Some followups

For tonight's post, I thought I'd share a few news links revisiting old stories

• The Guardian notes that British citizens of more, or less, recent Irish ancestry are looking for Irish passports so as to retain access to the European Union in the case of Brexit. (Net migration to the United Kingdom is up and quite strong, while Cameron's crackdown on non-EU migrants has led to labour shortages.
• NPR notes one strategy to get fathers to take parental leave: Have them see other fathers take it.
• Reuters notes that the hinterland of Fukushima, depopulated by natural and nuclear disaster, seems set to have been permanently depopulated. Tohoku
• Bloomberg noted that East Asia's populations are aging rapidly, another article noting how Japan's demographic dynamics are setting a pattern for other high-income East Asian economies.
• In Malaysia, the Star notes that low population growth among Malaysian Chinese will lead to a sharp fall in the Chinese proportion in the Malaysian population by 2040.
• Coming to Alberta, CBC notes how the municipality of Fort McMurray has been hit very hard by the end of the oil boom, as has been Alberta's largest city and business centre of Calgary.
• On the subject of North Korea and China, The Guardian wrote about the stateless children born to North Korean women in China, lacking either Chinese or North Korean citizenship.
• The Inter Press Service notes that, as the Dominican Republic cracks down on Haitian migrants and people of Haitian background generally, women are in a particular situation.
• IWPR provides updates on Georgia's continuing and ongoing rate of population shrinkage, a consequence of emigration.
• On the subject of Cuba, the Inter Press Service reported on Cuban migrants to the United States stranded in Latin America, while Agence France-Presse looked at the plight of Cuba's growing cohort of elderly.

On the longevity and extended health of Icarians, among others

Via the Washington Post I came across a 2012 article in The New York Times Magazine by Dan Buettner, "The Island Where People Forget to Die". In this article, Buettner highlights the longevity and good health of the inhabitants of Icaria, a small Greek island in the Aegean Sea several dozen kilometres away from the Anatolian mainland where the average inhabitant can expect to live a decade longer than the average American. While many factors seem to contribute to the Icarians' situation--an abundance of exercise, a healthy diet, and so on--it seems that all these individual elements are reinforced by Icarian society as a whole.

In the United States, when it comes to improving health, people tend to focus on exercise and what we put into our mouths — organic foods, omega-3’s, micronutrients. We spend nearly $30 billion a year on vitamins and supplements alone. Yet in Ikaria and the other places like it, diet only partly explained higher life expectancy. Exercise — at least the way we think of it, as willful, dutiful, physical activity — played a small role at best.

Social structure might turn out to be more important. In Sardinia, a cultural attitude that celebrated the elderly kept them engaged in the community and in extended-family homes until they were in their 100s. Studies have linked early retirement among some workers in industrialized economies to reduced life expectancy. In Okinawa, there’s none of this artificial punctuation of life. Instead, the notion of ikigai — “the reason for which you wake up in the morning” — suffuses people’s entire adult lives. It gets centenarians out of bed and out of the easy chair to teach karate, or to guide the village spiritually, or to pass down traditions to children. The Nicoyans in Costa Rica use the term plan de vida to describe a lifelong sense of purpose. As Dr. Robert Butler, the first director of the National Institute on Aging, once told me, being able to define your life meaning adds to your life expectancy.

[. . .]

If you pay careful attention to the way Ikarians have lived their lives, it appears that a dozen subtly powerful, mutually enhancing and pervasive factors are at work. It’s easy to get enough rest if no one else wakes up early and the village goes dead during afternoon naptime. It helps that the cheapest, most accessible foods are also the most healthful — and that your ancestors have spent centuries developing ways to make them taste good. It’s hard to get through the day in Ikaria without walking up 20 hills. You’re not likely to ever feel the existential pain of not belonging or even the simple stress of arriving late. Your community makes sure you’ll always have something to eat, but peer pressure will get you to contribute something too. You’re going to grow a garden, because that’s what your parents did, and that’s what your neighbors are doing. You’re less likely to be a victim of crime because everyone at once is a busybody and feels as if he’s being watched. At day’s end, you’ll share a cup of the seasonal herbal tea with your neighbor because that’s what he’s serving. Several glasses of wine may follow the tea, but you’ll drink them in the company of good friends. On Sunday, you’ll attend church, and you’ll fast before Orthodox feast days. Even if you’re antisocial, you’ll never be entirely alone. Your neighbors will cajole you out of your house for the village festival to eat your portion of goat meat.

Every one of these factors can be tied to longevity. That’s what the $70 billion diet industry and $20 billion health-club industry do in their efforts to persuade us that if we eat the right food or do the right workout, we’ll be healthier, lose weight and live longer. But these strategies rarely work. Not because they’re wrong-minded: it’s a good idea for people to do any of these healthful activities. The problem is, it’s difficult to change individual behaviors when community behaviors stay the same. In the United States, you can’t go to a movie, walk through the airport or buy cough medicine without being routed through a gantlet of candy bars, salty snacks and sugar-sweetened beverages. The processed-food industry spends more than $4 billion a year tempting us to eat. How do you combat that? Discipline is a good thing, but discipline is a muscle that fatigues. Sooner or later, most people cave in to relentless temptation.

This message was emphasized by an 2013 article in The Guardian by Andrew Anthony, based at least in part on the author's interviews with Buettner.

The phrase "blue zone" was first coined by [author Dan] Buettner's colleague, the Belgian demographer Michel Poulain. "He was drawing blue circles on a map in Sardinia and then referring to the area inside the circle as the blue zone," Buettner says. "When we started working together, I extended it to Okinawa, Costa Rica and Ikaria. If you Google it now, it's entered the lexicon as a demographically confirmed geographical area where people live measurably longer." So what does it take to qualify? "It's a variation," Buettner says. "It's either the highest centenarian rate, so the most centenarians per 1,000. Or it has the highest life expectancy at middle age."

All the blue zones are slightly austere environments where life has traditionally required hard work. But they also tend to be very social, and none more so than Ikaria. At the heart of the island's social scene is a series of 24-hour festivals, known as paniyiri, which all age groups attend. They last right through the night and the centrepieces are mass dances in which everyone – teenagers, parents, the elderly, young children – takes part. Kostas Sponsas tells me he no longer has the energy to go on until dawn. He will now usually take his leave by 2am.

One evening, the island's star violin player, whom we met at Gregoris Tsahas's favourite cafe, invites Buettner, me and several others back to his house to hear him play. He says he often grows exhausted while performing at festivals, but the energy and enthusiasm of the people keep him going. He plays some traditional folk tunes, full of passion and yearning and heart-rending beauty, and mentions with pride that Mikis Theodorakis, the composer of Zorba The Greek, was among the leftists exiled on the island in the late 1940s. Theodorakis later recalled the experience with pleasure. "How could this be?" he asked. "The answer is simple: it's the beauty of the island in combination with the warmth of the locals. They risked their lives to be generous to us, something that helped us more than anything bear the burden of the hardship."

One of the things Buettner has found that unites the elderly inhabitants of all the blue zones is that they are unintentionally old: they didn't set out to extend their lives. "Longevity happened to these people," he says. "The centenarians didn't all of a sudden at 40 say, 'I'm going to become 100; I'm going to start getting exercise and eating these ingredients.' It ensues from their surroundings. So my argument is that the environmental components of places such as Ikaria are portable if you pay attention. And the value proposition in the real world is maybe a decade more life expectancy. It's not living to 100. But I think the real benefit is that the same things that yield this healthy longevity also yield happiness."

I ask a number of men in their 90s and 100s if they do any keep-fit exercise. The answer is always the same: "Yes, digging the earth." Nikos Fountoulis, for example, is a 93-year-old who looks 20 years younger. He still has a smallholding in the hills of the island's interior. Each morning he goes out at 8am to feed his animals and tend his garden. He used to dig charcoal as a younger man. "I never thought about getting old," he says. "I feel good. I feel 93, but on Ikaria that's OK."

Long-time readers of Demography Matters may remember that I visited the phenomenon of extended life expectancy and relatively gentle aging before, in a February 2010 post taking a look at the position and numbers of the aged in Abkhazia. Fantastic claims that Abkhazians regularly lived past the century mark have been debunked. Conversely, traditional Abkhazian culture does seem to have not only promoted good health, but helped integrate aging Abkhaz into their society in a way that allowed them to continue to be productive. (I know nothing about the current situation in Abkhazia. Anyone informed on this subject, please advise in the comments.)

Is it possible to learn from the lessons of Icarians and similar populations? Maybe. As commented in the articles I linked to above, Icarians' longevity appears to be the product of a complex mesh of social factors that can't be easily replicated. Whether the relaxed lifestyle of Icarians and others can be replicated in our contemporary world is very open to question, for instance. If nothing else, the Icarian experience does provide fascinating hints towards a possible futuree.

The latest on emigration from Georgia

Back in August 2008, immediately after the South Ossetia War, I wrote at length about Georgia's demographic situation. Briefly put, with a relatively long history of below-replacement fertility, a recent tradition of mass emigration, and continuing political instability and economic underdevelopment, there were good reasons to be concerned for the future of the Georgian labour force.

Things haven't gotten better. A pair of articles by writer Mari Nikuradze, hosted at Democracy and Freedom Watch, reports on to the continuing large scale of emigration from Georgia. First comes the alarmingly-titled article "A quarter of Georgia’s population are missing", which also notes that Georgians continue to have trouble in getting visas to European Union member-states.

23 per cent of Georgia’s population is away from the country, 80 per cent of which are illegal labor migrants and sole bread-winners.

These are some of the findings in a new report made by Liberal Academy Tbilisi, called Visa Facilitation and Readmission: Visa Liberalization Prospects for Georgia.

The report also shows that Georgians have the most trouble with getting a visa to Europe, compared to other countries in the same region. The fraction of rejected visa applications was 17.2 and 15.1 per cent in 2009 and 2010, respectively. These numbers are higher than for Armenia with 10.8, Moldova with 6.9, Ukraine 3.4, Azerbaijan 5.0, Belarus 0.6 and Russia 1.2 per cent in 2010.

The presentation referred to, Visa Facilitation and Readmission: Visa Liberalization Prospects for Georgia, is available here. Tamara Pataraia's October 2011 policy brief suggests that Georgia still has a long way to go to demonstrate to the European Union that it would be a worthy partner.

"Nani is one of Georgia’s missing 23 %", meanwhile, takes a look at the life experiences of a single migrant.

Nani (48) left Georgia about 17 years ago to work in Italy and send money to her family. She’s from Samtredia, a small town in Western Georgia. Her husband works at a local theater, earning a small salary. Her daughter goes to school, while her son is getting higher education in Kutaisi, Georgia’s second largest city.

When Nani’s family was on the edge of hunger, she decided to leave. She tells DF Watch that at first she arrived in Italy illegally, because it was too expensive to get there with all necessary documents and procedures. For several years she gathered all necessary documents and saved money, and for now she’s a citizen of Italy.

Nani works as a servant for big Italian family. Her responsibilities are to clean the house, help with the cooking and look after two children. The family is quite rich and pays her a good salary.

“It’s enough for my living here and I’m sending money to my family in Samtredia. I’m also paying for my son’s education. Higher education isn’t free in Georgia, you know.”

She manages to come to Georgia once a year, during holidays.

“I know it’s not enough, but when I remember our being when I was living there I assure myself that it’s better to be here and help my family from here.”

She sends presents for birthday and clothes for her daughter when school starts in autumn.

Nani says she’s not planning to come back yet, as she is sure she won’t be able to find a proper job.

“Until I’m healthy and capable of work and do what I do here, I’ll stay. But then children will grow up, have their jobs and it will be easier to come,” she says, adding that she would like to spend her old age in her hometown with her grandchildren.

[. . .] According to the World Bank, net migration, which is the difference between emigration and immigration in a year, is always negative. In 1992-1996 it was -544 069; in 1997-2001 the numbers were equal to -390.036; in 2002-2006 -309.021 and in 2007-2011 number decreased to -150.000.

According to the International Organization for Migration, the Georgia’s indicator for emigration of is one of the highest in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and in the group of countries, which recently joined EU.

1 058.3 thousand people are in emigration in 2009, according to World Bank data. 644 390 of this number are in Russia, which is on the top of ten countries, where Georgian emigrants go. Then it is followed by Armenia, where there are 75 792 emigrated; Ukraine – 72 410, Greece 41 817 and Israel – 26 032.

Among EU countries, Greece is on the top of the list, followed by Germany, Cyprus, Spain and Latvia.

A brief article from The Messenger Online reports $US 108 million in remittances over the last three months: "The largest amount transferred comes from Russia, at $56 million USD, followed by Greece with $12 million, Italy with $10 million, and the US with $7 million."

Some further notes.

1. The continued large scale of emigration from Georgia has implications for the long-term economic development of the country. If a high proportion of the work force is working outside the country, economic development will be problematic.

2. The presence of large Georgian migrant communities in countries like Ukraine, but also Latvia, which are themselves sources of very large numbers of migrants may indicate both the survival of Soviet-era connections and Georgia's desperate state.

3. The continued concentration of Georgian emigrants in Russia, despite strongly negative Russian-Georgian relations, is outstanding. The number of labour migrants in European Union countries might be understated owing to illegal immigrants entering despite visa restrictions, but the same factors might also be in play in Russia.

4. The location of the largest Georgian migrant community inside the European Union in Greece signals Georgia's vulnerability to the Greek economic crisis.

Some more population-related links

The immigration of white South African farmers to Georgia, according to Eastern approaches, is actually occurring.

In August 2010, showing commendable imagination from a 5,000-mile distance, the authorities in Tbilisi invited South African farmers wanting a change of scene to consider an alternative: farming in Georgia. The country has an exuberantly pro-business government, low crime rates, and soil that positively squelches with underexploited potential. Once an agricultural power-house, Georgia now farms less than half of its arable land. It has less than half the number of cows and one-third of the pigs that it had in 1990. Agriculture employs over half the population, yet contributes less than a tenth of GDP. Ridiculously, this fertile country now imports 70 percent of its food. As a result, many of Georgia’s poorest people live in the countryside. Agriculture contributed over 16% of GDP in 2005, but only 8% in 2010.

[. . .]

Many local farmers are still suspicious. Most of them are subsistence-level producers; nation-wide, the average farm is less than one hectare. Seeing a government that has long paid them little attention suddenly court South Africans has produced mixed feelings. Last year, local farmers demonstrated in the village of Zeghduleti, near Gori, after common pasture that they had long used for grazing was cleared for sale to a foreign investor. After a number of arrests, the farmers were eventually advised to slaughter their cattle or graze them further afield. Georgia’s impatient government has a taste for dramatic change and short-term results. But as farmers know better than most, patience can be a virtue too.

Marginal Revolution observes that the incumbent Haitian president might be expelled from office if it turns out that he has been hiding a foreign citizenship, dual citizenship being unpopular in Haiti as a general rule and potentially even cause for banishment if a dual citizen involves himself in politics.

Marginal Revolution wonders why more Americans aren't moving to booming western Canada. The general consensus in the comments seems to be that Americans find it more difficult to move to Canada that you'd expect, for legal and cultural reasons as much as anything else.

The Population Reference Bureau's blog notes that improvements in sex ratios at birth in Indian states have stagnated for the time being.

The northwestern states of Punjab and Haryana have been the worst offenders. Haryana, formerly part of Punjab, was created in 1966 and borders Delhi to the north, west, and south. In 1999-2001, these states had very low SRBs of just 775 and 803, respectively. While they have since risen to 836 and 849, the last three SRS reports show a worrying tendency for the SRB rise to have leveled off. A low birth rate is often considered motivation for sex-selective abortion as male children could be more valued when couples have few children but that pattern is definitely not uniform across India. In Punjab, the total fertility rate (TFR — the average number of children a woman would bear in her lifetime in the birth rate of a particular year were to remain unchanged) was 1.9 in 2008 and 2.5 in Haryana. But it was also low in Karnataka (2.0) and Kerala (1.7), states with SRBs in the normal range. And, the two states with the highest TFRs, Bihar (3.9) and Uttar Pradesh (3.8), have low SRBs. Together, those latter two states hold 300 million population, one-fourth of India’s total.

Anatoly Karlin's brief post at Sublime Oblivion makes a convincing case that Russian demographics are no longer uniquely dre, with rising fertility, falling mortality, and net migration.

Some demography links

This afternoon--this afternoon in Toronto, at least--I thought I'd share with you five interesting demographics-related blog posts.

At Behind the Numbers, Mark Mather reports on the news that men in the United States are catching up to women in terms of life expectancy.

Dealing with my earlier post about biased sex ratios in the South Caucasus, fellow Livejournaler demographer has written--translated post here, original post here--on the subject, suggesting that the apparent deficit is a consequence of the underregistration of female births.

Geocurrents' Martin Lewis writes about the barrier along the Pakistani border built by the Iranians, dividing the historical region of Baluchistan. While built in an effort to control insurgents, the wall has a secondary use of limiting Pakistani migration into Iran.

The Global Sociology Blog links to an extended BBC series describing the effects of the male-biased sex ratio in India, describing things as varied as the grief of women forced to abort their daughters, the migration of women from more sex-balanced areas in southern India to the male-biased north, the shocking deterioration in the sex ratio in Kashmir, and Indian government efforts to encourage the birth of female children.

At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen summarizes a new book by Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd and the subtitle is A Convergence of Civilizations: The Transformation of Muslim Societies Around the World. This book makes the point, made here several times, that Muslim societies around the world are also going through the demographic transition, albeit each in their own distinctive ways.

Why are sex ratios at birth so male-biased in the South Caucasus?

Earlier this month, my attention was caught by a Behind the Numbers blog post by Carl Haub which described how sex ratios in the countries of the South Caucasus--Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan--were among the most unbalanced in the world.

Son preference and sex-selective abortion in China and India have frequently been in the news but who would ever have thought of it in the Caucasus countries? But it’s there, in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, three former Soviet Republics and the trends have been well analyzed in a recent paper.* The normal global biological sex ratio at birth (SRB) is 105 male births per 100 female. Where son preference is strong and the sex of a fetus is determined, there has been a rise in the abortion of female fetuses in recent years.

The SRB in those countries began rising in the mid-1990s and, in 2009, stood at 114 in Armenia and 118 in Azerbaijan. Birth reporting in Georgia has been somewhat erratic but the pattern is similar if not quite as skewed upwards. Abortion had long been used as a form of birth control in the Soviet Union and the practice has continued in the Caucasus. A low fertility rate is often thought to create a particularly likely impetus for sex-selective abortion when son preference is strong. In all three countries, the SRB for third births was well above the total SRB. In Armenia, the SRB for third births was about 140 in 2000-2004; in Azerbaijan, it was about 150; and, in Georgia, it was about 145. Of course, third births are much less frequent with low birth rates. In recent years, the SRB does appear to have leveled off, but their SRB’s are now exceeded only by China’s.

Such a ratio can't help things at all. Georgia that--as I noted here in August 2008--has been seeing massive emigration since the end of the Soviet Union, just like Armenia to its south and even Azerbaijan to its east. Georgia and Armenia have cohort fertility rates substantially below replacement levels, while Azerbaijan is getting there. If future cohorts of women come to be so outnumbered by men, the South Caucasus' demographic catastrophes can only worsen. As my co-blogger Scott just mentioned, gender balance can well be a competitive advantage in the economic sense, as human capital is found and used more equitably without misogynistic attitudes. Again, this is profoundly self-destructive.

But why is this going on? The Social Sciences in the Caucasus blog notes that the shift in sex ratios only occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when sex ratios were more normal, while commenters suggested that this shift is to be expected in economically straitened times in societies where abortion is an acceptable method of birth control and male children are valued more than female children. Sabina Kiryashova's IWPR article "Abortion Used for Sex Selection in Azerbaijan" describes this mentality.

Such abortions have become increasingly common in Azerbaijan in recent years, particularly since the use of ultrasound to determine the sex of the baby has became widespread.

Up to four of the eight women who come into gynaecologist Gulustan Aslanova’s clinic each day for abortions do so because they are expecting an unwanted girl.

Research conducted by the Women’s Crisis Centre in a main Baku maternity hospital found that abortions carried out because of the sex of the child are currently third behind those done because of the family’s financial situation and ones for contraceptive purposes.

Azad Isazade, a psychologist at the centre, said that in Azerbaijan, as in many eastern countries, preference has always been given to boys. That is rooted in the pre-Islamic, pagan period when men were needed for farming and newborn girls were buried alive.

That no longer happens, but some families see the lack of a male heir as a tragedy or even a curse.

This is fine, but why in the South Caucasus? In the online essay collection Watering the Neighbour's Garden: The Growing Demographic Female Deficit in Asia, the paper by Meslé et al. "A Sharp Increase in Sex Ratio at Birth in the Caucasus. Why? How?" (73-88) makes the point that the shift is unprecedented, occurring in the absence of any state coercion, without any parallels either elsewhere in the former Soviet Union or elsewshere in the Greater Middle East.

It is true that the countries of the Caucasus are very small compared to some of their neighbours and it is easy to imagine that by decreasing the scale to internal administrative districts the same phenomenon could be observed in some regions of Russia, Iran, and Turkey that are close to the Caucasus, particularly among the Azeri in Iran, in the Caucasian republics of southern Russia, and in the eastern regions of Turkey that border Armenia. It is for this reason that we have attempted to collect data by local districts in the countries of the Caucasus and also in the three closest large countries, as well as in Syria. [. . .]


When this data is assembled on a detailed map of the region, two observations reinforce the contrast suggested by national indicators. On the one hand, within each of the three countries of the Caucasus, high sex ratios at birth are almost systematically observed in all the regions. The only notable exceptions concern two groups of Azeri rayons concentrated in the North on the border with Russia and in the South on the border with Iran. On the other hand, no such ratios are observed in the administrative districts nearest to the countries of the Caucasus, either in Russia, Iran, Turkey, or Syria. In Russia, the federated republics of the northern Caucasus such as Karachay-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Ingushetia, and Dagestan are all between 104 and 107. Only North Ossetia is slightly over 108. In Iran all the northern provinces and notably the four sharing a border with Azerbaijan (Gilan, Ardebil, eastern Azerbaijan, western Azerbaijan) are below 107. Finally, in Turkey there is a zone around the Van Lake, which is slightly over 107, but all the provinces along the border with Georgia and Armenia are between 104 and 107.

The number of abortions a woman has rises if the first children born are female, but still. Why in the South Caucasus?

On what the Abkhaz have to teach us about longevity

The Abkhaz, the titular nation of the quasi-state of Abkhazia in northwestern Georgia, contrary to popular mythology, don't actually live to amazingly long ages. First, here's some background about the Abkhaz, as provided in Georgi Derluguian's "Abkhazia: A Broken Paradise".

Linguistically and anthropologically, the native Abkhazes belong to the North Caucasian group of peoples that also comprises the Adyghs (Adygeis, Circassians, Kabardins) and, more distantly, the Vainakhs (Chechens and Ingushes) and most Daghestanis (Abdushelishvili, Arutyunov and Kaloyev, 1994). To a considerable pride of its native speakers, the Abkhaz language is featured in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's hardest-sounding tongue. Indeed, it boasts more than sixty consonants to (depending on the dialect) just four, or even one, vowels. The verdict of patriotic Georgian scholars renders Abkhaz merely patois, a backward dialect of the Georgian language. Today, however, comparative linguists consider it proven that the languages of the North Caucasian group are entirely unrelated to any other language family in this part of the world, be it Indo-European, Afrasian (Semitic), Turkic or Kartvelian (a small endemic family that consists of Georgian proper, and the Svan, Mingrelian, and Laz languages) (67).

Until the last quarter of the 19th century, the population of Abkhazia – approximately 100,000; the actual number is difficult to estimate due to the complete absence of any state authority and thus a lack of censuses prior to the 1890s – consisted solely of ethnic native Abkhazes and a few other closely related peoples (such as the Ubykhs) who no longer exist. In 1864, the sweeping push of Russian armies towards the Black Sea provoked among the highlanders a panic that led to mass exodus across the sea into the Ottoman lands: the territories of modern Turkey, Syria, Jordan, and even Kosovo (Ascherson, 1995; Lieven, 1998). This panic of apocalyptic proportions swept the entire expanse from Daghestan and Chechnya in the east Caucasus to the Circassian lands and Abkhazia in the western parts. Since Abkhazia was situated right on the Black Sea coast, the emigration was particularly massive there. At least half or perhaps as many as three quarters of Abkhazes abandoned their native land in successive waves following the series of crushed rebellions between 1864 and 1878.

As Zhenglian et al. noted in their paper "Age validation of Han Chinese centenarians", exaggerations of the numbers of extremely old age are common in any number of states and nations.

Many researchers have indicated that elderly people tend to exaggerate their age. Thoms (1873, 2nd ed. 1878) found that the ages of about 90% of the centenarians reported in the newspapers during the period 1868-72 could not be validated. In the literature, age exaggeration by those claiming to be centenarians was often reported (see, for example, Bowerman, 1939). Among the 1756 reported centenarians in a census taken in Bulgaria at the beginning of this century, only 51 could be verified (Vischer 1945). This problem of overstatement of age by the extremely old has been found in the United States (Myers, 1966; Rosenwaike, 1968), and in the former Soviet Union (Medvedev, 1973, Myers, 1965). A carefully-validated census taken in
Vilcabamba found that all the age claims made by those reporting their age to be over 100 years old, were either incorrect or unsubstantiated. Systematic age exaggeration was found from 70 years old onwards (Mazess & Forman, 1979). This is especially true of extremely old people who come from societies where illiteracy is high, accurate documentation showing date of birth does not exist, and even accurate oral information about birth dates is lacking (Mazess and Forman, 1979). A revaluation of actual ages among a sample of Abkhazians showed that the earlier reports of increased longevity in Abkhazia were erroneous. In fact, the study concluded that extreme old age was no more prevalent in Abkhazia than in the U.S.A. (Palmore, 1984). Age exaggeration was, in fact, very common around 1900 in most of Europe. It is still common today in most other countries of the world, especially in countries with a high proportion of illiteracy (Jeune, 1995, p. 17).

The methodology of the Soviet studies (Other cultures, elder years, Ellen Rhoads Holmes and Lowell Don Holmes) was flawed, with statistics fluctuating wildly from census to census and a near-complete lack of documentation to back up claims. In actual fact, they suggest, only 0.3% of Abkhazians in 1970 may have been older than 90 years, a proportion above the Soviet average and comparable to the American. The acceptance of the myth of Abkhaz longevity might not be surprising, since iIn the book Forever Young: A Cultural History of Longevity by Lucian Boia and Trista Selous, the point is made (155-160) that long lifespans were seen as legitmizing factors for the Soviet system.

Stalinism had set up a complete mythology that overlaid every aspect of real history and ordinary life. Although cracked and losing credibility, this fictiious discourse on the world, supported by the transformist project inherent in Stalinism, survived the Red dictator's death. It's ebb was slow and affected the core ideology only very partially.

Longevity followed. the same pattern. The Caucasians became thinner on the ground, but did not disappear altogether. The year 1974 saw celebrations for the 140th birthday of a lady in that region, who died the following year. [. . .] She was 85 when she joined a collective farm; at 104 she travelled to Moscow for the USSR's first agricultural exhibition; at 128 she was still working. Her speed and skill made her a model for the other workers.

Another source observes that Stalin, just like China's emperor Qin Shi Huangti, wanted to live for a long time and hoped that evidence from his native Caucasus could legitmize his hopes.

Anthropologist Sula Benet's classic 1974 ethnography The Abkhasians: The Long-Living People of the Caucasus is arguably one of the best sources on the Abkhaz. The 1954 census, she noted, claimed 2.58% of Abkhasia's population over 90, versus 0.1% in USSR, a figure verified according to the following method.

First, documentary evidence as sought to substantial their statements to demographers; second, a lengthy questionnaire was administered by local physicians. It included such questions as age when married, age when first child was born, age when the siege of Sevastopol occurred, and age when the Tuyrks invaded his village. 'If a respondent really knew his age, his answers would give a consistent pictures. If he did not know his true age, major discrepancies would apear. Unless the respondents (often an illiterate or semi-literate peasant) were extremely agile with numbers, any deliberate attempt to mislead the interviewer would also show up here.

This method, it should be noted, didn't allow (as noted above) for unintentional misunderstandings.

Still, as observed in the Globe and Mail some time ago, elderly Abkhaz do seem at least anecdotally to enjoy relatively happy lifespans.

Jinjolia's bent frame can be seen pacing the grounds of his sprawling three-hectare garden, occasionally leaning on his walking stick for support. His son and grandson are buried under a canopy farther up the mountain and Mr. Jinjolia still climbs the slope to sit at their graves.

His face is wizened now and his voice is a high-pitched whine, but Mr. Jinjolia's brown, darting eyes are clear. It's also clear that he rules the roost in the family home. At a late-afternoon lunch earlier, his family and neighbours stood in respect while he toasted guests.

They didn't touch their glasses until Mr. Jinjolia finished speaking from the head of the table.

Why has he lived so long? "I don't know," he shrugged. "All my life I've drunk and smoked and chased girls," he said, laughing.

But most of his life was just hard. He said he doesn't remember much about the Bolshevik Revolution, but he does remember the hard years that followed, when he was put to work at age 12 on a collective farm. "I was too young to go to work," he said.

When the Second World War erupted, Mr. Jinjolia was sent to the Russian front twice and was shot on both tours of duty. His two convalescences were the only periods in his life when he was hospitalized.

Once, in 1930, he says, he contracted malaria, but he drank some vodka and recovered. His first marriage ended in divorce, his second wife died and his third wife passed away 20 years ago.

He wanted to marry one more time, but was afraid he would outlive her too.

Ms. Ashuba's long life was also marked by the great social upheavals of the 20th century. She too picked tobacco for decades on a collective farm. After her husband was killed in the war, Ms. Ashuba raised six children on her own. Her salary from the collective farm was paid in food, not money.

"Each year, I prepared one tonne and 300 kilograms of tobacco and each month a I got a few pieces of soap, corn and sugar," she said.

Ms. Ashuba said her life improved after the Soviet Union's collapse even though the breakup brought more war and unrest to the Caucuses.

"Life here in Abkhazia is better," she said, during an interview beneath a cherry tree on her family's gated compound. "When I was young, I had to work all the time. I would work until I collapsed."

As she spoke, her 76-year-old son Ilia and 68-year-old daughter, Eteri, hovered nearby, periodically bringing coffee, cheese and vodka.

A neighbour, Natella Shlarba, said Abkhazians feel a moral duty to care for their elders. "We don't have [seniors' homes]. If you don't take care of your parents, no one will say hello to you on the street. All this love that is given to people makes them live longer."

Benet claimed that aging begins later among Abkhazians, with many working to an advanced age on light tasks, with a large minority having good vision and hearing, perhaps controversially claiming that Abkhaz had no phrase for "old people" (9-10). can this be justified?

Chapter 2 of her ethnography suggests it may be. Benet argues that Abkhaz are traditionally concerned with their weight as a health issue, with a traditional diet marked by moderate protein and little consumption of fat or carbohydrates, with wine, fruits and vegetables, honey, fermented milk, and fresh meat dominating. She further argues that age is the major determinant of social status instead of wealth or social tradition, with the elderly playing a central role in the preservation of Abkhaz culture and a strongly patriarchal and extended family structure encouraging close family ties and the elderly's continued participation in family life. The role played by age in social structure apparently didn't produce conflict between age groups since each age group inherited the privileges of the older ones in turn, all within a context of a culture with established mechanisms for resolving conflict (63). To the extent that genes play a role, Benet speculates that the relative isolation of the Abkhaz for millennia and established traditions of adoption, ritual and otherwise, may have helped consolidate a homogeneous gene pool. Benet's conclusion is unsurprising.

Abkhasians live as long as they do primarily because of the cultural, social and psychological factors that structure their existence. The most important are: the uniformity and predictability of both individual and group behaviour; the unbroken continuum of life's activities; and integration of the aged into the extended family and community life as fully functioning members in work, decision making, and recreation. No less important are thye culturally reinforced expectation of long life and good health; cultural mechanisms used in avoidance of stress and lack of intergenerational conflict. All these factors are most conducive to longevity (103).

Curiously, in a parallel she notes that longevity is paired with a relativly low birthrate, high rate of adoption, and flat age profile by the standards of surrounding population. For instance, a 19633 surbvey of Atara-Abkhaskaya revealed that some "60% of all peasant households had either one or two children, while 8.1% had no children at all. Two percent of the households had adopted one or two children, and only 12 percent had more than five children" (66).

Benet's analysis of the Abkhaz situation seems to hold up. Caloric restriction and diet do play a major role in sustaining health and extending lifespans; social structures which include the elderly at the same time they regulate derived social conflicts play important psychological roles; family structures which help create fairly broad and extended group solidarity help. The extent to which this has survived in an Abkhazia devastated by war and economic collapse is open to question, true, but I don't think it's too much to claim that despite the propaganda surrounding claims of special Abkhaz longevity there's still a fair bit that aging societies can learn about the ways in which the Abkhaz traditionally dealt with their health and with their elderly.

The Georgian Mess

The ongoing war in Georgia, being an ethnic conflict that, most unlike the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s--featured great-power military intervention right from the start, and as a result has attracted a very large amount of international attention from the word go. Google News Canada returns in excess of 39 thousand hits to a simple search using the keywords "Russia" and "Georgia." This latest spurt of interethnic war is only the latest in the long-standing conflicts South Caucasus region including the states of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, with the wars of Armenians versus Azerbaijani and of Georgians versus Ossetians and Abkhazians, but it's one that will be very serious for Georgia's economic future.

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The South Caucasus forms an interesting region in Europe insofar as fertility is concerned, as revealed by the Vienna Institute of Demography's European Demographic Data Sheet 2008 (sources here PDF format)which provides data on the populations of the three different South Caucasus states. Georgia stands out somewhat among its Caucasian peers. Selected information from Georgia, the other South Caucasus states and on their neighbours Turkey and Russia, is provided in the table below.

Some interesting trends appear--Azerbaijanis seem to behave rather like their Turkish counterparts--but one that does stand out is the extent to which Georgians have advanced beyond their South Caucasus peers further down the stages of the demographic transition. This isn't new: Georgia was to be found advancing ahead of Armenia and Azerbaijan and joining the Slavic republics of the Soviet Union in the movement towards post-transitional fertility patterns and low fertility at least as early as the 1950s--one source suggests that as of 1950, Georgia's TFR was around 3, while Armenia's was close to ~4.5, and Azerbaijan's ~5.5.

The aging of populations is a natural phenomenon around the world, and even in the most fortunate polities the management of this aging consumes quite a few resources. Georgia is not one of those fortunate polities, as the World Bank points out in its 2007 survey of gross national income per capita (PDF format). Edward's writings back in 2006 on Serbia's serious demographic issues and their likely impact on Serbia's economy were quite accurate, but Serbia is starting from a much higher point than Georgia.

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Economic gaps with Russia existed before. As noted here, Georgia fell, along with Moldavia and Armenia, into a group of lower-middle income republics, well ahead of southern Central Asia but well behind Russia and the Baltic States. After the Soviet collapse, suffering internal disintegration and the shock of isolation from the wider Soviet economic space that Georgia was affiliated with, Georgia suffered a steep collapse. Timothy Heleniak observed that in the conflict-ridden post-independence South Caucasus, first Russians, almost half of the South Caucasus' population, left, followed by large chunks of the general population. With growing--and stable--21st century economic gaps like the ones shown above, it's no wonder that this mass labour migration has occurred. Fiona Hill described the current state of affairs in a recent lecture, "Eurasia on the Move: The Regional Implications of Mass Labor Migration from Central Asia to Russia".

According to Hill, Russia has experienced positive net migration since 1991, with the majority of immigrants arriving from other Soviet successor states. Ethnic Russians migrating to their titular homeland from other Soviet republics comprised nearly 60 percent of total immigration to Russia between 1989 and 2002. However, Hill noted that these numbers reflect only legal migration. She argued that significant numbers of non-Russian labor migrants have come to Russia from the Caucasus and Central Asia, often illegally. As many as 2 million Azerbaijanis, 1 million Armenians, 650,000 Tajiks, 500,000 Georgians and Kyrgyz, and 100,000 Uzbeks may be working in the Russian Federation.

High levels of immigration have affected Russia in a number of ways--many of which, Hill argued, have been very beneficial to the country. She noted that the Russian economy has more than doubled since 1999 and that domestic demand has increased significantly. Immigrant entrepreneurs provide Russian consumers with cheap goods (primarily from Asia and the Middle East), which is particularly important in Siberia and the Far East, where transportation costs make goods from European Russia prohibitively expensive. In addition, "cheap labor is filling a void inside Russia itself--the whole of the lower-paying sectors in the Russian economy are increasingly being filled by migrants from elsewhere in the CIS," she said.

Immigration has also helped to ameliorate the consequences of Russia’s demographic decline, Hill argued. Russia could face serious labor shortages in all fields due to out-migration of skilled workers, high death rates among working age people, low birth rates, and a high percentage of the population above retirement age. However, according to Hill, immigrants have compensated for three-fourths of Russia’s natural population decrease between 1992 and 2003. The majority of immigrants are of working age, and although many are employed in low-skill sectors of the economy, migrants from the CIS also include a large number of university graduates.

Hill contended that labor migration to Russia has also had a stabilizing effect in the Eurasian region as a whole: "Russia’s biggest contribution to the security of this very vulnerable region over the past decade has not been through its military presence--or security pacts, but has been specifically through absorbing the surplus labor from the Caucasus and Central Asian states, providing markets for their goods, and transferring funds in the form of remittances." Russia’s labor market has provided an outlet for hundreds of thousands of people who would be unemployed in Central Asia and the Caucasus, and remittances from migrants working in Russia have become a major component of the economies of many former Soviet states--as much as 25 percent of GDP in Georgia and 18 percent in Tajikistan.

As essential as these labour diasporas might be for the migrant-sending nations, not only are their affairs complicated by the hostility of some Russians towards Caucasians of all ethnicities and Muslims (including Russian citizens) and by the formulation of immigration policies that make life relatively difficult for these diasporas. Osmanova, Vartanian and Bulghadarian wrote in their 2007 IWPR article "Caucasian Migrants’ Struggle in Russia", Armenians and Azerbaijanis found it easy enough to evade Russian restrictions on the employment of foreigners in marketplaces. Georgians found it much more difficult, thanks to very bad Russian-Georgian relations.

Pro-government parliamentarian Giga Bokeria has said that neither the government nor parliament in Georgia will take any steps to ease the problems of Georgians wishing to work in Russia.

According to the World Bank, remittances from Russia constitute five per cent of Georgia’s GDP. The real figures are certainly higher as much of the money is sent in roundabout fashion.

There are an estimated one million Georgians living in Russia. In addition, around 90,000 Georgians go to Russia each year for seasonal work. Typically, these workers come from the provinces of Georgia, have no higher education and are aged between 25 and 35.

They are the ones worst affected by the transport blockade on Georgia imposed by Russia last autumn.

In May, Federal Migration Service deputy head Vyacheslav Postavnin, appeared to utter a veiled threat towards Georgia, saying, "When it comes to attracting labour migrants it is always better to give the priority to those countries with which Russia has good relations, including trading and economic relations, where there is a positive attitude."

Further complicating things for the Georgians working in Russia is the possibility that Georgia's large diaspora is not only politically active but possibly also aligned against Saakashvili: Might the President have been trying to weaken pro-Russian factions by weakening their economic base? God only knows.

What is certain is that, as Mzia Shelia noted in her 2006 "Population Aging in Georgia Under conditions of Economic Crisis" (PDF format), a Georgia facing a rapidly aging and shrinking population is going to face challenges of an almost existential nature.

It is significant that demographic burden didn’t increase in the noted period; presumably it was caused by reduction of average life expectance. In the same period aging process developed more profoundly in rural areas than in urban ones. All the regions of the country have aged considerably. At the present time in Georgia not a single region or ethnic group is demographically young. Age structures were deformed most of all among Russians, Ukrainians, Ossetians and Greeks. The level of longevity has declined too with which Georgia had always been a distinguished country.

Due to the economic and political crisis in the 1990s, Georgia retreated from the evolutionary way of its demographic development and at present starkly different model of demographic aging has been formed. Under weak economic conditions all social, economic, psychological and moral problems associated with population aging were brought out much severely. For example, in parallel with the growth of pension expenses incurred by high level of aging, retirement-age increase becomes more and more actual issue. It should be noted that in Georgia where according to the official statistics the unemployment level is 15.1 percent, retirement age increase cannot give the same results as it can give in developed countries. In our opinion and as it attested by studies, the rise of retirement age for the country which is under conditions of economic crisis will lead to the further increase of unemployment, acceleration of emigration processes, "brain drain" and decline in the country’s intellectual potential in the long run. It will intensify social tension even further; intergenerational relations will become acute. All the above will deepen economic crisis.

There's no easy way for Georgia to catch up economically. Gylfason and Hochreiter this month have attributed Georgia's wealth gap relative to Estonia to underinvestment in the economy generally and in education, a lack of technological sophistication, and isolation (Turkey can't play the same role for Georgia that Finland played for Estonia, and Russia most certainly won't). The thing is, Estonia of all of the countries of post-Communist Europe is going to come the closest to replacement-level fertility at the end of the day because it really is a post-Communist Nordic country in quite a few dimensions including the demographic, but Georgia's more likely to fit into the typical Mediterranean (and Black Sea?) framework of sustained below-replacement fertility. Without immigration, it's bound to suffer rapid aging. Add in emigration--if not to Russia then to Turkey, another neighbouring regional superpower with a large and dynamic economy and historical connections to the country--and Georgia's rapid marginalization is secured.

If this fate can be avoided at all, Georgia needs good leaders. It doesn't have them now: Misha Glenny was right to write recently in The New Statesmen that Georgia's triggering the recent war was "a disastrous political miscalculation, even in an era that is increasingly defined by spectacularly poor judgement." The author of a 2002 report from the office of the Public Defender of Georgia looks to have been right to argue that the Georgian state's manifold failures are responsible for the exit of many thousands of people from the Georgian nation-state. The damages of this war have imposed huge costs on the country. If Georgia can only continue to offer its young people poverty and war, why should they stay?