal it will still get to say it is no longer the poorest “proper” European country.

Translation: Russia isn’t Germany – It has Nothing to Repent For

This about History, tagged , , , was written by for on June 16, 2013

The German president has decided to teach Russia to fight with remnants of totalitarianism, and could not think of anything better than to call to repent. Original article by Alexander Romanov

German president allowed himself to teach Russians to fight “remnants of totalitarianism”

The German president  decided to teach Russia to fight with remnants of totalitarianism, and could not think of anything better than to call to repent. Although, in theory, one should not teach one’s grandmother to suck eggs as well as the loser should not teach the winner.

It happened during the 15th annual forum called “The Potsdam Meetings” which was held near Berlin. The event was organized by the German NGO “German-Russian Forum”. The main topic for this year’s meeting was “The influence of the past on the future.”

The two-day conference was attended by politicians, artists, scientists, civil society representatives from Russia and Germany. They discussed the following topics: “How history impacts national identity?”, “What are the major historical images that shape the consciousness of the Russians and the Germans?”, “The Future of the Past – the lessons of history.” The number of participants in such meetings is usually quite small – 15-20 intellectuals on both sides.

The highlight of the forum was the meeting with the German president Joachim Gauck in Bellevue palace, Deutsche Welle reports.

The participants were brought by bus from Potsdam to the Berlin residence much ahead of time. For an hour, they stamped in the foyer of the presidential administration, passing time by trying mineral water, juice, coffee and biscuits. Then they proceeded into the palace itself, and sat in semi-circle still waiting as the palace staff was removing extra furniture.

Appearing late by just six minutes Gauck, a former Lutheran pastor, now an active advocate of gay rights, immediately declared himself an expert on the issue and went on to a lengthy discourse on how and why Germany repented.

It was a long and painful process for Germans, he told. In West Germany, “after some delay arose a self-critical historical discourse.” At the same time, the president said, “the focus was not our own suffering and losses but on the guilt of our compatriots, their failure to save democracy, their cruelty.”

Well, this is not surprising: the suffering of German people make up only a tiny fraction of the suffering they have brought to other nations. In a different way to do it was simply impossible. What is there to discuss?

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Translation: FEMEN vs. Barbie: Life in Plastic ain’t Fantastic

This , about Society, tagged , , was written by for on May 18, 2013

The Ukrainian feminist group FEMEN organize yet another topless action. Life in plastic ain’t fantastic – and they will try to prove it through the power of their boobs. Sasha Pyatnitskaya covers the story for Komsomolskaya Pravda.

Topless FEMEN protest against Barbie Dreamhouse in Berlin

The restless maidens of FEMEN, a Ukrainian feminist group, staged yet another of their topless protests. This time their ire was aroused by the Barbie doll museum that had just opened at Alexanderplatz in the center of Berlin. Stripping down to the waist, the scandalous Ukrainian gals shouted slogans as they set a cross on fire and pinned a hapless doll to it. One had inscribed text on her body: “Life in plastic ain’t fantastic.”

femen-berlin-barbie-burning-2

Fortunately, they did not manage too draw too much of the attention of those girls who’d come to look on Barbie’s house, as they were soon detained by police, according to Reuters.

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Translation: Demographics in Russia and Germany

This about Demographics, tagged , , , was written by for on May 17, 2013

In a graphs-heavy blog post, German-Russian blogger A.S. Schmidt argues that with its far higher emigration rates and lower birth rates, Germany is now in a much bigger demographic crisis than Russia.

Demographics in Russia and Germany

I have long wanted to compare some of the demographic trends in Russia and Germany but, to be honest, I was afraid to take on this subject, since the volume of data is very large. In the future, I hope to return to this subject again because of this. Today, I will only compare a few demographic indicators to give a general overview of the situation and take away some of the deep-rooted prejudices. In the future, I plan to write more about measures aimed at the birth rate, migration, aging of the population and some non-obvious effects of policy on the population in Western Europe.

To analyze the situation, I used data from the Federal Statistical Office of Germany, the Federal State Statistics Service of the Russian Federation (Rostat), Federal Research Institute of the German population. To check my calculations I used data on the site of the World Health Organization (WHO). For the analysis I uysed the period 1990-2012.

Fertility in Russia and Germany

To start, let’s take a look at the fertility rate. The fertility rate characterizes the number of births per 1000 inhabitants per year. It can be said that the fertility rate is one of the most important indicators to measure the population. Let me remind you that the population of Russia is about 143 million people, and the population of Germany is 81 million people.

1.-germany-russia-birth-rates

To avoid unfounded accusations of being creative with the truth, I just want to end the argument about the connection between the growth of the fertility rate and the increase in the decline of the population Russia. The chart below gives an overview between the number of births in Russia and Germany in absolute terms.

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So Apparently Germany Is A Christian Theocracy

This about Society, tagged , , , , , was written by for on September 28, 2012

At least if you take Michael Bohm’s arguments in his latest Moscow Times missive on how Russia Is Turning Into Iran to its logical conclusion.

Look, I’m not a fan of blasphemy laws. The First Amendment is a wonderful thing and something that makes the US truly great… even exceptional, to an extent. Although it should be noted that there are limits even in the US: Some quite appropriate in my opinion, others ridiculous such as the taboo on boobs on TV.

Still, if Russia’s moves to criminalize blasphemy brings it “another step closer to becoming like Iran and other Muslim theocracies”, then we have to admit that the likes of Germany, Poland, Israel, and Ireland are already long there – and contrary to what Bohm claims, it doesn’t seem that any of those countries have ended up in “chronic economic stagnation, decline and high poverty rates.”

Just look at the Wikipedia article. About half the Western world has blasphemy laws on the books. In Germany, a man was sentenced to one year in prison (suspended) in 2006 for insulting Islam. In Poland, the singer Doda was fined 5,000 złoty for the fairly innocuous comment, made well outside church, that the Bible was written by “people who drank too much wine and smoked herbal cigarettes.”

Also back in 2006 in Germany, a Berlin man was imprisoned for 9 months for disrupting a church service – but unlike the case with Pussy Riot, nobody nominated the poor bloke for the Sakharov Peace Prize. Nor did The Guardian hire a German journalist to write an oped about how Germany was becoming a “Protestant Iran” (as did Oleg Kashin).

Yet no Western commentator thinks to compare those countries to Islamic societies where apostasy is punishable by death and mobs demand the deaths of 12 year old girls who (supposedly) burn the Koran. And quite rightly so. Regardless of one’s view on the precisely where the boundaries between free speech and protecting religious feelings and social order are, it is intuitively obvious there are stark and clear lines separating today’s Christian civilization from a large chunk of the Dar al-Islam.

Russia on the other hand has yet to even sign the blasphemy bills into law, but shills like Michael Bohm are already rushing in to bracket it in with Iran. If this isn’t double standards then I really don’t know what is.

PS. I am not even going to comment on Bohm’s bizarre and absolutely illiterate musings regarding GDP.

Proof Of Genetic Memory

This about Politics, tagged , , was written by for on May 27, 2012

h/t Red Hot Russia. 🙂

The Return of the Reich?

This about Philosophy, tagged , , , , was written by for on October 13, 2009

This is my second follow-up post to The Belief Matrix, in which I attempted to advance a universal model for civilizational responses to subsistence crises (The Malthusian Loop) and the Western challenge (The Sisyphean Loop). This time I will look at Germany, a nation that was always torn between its hard-assimilated Roman / Western identity, and German Romanticism – the nativist reaction against the “Idea of the West” (as previously loosely-defined, a set of concepts like the scientific method, rule of law, economic rationalism, and liberalism).

Before World War One, Germany was a confident, expanding power, but  one wracked by insecurity. It was encircled by France and Russia on land, and contained by Great Britain at sea. The increasing cooperation between those three nations reinforced Germany’s suspicions and made it resentful about being denied its rightful place in the sun (all the best colonies had already been snapped up by the time Germany came to the imperialist game). In retrospect, much has been made of the balefulness of the Prussian militarist tradition, the influence of German nationalist groups, and the Kaiser’s bombastic antebellum rhetoric as one of the enabling factors of Germany’s Sonderweg. However, one should also note that in 1900 Germans enjoyed a higher level of adult enfranchisement than the British (22% versus 18% of the population, albeit with the caveat that the Reichstag’s powers were far more circumscribed) and that the anti-war Social Democrats won 34.8% in 1912.

The Teutonic Spirit

That said, imperial Germany was different from the Western liberalisms (Great Britain, France and the US) – not even so much in its political economy, an uneasy fusion of “Western” industrialism and “Eastern” autocracy, but also in its reflection in the psychological make-up of the German people, whose defining trait is a constant internal struggle between “civilized” Roman values (Rationalism / “The Idea of the West”) and “barbarian” Teutonic instinct. From Peter Viereck’s Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler, first published in 1941 (well into WW2):

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Schröder, Captain (of What Should be) Obvious

This about Geopolitics, tagged , , , , was written by for on August 20, 2008

In an interview in Spiegel, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder states the obvious, something that Washington and its British and east European lackies seem to have difficulty grasping.

‘Serious Mistakes by the West’

Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder discusses the war in the Caucasus, the possibility of Germany serving as an intermediary in the conflict and his belief in a constructive role for Russia.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Schröder, who is at fault for the Caucasus war?

Gerhard Schröder: The hostilities undoubtedly have their historic causes, as well, and the conflict has had several historic precursors. But the moment that triggered the current armed hostilities was the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia. This should not be glossed over.

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