Only a miracle can save Russian pensioners—current and future—from poverty. Or - as always - ordinary Russian women.

MAXIM KVASH

Sensation! A giant diamond deposit has been declassified in Siberia. Many years ago, Soviet geologists discovered the Popigai astrobleme - a meteorite crater, and in it - trillions of carats of uniquely hard diamonds. Hundreds and thousands of times more than has been explored throughout the world so far.

A couple of weeks ago the Internet was simply filled with this “news”. By the way, it’s not completely false: the deposit exists, impact diamonds exist, and perhaps there really are a lot of them. Even about hardness, it seems, is not complete nonsense - the “presence of lonsdaleite” is noted.

“Money,” I admit, then had a hard time refraining from making—among others—a joke about the “Savior of Russia” diamond. In case anyone doesn’t remember, this is the main intrigue of the best post-Soviet film comedy “Shirley Myrli” (a subjective, value judgment of the author, based on dislike for domestic film and television production). At the end of this film, the entire Russian people, using the money received from the sale of the super diamond, goes to the Canary Islands.

The nonsense in the “news” was the secrecy - information about the Popigai deposit was quite accessible before. And the main conclusion, sometimes stated, sometimes implied. That you can get fabulously rich from the extraction of these undeniably minerals. Even if everything is true, and even if they can be extracted on an industrial scale, their prices will drop radically.

Belief in a miracle that will solve all problems is actually a long-standing problem. An anecdote is popular among economists, the authorship of which is attributed to the patriarch of Russian economic science, Evgeny Yasin: “How to save the Russian economy? - The optimistic option: we’ll do everything ourselves... - And the realistic one? - Aliens will arrive.”

From about the same opera, there are periodically emerging hopes that the shortage of drinking water in the world (a real problem, a constant headache for the UN, the World Bank and other respected organizations) will allow Russia to make great money by exporting water from Lake Baikal.

Well, okay, we can’t solve all the problems, but is it possible to solve a separate pension issue? Ensure a decent old age for current and future retirees?

Actually, to do this you need to do one thing, either very simple or incredibly complex. In the long term, for decades to come, to ensure a financial flow (growing due to inflation, rising living standards and the aging of the population), allowing for the redistribution of part of the economy’s income in favor of the elderly. And in such a way that it does not ruin the economy itself.

Several years ago, the idea that it was possible to capitalize the pension system at the expense of state property was very popular. Let's, they say, contribute state-owned stakes in the largest companies to the Pension Fund and, let's not forget, land - millions of hectares of arable land, forests and industrial zones. We will achieve that the return on capital will be at least five to ten percent, then a little arithmetic, and wealthy pensioners will emerge from the magician’s hat instead of a hare.

Alas, in Russian reality, income from the use of state property is negligibly small compared to the deficit of the pension system. And there is a whole line of influential contenders for them, from Igor Sechin with Rosneftegaz to the government of Dmitry Medvedev with a wreath of various tasks. Not to mention the smaller interests, who are not at all attracted by the prospect of sharing with someone (much less with an anonymous and voiceless army of pensioners) the income from what they were lucky enough to manage.

So we must look for miracles elsewhere. Either that something will click in Vladimir Putin’s head, and he will come to terms with the fact that the retirement age needs to be raised, that “the budget of the extended government needs to be balanced in the long term” (this quote can be attributed to Alexei Kudrin, or to hundreds more sober experts). Or that financial literacy will become universal, and citizens themselves will begin to save so much that no pension will be needed. Well, or that Russian women will finally demand that they stop calling them pensioners at the blossoming age of 55.

What will save pensioners