Russia’s Population Nightmare

 Russia’s determination to regain control of former Soviet Union countries is driving the world to a dangerous place.  Its accommodations with China, which also has plans for regional, if not worldwide domination, is particularly troubling.  Understanding the characteristics and future possibilities of Putin’s domain is useful in evaluating how practical his goals are.  Russia’s economic prospects were considered in What Does the Future Hold for Putin and Russia?.  The nation seems cursed by an abundance of natural resources that precludes the development of a balanced economy capable of thriving in the warmer world which is coming.  Long-term developments are not promising.  Here Russia’s bizarre demographics will be discussed.

Russia is a huge country with a relatively small population—one with a rather unique history.  Centuries of serfdom with aristocratic overlords was followed by the violent disruption of a world war, the communist revolution with its economic disruptions, another world war, the failure of the Soviet Union and subsequent economic chaos, and finally a remake of the tsarist-like system with Putin as the supreme leader surrounded by billionaire cronies as the new aristocracy.  Nicholas Eberstadt provided a look at the state of Russia’s population of 2011 in a Foreign Affairs article: The Dying Bear.  The occasion for his article was the twentieth anniversary of the end of Soviet Russia.

“For Russians, the intervening years have been full of elation and promise but also unexpected trouble and disappointment. Perhaps of all the painful developments in Russian society since the Soviet collapse, the most surprising -- and dismaying -- is the country's demographic decline. Over the past two decades, Russia has been caught in the grip of a devastating and highly anomalous peacetime population crisis. The country's population has been shrinking, its mortality levels are nothing short of catastrophic, and its human resources appear to be dangerously eroding.”

“Globally, in the years since World War II, there has been only one more horrific surfeit of deaths over births: in China in 1959-61, as a result of Mao Zedong's catastrophic Great Leap Forward.”

“By various measures, Russia's demographic indicators resemble those in many of the world's poorest and least developed societies. In 2009, overall life expectancy at age 15 was estimated to be lower in Russia than in Bangladesh, East Timor, Eritrea, Madagascar, Niger, and Yemen; even worse, Russia's adult male life expectancy was estimated to be lower than Sudan's, Rwanda's, and even AIDS-ravaged Botswana's. Although Russian women fare relatively better than Russian men, the mortality rate for Russian women of working age in 2009 was slightly higher than for working-age women in Bolivia, South America's poorest country; 20 years earlier, Russia's death rate for working-age women was 45 percent lower than Bolivia's.”

What is it about Russia that produces these results?  Eberstadt had no simple answer.

A recent edition of The Economist provided both an update and a possible explanation for Russia’s demographic woes. One article, Russia’s population nightmare is going to get even worse, provides new data.   Consider the change in Russia’s population over time.

 

The population was plummeting in the decade before Eberstadt’s article, but it then turned upward before again beginning to fall in recent years.  That is not a sign that something significant had changed.  Social rewards for having more children helped increase the number of births but, at best, births and deaths were about equal over a several year period.  The population growth came mostly from immigration from surrounding countries.  A plot of births and deaths over the years is more informative.

 

The population loss between 1990 and 2010 was clearly a significant occurrence.  Government policies increased the birthrate temporarily but policy changes, the pandemic, and war are driving the death rate sky high. 

“A demographic tragedy is unfolding in Russia. Over the past three years the country has lost around 2m more people than it would ordinarily have done, as a result of war, disease and exodus. The life expectancy of Russian males aged 15 fell by almost five years, to the same level as in Haiti. The number of Russians born in April 2022 was no higher than it had been in the months of Hitler’s occupation. And because so many men of fighting age are dead or in exile, women now outnumber men by at least 10m.”

To the remarkable tendency of Russian people to die at an early age has been added the war deaths and the flight of young people to avoid military service.  Russia’s population is becoming older and more enfeebled.

“According to Western estimates, 175,000-250,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded in the past year (Russia’s figures are lower). Somewhere between 500,000 and 1m mostly young, educated people have evaded the meat-grinder by fleeing abroad. Even if Russia had no other demographic problems, losing so many in such a short time would be painful. As it is, the losses of war are placing more burdens on a shrinking, ailing population. Russia may be entering a doom loop of demographic decline.”

“The decline was largest among ethnic Russians, whose number, the census of 2021 said, fell by 5.4m in 2010-21. Their share of the population fell from 78% to 72%. So much for Mr Putin’s boast to be expanding the Russki mir (Russian world).”

The impact of the pandemic on Russia is indicative of a nation whose leader can’t or won’t provide his people with healthcare.

“The Economist estimates total excess deaths in 2020-23 at between 1.2m and 1.6m. That would be comparable to the number in China and the United States, which have much larger populations. Russia may have had the largest covid death toll in the world after India, and the highest mortality rate of all, with 850-1,100 deaths per 100,000 people.”

The article finished with this summary.

“The demographic doom loop has not, it appears, diminished Mr Putin’s craving for conquest. But it is rapidly making Russia a smaller, worse-educated and poorer country, from which young people flee and where men die in their 60s. The invasion has been a human catastrophe—and not only for Ukrainians.” 

That article also provided no explanation for Russia’s fundamental high mortality rate that is independent of pandemic and war losses.  In the same issue, The Economist also pondered a comparable problem in England.  Its mortality rate has been steady or increasing rather than falling as it has for decades.  The effect is not as dramatic as in Russia, but it is cause for concern and demands an explanation.  The article was titled Why did 250,000Britons die sooner than expected?  That number is the increase in deaths over the last decade beyond what can be explained by taking factors like the pandemic into account.  The discussion points to a simple reason for increased mortality.

“As for where people are dying, the uncomfortable truth is that the 250,000 do not die in places like the London borough of Westminster (where life expectancy surpasses that in the Swiss canton of Geneva). They die in poorer towns and cities.” 

An interesting claim is made about the quality of healthcare and increased mortality rates.

“A government press release in 2021, to mark the creation of an Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, acknowledged that around 80% of a person’s long-term health is determined not by the care they receive but by wider social factors. Cold, damp homes can increase the risk of developing heart and respiratory diseases. A low income or a limited education can worsen the choices a person makes about their diet. Poor people sometimes use food, drugs and gambling as an escape.” 

The concept of a “level of deprivation” is introduced to characterize population groups and assess mortality rates.

“Outside London, there is almost a perfect correlation between life expectancy in a local authority and its level of deprivation—as measured by a government index of a battery of economic and other factors. Our calculations also suggest that between 2001 and 2016 income and employment deprivation alone accounted for 83% of the variation between local authorities in life expectancy.” 

The austerity policies of the ruling party over the last decade is blamed for the excess deaths. 

“During the 2010s, spending per person decreased by 16% in the richest councils, but by 31% in the poorest. Benefits were also cut. Our analysis of a detailed dataset of local government spending from 2009-19, compiled by the Institute of Fiscal Studies, a think-tank, shows that places with the largest relative declines in adult social-care spending and housing services were the ones that suffered the greatest headwinds to life expectancy.”

It has long been known that stresses generated by economic worries, a lack of dignity, a feeling of being unequal and other issues can generate ill health.  Psychologists know this, but politicians seem to refuse to consider it.  What these English researchers are saying is that a government that does not provide the social needs of a section of population will cause adverse health outcomes—such as early death.  Consider the English town of Middlesbrough where class differences lead to longevity drops as extreme as those found in Russia

“…in Middlesbrough, the gap in life expectancy between the richest and poorest fifth of the population is 11.3 years for men and 8.8 years for women.”

If such effects are measurable then an explanation for Russia’s early deaths lies in concluding that Russia has a lousy government that does not provide for its social needs.  Can anyone doubt that is true.

 

Mental Health and Outcome Paradoxes

 In 2010, Robert Whitaker published Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.  As the title suggests, he viewed the rapid rise of long-term mental illness as an epidemic, one caused by the massive use of psychotropic drugs as remedies for mental illness.  He produced compelling arguments indicting the pharmaceutical industry for promoting and selling vast amounts of drugs that were of little value and would often lead to long-term medical issues and dependence for the users.  His warning went unheeded.  It seemed that the general public was unable to believe that the treatment of mental illness could be such an incredible mess.  Since that publication the rise in numbers of people captured by a perceived need for chemical support has continued to grow.  Recently, Rachel Aviv produced an overview of mental health issues that provides a different perspective on possible treatments and produces a potential explanation for why the “epidemic” has continued.  Aviv’s ground-breaking book was titled Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us.  This work was previously reviewed in Mental Illness: The Stories We Tell Ourselves and the Stories Psychiatrists Tell Us.  Aviv probably had no intention of supporting Whitaker’s contention, but, in effect, she does.

Whitaker suggested two interpretations of the available data that Aviv had trouble accepting.  The first involves data accumulated on the outcomes of peoples suffering from schizophrenia in various countries.  Researchers were particularly interested in whether the presumed superior healthcare available in developed countries would produce better health outcomes relative to the results obtained in less-wealthy developing nations.  The first surveys began in the late 1960s by the World Health Organization (WHO).  The developed world was startled to discover that the poorer countries experienced better outcomes than the wealthy countries with their readily available drugs and experts.  Healthcare professionals have been resurveying populations over the years hoping that the results will change.  But they haven’t.  The following quotes detail the results from a typical survey. It is from an article that appeared in Nature: Developing countries: The outcomes paradox (2014).

“The pattern for most diseases is clear: the richer and more developed the country, the better the patient outcome. Schizophrenia appears to be different.”

“The study found that developing countries had higher rates of complete recovery: an average of 37% compared with 15.5% in developed countries. The rates of chronic illness, however, were similar: 11.1% in developing and 17.4% in developed countries. Patients in developing countries experienced longer periods of unimpaired social functioning, even though far fewer of them were on continuous antipsychotic medication.”

The conclusion that both Whitaker and I would draw from such data is that schizophrenia patients who are regularly medicated with antipsychotic drugs are not receiving the best care available.  It is of course true that that all dealings with human health are subject to errors in interpretation.  On the other hand, this interpretation has withstood fifty years of attempts to negate it. 

Whitaker would likely take this a step further and suggest the medications are inhibiting any natural patient recovery and converting a periodic condition into one that is chronic.  Here it will be proposed that the mere notion that mental illness is caused by a brain malfunction that can be fixed by medications is sufficient to dramatically increase the incidence of diagnosed illnesses.  The tale of how this might occur leads is to another outcome paradox.

Whitaker’s second take from the data available to him was that the dramatic increase in diagnosed incidences of mental illnesses, and the increased number of disabilities due to claims of mental illness is likely due to the effects of the drugs being used on patients.  Consider data from the CDC: About Mental Health.

“Mental illnesses are among the most common health conditions in the United States.

More than 50% will be diagnosed with a mental illness or disorder at some point in their lifetime.

1 in 5 Americans will experience a mental illness in a given year.

1 in 5 children, either currently or at some point during their life, have had a seriously debilitating mental illness.

1 in 25 Americans lives with a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or major depression.”

Those of us with long lives can remember a time when mental illness was rare.  A time when childhood involved encountering a wide range of personalities in playgrounds, none of which were considered in need of chemicals to alter their behaviors.  And our experience recalls few if any who needed chemical assistance later in life.  What has happened?  Whitaker’s concerns must be answered. 

Aviv states over and over that what is referred to as mental illness is highly complex and too unwieldy to be addressed by simple classifications and remedies. 

“…mental illness is caused by an interplay between biological, genetic, psychological, and environmental factors…”

Psychoanalysts led the way in addressing mental illness by focusing on psychological and environmental factors.  Their success was quite limited, and they were mostly superseded by psychiatrists who focused on biological and genetic factors and attempted to treat patients with medications.  Their success has, by many measures, been quite limited as well.  The fact that neither caregiver can deal with the full range of issues suggests that caregiving has a serious problem.  Psychanalysis is expensive, time consuming, difficult, and has a low record of success.  Treating mental illness as a physical problem that can be addressed with drugs is simple, enormously profitable, and can produce growing ranks of patients.  It is this last feature that contributes to Whitaker’s “epidemic.”

What is revealed in Aviv’s case studies, including her own experiences, is the power that individuals have over their own thought processes.  As in Aviv’s title, the stories we tell ourselves can make us who we are.  We can concoct these stories on our own or we can assimilate stories told by other individuals or by the supposed “experts.” 

“There are stories that save us, and stories that trap us, and in the midst of an illness it can be very hard to know which is which.”

As a young child Aviv told herself a story that nearly proved tragic.  When she was age six, she suddenly stopped eating.  She doesn’t recall much about her reasoning at the time but suggests she may have been influenced by the Jewish Yom Kippur tradition which calls for people to reject food and liquids for a full day as a means of cleansing body and spirit.  She recalls feeling proud of her ability to turn away from food and remembers thinking it was important to her to feel like she had become a better person.  She also remembers being pleased by the reaction of her parents and the attention she received. She ended up in a hospital where she and other girls were treated as sufferers of anorexia.  Rachel was the youngest girl anyone could recall suffering from this condition.  During this period the malady was not well understood, and her doctors tried to apply psychanalytic techniques to discover the sources of her problem.

Her story would be enhanced by the older girls whose practices she would imitate, thinking of them as mentors.  She was taught that in addition to limiting eating, one could lose weight by exercising.  She would try to keep up with the exercises done by the older girls and followed their lead by standing and moving around all day, only stopping at bedtime.  Aviv was lucky to drift into this mode of behavior at such a young age.  It did not manage to capture her because she did not fully possess the consciousness and experiences of the older girls.  She was not allowed to see her parents while confined unless she ate a certain amount of food.  This provided enough motivation to get her eating again and she was soon released.  However, she continued to be affected by the experience.  The need to remain standing all day long followed her as she resumed school.  It would be around a month before she felt comfortable sitting down like the other children. 

As a staff writer for The New Yorker, Aviv would encounter examples of behaviors that could be categorized as mental illness.  She tells of a particularly startling case that illustrates the power of a story that satisfies a need and is also supported by the beliefs of others.

“A few years ago, I went to Sweden to report a story about a condition known as ‘resignation syndrome.’  Hundreds of children from former Soviet and Yugoslav states who had been denied asylum in Sweden had taken to their beds.  They refused food.  They stopped talking.  Eventually, they seemed to lose the ability to move.  Many had to be given feeding tubes.  Some gradually slipped into states resembling comas.”

This only happened in Sweden, not in any other Nordic countries where similar refugees were attempting to settle.  It seemed that in Sweden one child chose the anorexic-like response, probably as an act of protest, and others imitated the behavior.  But a response, initially voluntary, can become intrinsic and compulsive.  This seems to be the path by which anorexia captures its victims.

“Something about the mute, fasting children in Sweden felt familiar to me.  For a child, solipsistic by nature, there are limits to the ways that despair can be communicated.  Culture shapes the scripts that expressions of distress will follow.  In both anorexia and resignation syndrome, children embody anger and a sense of powerlessness by refusing food, one of the few methods of protest available to them.  Experts tell these children that they are behaving in a recognizable way that has a label.  The children then make adjustments, conscious and unconscious, to the way they’ve been classified.  Over time, a willed pattern of behavior becomes increasingly involuntary and ingrained.”

Each person has a unique biology and a unique set of cultural experiences.  Being unique can be lonely and unsatisfactory.  One will be intrigued by stories that resonate with the individual and are also recognizable to a segment of society.  A pattern of behavior recognized as a known illness will be attractive to one who seeks confirmation for their story and perhaps provides a path to comfort and aid.  For a very long time, women in distress would turn to a behavior called “hysteria” to express their story in a manner that society recognized.  That behavior pattern disappeared when it no longer seemed appropriate.  The go-to illness today is depression.  Any symptom associated with distress can be recognized by the social and medical communities as a form of depression.

“The philosopher Ian Hacking uses the term ‘looping effect’ to describe the way that people get caught in self-fulfilling stories about illness.  A new diagnosis can change ‘the space of possibilities for personhood,’ he writes.  ‘We make ourselves in our own scientific image of the kinds of people it is possible to be.’…We find a way to express our distress through imitation until, eventually, we ‘have “learned” or—better—“acquired” a new psychic state’.”

Like the children in Sweden who stopped eating, exhibiting aspects of a mental illness can be purely a cultural or social phenomenon.  There need be no biological issues involved.  In fact, much of what is recognized by psychiatrists as clinical depression has been identified as a psychic state that is self-constructed by an individual’s storytelling, or by imitation, or by both.

There is an academic realm of study referred to as response expectancy theory.  The basis for this line of research is the perfectly reasonable assumption that what people experience in a given situation is influenced by what expectations they have.  Such considerations are very important in clinical tests of medications where comparisons are made between the responses of patients who are provided either the drug under study or an inert substance, a placebo.  Patients are not told which type of pill they receive.  Often, patients receiving a placebo will claim to have benefited from it.  This is referred to as a “placebo effect.”  Another aspect of the placebo effect is that a clinical participant is likely to notice side effects from receiving the medication.  This can increase the probability that this patient will perceive benefits from his/her pill.  These factors complicate the interpretation of clinical trials.

The size of the placebo effect only became clear when pharmaceutical companies were required to provide the results of all clinical trials of their drugs, not just the ones producing favorable results.  Analysis of complete sets of test results indicate that antidepressant medications perform only slightly better than a placebo.  Some argue that the benefits of the drugs are too small to be clinically significant (see Antidepressant Drugs versus Placebos).  In other words, most of the benefits individuals experience from using these drugs arise because they have constructed a new story to tell themselves, not because of some physical change to the function of their brain.

Psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies have known these facts for decades.  They also know that no association between mental illness and specific physical conditions has ever been identified.  In their view, if the medications they prescribe produce beneficial results for their patients, case closed.  As Aviv puts it.

“For more than fifty years, scientists have searched for the genetic or neurobiological origins of mental illness, spending billions of dollars on research, but they have not been able to locate a specific biological or genetic marker associated with any diagnosis.”

Yet people believe the medications work.  And if a distressed person is told that their condition is caused by a chemical imbalance in their brain that can be fixed with medication, that presents them with the opportunity to stop worrying about their problems and blame everything on a mysterious brain malfunction over which they have no control.  It also tells them that they will likely need to be medicated for the indefinite future. 

A pair of articles in The Economist tried to break through this willful ignorance on the issue of prescribing antidepressants.  These articles were discussed in Psychopharmacology and Depression.  The conclusion was that short-term side effects and addiction finish with long-term health problems that they fear will swamp the struggling British healthcare system.

One can identify several medical outcome paradoxes in this discussion.  Perhaps the greatest—and the most consequential—is the continued application of the chemically imbalanced brain hypothesis to nearly all forms of behavior that can be labeled as a mental illness.  As Whitaker observed (and predicted), the incidence of mental illness has grown.  When experts are asked why this has occurred, one usually gets a response such as provided by this source. 

“The increase is due to the rise in social media, the COVID-19 pandemic, and societal trends that have resulted in smaller family units and less community involvement. The mental health crisis, which is particularly acute for older people and the youngest adults, is compounded because people lack health insurance or access to a healthcare provider depending on where they live.”  

So, the increase is caused mainly by cultural changes—changes which mysteriously cause chemical imbalances in our brains.  That is a leap way too far.

The way mental health is characterized and treated is an incredible mess.

 

On the Future of Masculinity: Are Men Required for Warfare?

 Much has been written about the troubles of young males in our society.  Except for the few who are born into a life of social entitlement—the economically or genetically endowed—most seem to be falling behind.  Health, income, life expectancy, educational attainment, and stable family lives are all in decline.  This state of diminished expectations was discussed in Are Men Becoming the Second Sex? 

Richard V. Reeves discusses these issues in his recent book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It.  He attributes much of this struggle to the established fact that girls find it easier to learn than boys.  Starting at the same age, boys will fall behind the girls.  This is partly because the brain develops more slowly in boys than in girls, and because boys are more easily distracted from studying than girls.  The result is that boys continue to fall behind through adolescence.  Boys are not less intelligent than girls, but they do have to work harder to reach the same educational attainment.  Another cause of boys’ struggles is cultural.  Thousands of years of patriarchal society produced masculine roles that men see as being no longer available.  Women have broken through the patriarchal constraints that confined them to stay-at-home motherhood and have inserted themselves in all occupations once held only by men.  In particular, they are now capable of raising a child without the economic support of a male.  This leaves men bereft of what they viewed as their major role in life.  Women are escaping from patriarchy, men are not.  Reeves provides this perspective.

“Economically independent women can now flourish whether they are wives or not.  Wifeless men, by contrast, are often a mess.  Compared to married men, their health is worse, their employment rates are lower, and their social networks are weaker.  Drug related deaths among never-married men more than doubled in a decade from 2010.  Divorce, now twice as likely to be initiated by wives as husbands, is psychologically harder on men than women.”

“One of the great revelations of feminism may turn out to be that men need women more than women need men.  Wives were economically dependent on their husbands, but men were emotionally dependent on their wives.”

In Reeves telling, boys and young men seem to be meekly accepting their fate rather than breaking the chains of patriarchy and defining a new social role for themselves.  They are seen as requiring some form of affirmative action to assist them in making a transition.  He points out that the political right wishes to address this problem by maintaining the patriarchal roles as much as possible.  Reeves indicated the male under patriarchy was required to provide for his family.  However, he was also required to protect the family.  For some males, this role can be quite important, the ability to physically protect can become a major part of what passes as masculinity.

Arlie Russell Hochschild spent several years studying what we now refer to as the Republican far right in Louisiana in order to understand what motivated their political actions.  She concentrated on the emotions that drove the people.  Her work, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, should be required reading for all citizens.  Her findings were discussed in Strangers in Their Own Land: Republican Voters in the South.  Hochschild presented her view on the masculinity issues experienced by the males she encountered.

“On the personal side there was one more thing—the federal government wasn’t on the side of men being manly.  Liberals were certainly on the wrong side of that one.  It wasn’t easy being a man.  It was an era of numerous subtle challenges to masculinity it seemed.  These days a woman did not need a man for financial support, for procreation, even for the status of being married.  And now with talk of transgender people, what, really, was a man?  It was unsettling, wrong.  At the core, to be a man you had to be willing to lose your life in battle, willing to use your strength to protect the weak.  Who today was remembering all that?  Marriage was truly between a man and a woman…Clarity about one’s identity was a good thing, and the military had offered that clarity…even as it offered gifted men of modest backgrounds a pathway to honor.  Meanwhile, the nearly all-male areas of life—the police department, the fire department, parts of the U.S. military, and the oil rigs—needed defending against this cultural erosion of manhood.  The federal government, the EPA, stood up for the biological environment, but it was allowing—and it seemed at times it was causing—a cultural erosion.”

From this perspective, the male role of protecting was more significant than provisioning.  And protecting might require a resort to violence.  A true male would be ready, willing, and able should that be required.  These people do not sound like those who might meekly accept what they view as a lesser role in society.  It would not be surprising to see some manufacture reasons why their traditional concept of masculinity could still be put into play protecting people or the nation from someone or something.

Unfortunately, the view that men-only roles exist places them on the wrong side of history.  Encountering a comment that claimed the army had learned that females made better marksmen (markspersons?) than men invited a bit of research.  Such a published claim by the US army was not easily found, but some corroborating information from the NRA was interesting: Are Women Naturally Better Shooters Than Men?

It seems that women become good shooters faster than men because they are more willing/able to accept instruction and follow it.  The following is from an army shooting instructor.

“’As a military logistician, my units had around 20 percent female personnel in both officer and enlisted ranks. All the women fired Expert their first day, but less than a third of the men did so. Several men had to re-train and repeat the course to qualify. This pattern continued when the 9mm replaced the .45 in 1985, until I retired in 1997. It also appeared that differences in musculature and hand size had no effect on the scores’.”

“So what did make the difference? Says Col. Haynes, ‘Told how to hold the gun, that’s the way they held it. Told to look at the front sight, that’s what they looked at. Told what I thought they were doing wrong, their first instinct was to believe me’.”

“So, our first male gun instructor says that yes, women are better shooters, and his theory is that it’s because we listen.”

Women once again are capable of learning faster than men, but are not necessarily better shooters in the long run.  That conclusion is confirmed in studies of highly-trained shooters in Olympic and other competitions.

But shooting is only part of warfare, can that still be thought of as mainly a man’s activity?  Unfortunately, we have a major war ongoing, providing us with insight on how the genders participate.  There was an interesting article in The Economist: Ukraine’s women snipers take the fight to Putin.  The article introduced three women who had been trained as snipers and were about to be sent into action.  It provided the following comment from their trainer who went by the name “Deputy.” 

“Deputy says he was initially sceptical about the idea of training women snipers. Now he believes they are more suited to the profession than men. Women are light and nimble, he says; able to retreat without making a sound. On the whole, they are also ‘more patient,’ and less likely to take unjustified risks. But the thing that really convinced him was seeing how women coped with a gruelling military survival test that those in the know call ‘Fizo’. From a pool of 90 candidates, only five were left standing by the end of the test. Two of them were men. ‘The other three you see before you’.”

Modern warfare depends less on brute force and more on the ability to understand and utilize new technologies.  The military loves recruits who are quick learners. 

There is no place in the current economy for men to hide from aggressive females.  Many are eager to move into positions that had previously been considered male-only.  That is coupled with recognition that job growth in the near future is predominately in areas that were once considered female-only, or require skills that are associated with feminine abilities.  What are males going to do in response?  Reeves suggests they need help in catching up in the education system, and they must learn to embrace the kind of work that is available.  Thus far, none of that is happening.  Many seem to prefer to not work at all.

The ease with which females were able to displace males in all sorts of activities suggests that the millennia of patriarchy we endured arose not from some fundamental biological imperative, but rather, from an historical peculiarity in the development of human civilization that allowed male dominance to persist.  We may be returning to a more normal state in which the genders share responsibilities, one that may be more characteristic of our millions of years of evolution.

Males should also realize that if they refuse to incorporate themselves in the developing future, they may learn what living in a matriarchy is like.