Masha Gessen’s article, The Dying Russians, brings me back to our class discussion from last week on Middle Range Theory politics. More specifically, the distinguish between inductive and deductive reasoning theorists use to formulate their political and other such theories. Its relative metaphor to understand this paradigm of logic is used in the example of the hedgehog and the fox. Whereas the hedgehog claims to know one thing very well, the fox claims to be privy to many. The two theorists in this article, Michelle Parsons and Nicholas Eberstadt, embody two different methods of study. Parsons utilizes deductive reasoning and is the hedgehog, while Eberstadt informs the reader using inductive reasoning which corresponds to being the fox. Parson’s analysis of the mortality trend hones in on the 1990s, and without much hard statistical evidence to support, relies off of the testimonies of middle-aged Russians to purport the claim that similar cultural trends that occurred after WWII fed into the 90s crisis. Moreover, the scope of her study was very limited. Although she was determined to explain the defining moment that triggered this mortality crisis, she skimmed over the Gorbachev period which was flanked by economic failure and social movements. Conversely, Eberstadt is hesitant to qualify such observations into a theory, but instead looks at the mortality crisis from a decades long perspective. And unlike Parsons, Eberstadt does not prioritize one reason or the other, but broadens his scope to conduct multiple different studies to garner statistics to further inform him. His inductive reasoning has given him plenty of data, but has left him baffled as to properly pin the crisis on one thing. His role as the fox has led him to examine the problem in a more holistic and less partisan to one viewpoint not only because he has expanded the timeframe of the crisis, but also because he doesn’t believe that middle-aged, average “Muscovites” encumber the entirety of the problem.