It's time to axe security forces and security guards: by 2030 there will be no one to work in the country

Bloomberg, the world's leading economic news agency, reported last week that Russia's population was dying out and there was no one to work in the country:

“Already now, students and soldiers have begun to be involved in emergency work (for example, for harvesting), the Soviet practice of using prison labor has been resumed.

In Russia, two problems await in the future. The country already has a shrinking workforce, and there is a structural problem with the reduction of workers under the age of 40. Russians reach maximum labor productivity between the ages of 30 and 40, and by 2030 the share of this category will decrease by 25%".

Journalist Pavel Pryanikov, commenting on these numbers, writes:

“I’ll add: I recently read a cheerful report from the officials of the Astrakhan region that they attracted 7 thousand students to the harvest; I recently wrote about the inauguration of a labor camp for convicts in the Moscow region - they will work in the fields.

The problem is enormous, while the same networked intelligentsia is ready to discuss anything - Morgenstern, the intrigues of "aggressive NATO", naked asses against the backdrop of temples, the intricacies of the royal court. Only - not the main problems of the country.

(By the way, have you noticed that the talk about Shoigu's megalomania has stopped, about the construction of new cities in Siberia? Probably, after all, one of the honored retirees of the special forces finally hired scientists, and they considered that there was no labor force for this megalomania).

Several bad demographic factors were superimposed on the country.

The first and foremost is the echo of 1990-2003 with a strong decline in the birth rate. A small generation of that time is now entering life.

The second is the emigration of qualified personnel.

The third is supermortality 2020-21. In December, excess deaths will reach 1 million during the pandemic, and hundreds of thousands of them were able-bodied people.

And these three factors are not going anywhere in the 2020s.

The government is responding to this dire problem in two ways. The desire to bring as many migrants from Central Asia as possible. But I wrote about the main problem of this labor force - 90% of these are low-skilled personnel. They will not go into mines and mines, they will not go to work in factories and power plants, to design bureaus and to drive ships and airplanes.

Migrants will not solve the problem of losing qualified personnel.

The second way is the usual Soviet labor mobilization of those "who cannot be there." While students and prisoners. But here, too, the reserve is limited. There are few prisoners, a lot of students cannot be forcibly driven to harvest potatoes. The research institutes also ended, from which the intelligentsia was driven to vegetable depots.

There can be only one solution under these conditions: a sharp increase in investment in labor productivity, in automation and robotization. This process goes on all the time. For example, AvtoVAZ over the past 20 years has reduced the number of employees from 90 thousand employees to 35 thousand with approximately the same production of cars. But this also lags behind the productivity at similar Western car plants - there, with the same volume of production of cars, AvtoVAZ would employ 8-10 thousand people.

A separate big topic.

And another big topic - the long-overdue reduction of the surplus vokhra, employees of various law enforcement agencies and private security companies - their total number already exceeds 5 million able-bodied men (15-20% of all men). The country can no longer pull such huge weights on its economy and demography..."