In light of the ongoing tensions between Russia and Ukraine, we offer the following brief demographic and historical information that can help make sense of the two countries and the tensions between them.
Russia:
Current population: 144 million
Ethnic Ukrainians comprise less than 2% of Russia’s population.
Established in 1721, the Russian Empire, was one of the world’s largest empires, surpassed in size only by the British and Mongolian empires.
A series of military defeats in World War I led to the toppling of the Russian Empire in the 1917 Russian Revolution, and the rise of the Soviet Union under Vladimir Lenin’s leadership in the early 1920s.
The Soviet economy industrialized rapidly under Joseph Stalin’s brutal rule (1928-1953), but stagnated in the following decades.
In the late 1980s, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev (1985-91) introduced “glasnost” (openness) and “perestroika” (restructuring) which eventually led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union into Russia and fourteen other independent republics in 1991.
Ukraine:
Current population: 45 million
Ethnic Russians comprise 17% of Ukraine’s population.
Much of Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire from the latter half of the 18th century through the Russian Revolution in 1917.
Ukraine experienced independence only briefly from 1917 until 1920, when it was taken over by the Soviet Union.
Under Soviet rule, Ukraine endured two famines that killed eight million Ukrainians. Another 7-8 million died at the hands of German and Soviet armies during World War II.
Ukraine gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Sources: CIA World Factbook’s entries on Ukraine and Russia, available at:
Learning Life has been blessed with some remarkably experienced, skilled and smart volunteers. Among our volunteers, Dan Cassidy is a veteran, having been involved for more than a year in Learning Life’s young life.
Dan’s pleasant demeanor belies an accomplished and focused non-profit professional intent on making a difference. Dan is a 27-year veteran of the association and nonprofit profession, having held executive management positions with associations in the higher education, business and medical industries, many with operations located around the world. Most recently, Dan served as Chief Operating Officer of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, and he is currently the Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer of the National Society of Professional Engineers.
Dan earned a BA in Accounting from Catholic University, an MBA in Finance from George Washington University, and is a certified public accountant (CPA). He is an active member of the Operational Excellence Roundtable, the Finance & Administration Roundtable (previously its President), and the American Society of Association Executives.
Asked why he chose to volunteer with Learning Life, Dan responds “I choose to work with Learning Life because I believe in the positive impact social entrepreneurship can have on individuals and communities. The opportunity to share my knowledge and experience with a startup social enterprise like Learning Life is exciting.” Dan has advised Learning Life on organizational strategy, fundraising and non-profit incorporation, and has made helpful improvements to our website and donation page.
Beyond Learning Life, Dan is active in his local community serving as a volunteer for, among other things, the Fairfax Area Office on Aging, Southwestern Youth Association sports, and his community homeowners association. He resides in Clifton, Virginia with three California natives – his significant other Kathy, along with Annie the dog, Sally the cat, not to mention a garage full of sports equipment.
To learn more about volunteering with Learning Life and other ways you can help, contact us at email@learninglife.info.
Toward Private Nudges for Public Citizens
What is the good citizen, and how can modern democratic societies nurture more good citizens?
These questions have animated me as a sociologist for nearly two decades now, and they are a key impetus for Learning Life.
As I’ve noted in my own research, some critics of democracy enjoy saying that Americans live in a republic, not a democracy. Our founders, these critics like to add, never intended a democracy, which they often associated with mob rule, but rather a republic governed by wiser representatives chosen from among the people. There is some truth to this, but some of the founders did advocate nurturing an informed and engaged citizenry, and subsequent political leaders in the United States and elsewhere have called again and again for government “of, by and for the people,” as Abraham Lincoln famously put it.
Today, in retrospect, it seems fairer to argue that a republic requires democracy of some kind. That may seem paradoxical if one defines a republic as rule by representatives and democracy as rule by the people themselves. However, what I mean is that elected representatives, left to rule alone without the scrutiny and involvement of the people, may be more likely to advance their own interests and those of their friends than those of the people. Ensuring our representatives more often than not advance the interests of the people requires informed and engaged citizens – that is, some measure of democracy – to keep them honest.
Thus, informed and engaged individuals are good citizens, and good citizens can help ensure governments, local to global, are more responsive and accountable to the people. The trouble, as the French political thinker Benjamin Constant noted so well in the early 19th century, is that it’s usually difficult to get most modern citizens to stay informed and engaged because they are so absorbed in their private pursuits of happiness at work and leisure with family, friends and colleagues.
There are no lack of public proposals for ways to nurture informed and engaged citizens, from civics in schools to more open government, citizen issue assemblies, and more democratically financed elections (e.g., low dollar limits on campaign contributions to encourage candidates to engage more ordinary citizens rather than wealthy donors). Many of these public proposals can indeed help inform and engage more citizens, but they ignore the powerful lure away from public engagement that private life poses.
Accordingly, citizen engagement demands not just public solutions, but private ones. As the American sociologist Herbert Gans wisely put it, “if citizens cannot or will not come to political institutions to participate, these institutions have to come to them” (Gans 1988: 123). Gans mostly had in mind ways to make government and media more representative of and responsive to the people. In contrast, I have in mind ways in which private life can nudge people into public life, and in particular how business can help engage people more in their government and communities, local to global.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I find the burgeoning interest in social entrepreneurialism – in essence, using business to do good – encouraging. More and more for-profits and non-profits alike are selling services or goods — from food to soap to shoes — to do good in the world, and in so doing, informing their customers a little about social problems and ways to address them.
Constant, Benjamin. 1997 [1833]. “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns” in The Libertarian Reader, ed. David Boaz. New York: The Free Press.
Gans, Herbert J. 1988. Middle American Individualism: Political Participation and Liberal Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lachelier, Paul. 2007. “Democracy, Individualism and the Civil-Civic Citizen: Young American Professionals Talk about Community, Politics and Citizenship.” Doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Five Facts on the Demographics of American Women
Every day, Learning Life spreads facts on current topics on our Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin pages. This helps advance Learning Life’s mission to nurture a wider culture of learning using everyday surfaces, including our social media pages. The following facts on U.S. women’s current demographics come as the United States celebrates Women’s History Month in March.
1) As of July 2014, there were five million more females than males living in the USA — 162 million vs. 157 million, respectively.
2) Two signs of the ever growing role of women in the American workplace: as of 2014, women 16 and older comprised nearly half (47%) of the U.S. civilian labor force. Fourteen percent of working women were in management, professional and related jobs in 2014.
3) Women are getting more educated than men: women constituted 55.2% of all college students in 2014, and among those with advanced degrees (i.e., more than a college degree), 30.2% of women held professional certifications or licenses compared with 29.9% of men.
4) Yet women are still paid much less than men: women working full-time year-round made 77 cents to every $1 men working full-time year-round made in 2012. There was no change in this pay inequality from 2011 to 2012.
5) As of 2014, American women age 40 to 44 had on average given birth to 2 children, down from 3 in 1976. The percentage of women age 40 to 44 who had not given birth was 15% in 2014, up from 10% in 1976. Still, in 2013 there were 5.2 million stay-at-home mothers compared with 214,000 stay-at-home fathers nationwide.
