The country of inequality

How much money the richest Russians keep abroad - from $ 800 billion to $ 1 trillion - comparable to the wealth of all Russians within the country

From an economic point of view, Russia is a country of inequality. Look, for example, at Ingushetia: in this region up to 40% of the poor, the standard of living at the Honduras level. And now on Sakhalin, where the highest gross in Russia regional product per capita, comparable to Singapore indicators. Or Moscow and St. Petersburg, which exist in another economic league. With such a variety of Russia is one of the three leaders in the inequality of regions within the country among the states of Europe and Central Asia, the World Bank said in a new report.

This is not the first time that experts cite Russia as an egregious example of property inequality in order to emphasize its thesis: against the backdrop of the worldwide growth of injustice, the old public contract begins to crack at the seams. The growing abyss between the rich and poor harms democracy, economic growth and social stability around the world. Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, like Brexit in the UK, is often associated precisely with the fact that entire population groups in these countries feel abandoned and lost due to globalization. The shocking level of inequality in Russia also sooner or later should lead to the fact that property stratification will turn into a huge headache for the authorities.

“In the Russian public sphere, they almost do not talk about this problem,” says Professor Shaninka, sociologist Grigory Yudin. - This is partly due to the fact that the Russian authorities are most afraid of two things: awareness of the scale of inequality and collective action. Together, these two phenomena form a detonating chain. ”

In the very unequal distribution of goods, there is no historical sensation. However, elementary statistics show that the deregulation of markets since the 1980s led to a sharp increase in the share of capital in the world GDP, as a result of which a skew appeared in the direction of super-rich people. At the same time, income of the middle class, not busy in modern creative industries, at best stomped on the spot. In the future, a new wave of labor automation, apparently, will only strengthen this trend.

Big explosion in the post -Soviet space

Scientists have long been discussing what to do with growing economic inequality, but the French economist Tom Picketti, who published this problem in 2015, published this problem in 2015, the book “Capital in the XXI century”. Thanks to Picketti and other large scientists, attention to the topic of inequality is no longer a marker of socialist views.

This year, on September 19–20, the Moscow Center of Carnegie held at the Skolkovo conference “Russian Economis Challenge” dedicated to global inequality and its refraction in Russian realities. One of Picketti's associates at the Parisian School of Economics came to the conference - young economist Philip Novokmet.

Last year, a joint scientific article of Picketti, Novokmet and Gabriel Zukman (another specialist in French inequality), entitled "from the Soviets to oligarchs: inequality in Russia from 1905 to 2016," thundered in Russian and world media. This is a monumental study that attracts an impressive volume of various statistical and tax data to assess the dynamics of property stratification in Russia over the past 100 years.

Unlike a widely replicated report by Credit Suisse, according to which 1% of Russians owns 75% of all national wealth, the work of French economists is based on a more solid methodology and contains less hypothetical assumptions (what can we say about Rosstat, the approach of which many economists consider hopelessly outdated).

Of greatest interest for the authors of the article is the last quarter of the 20th century - the period of transit from the planned economy to the market system. Their main conclusion is that the collapse of the USSR and a spasmodic transition to the market led to a “big explosion” in the field of economic inequality.

Russia suffered from “shock therapy” much more than any other post -communist country, including even China, where the changes were more smooth.

After the dismantling of the Soviet system, aimed at forced alignment of income, the upper 10% of the salaries of Russians began to grow increased pace, while the life standards of the more poor half of the population in real terms were reduced (we are talking about data for 1989-2015). As a result, rapprochement in income levels felt only a smaller part of the population. This traumatic experience of the 1990s is associated with the rejection of large-scale reforms in the general population, which has still been preserved.

“Russian capitalism almost does not put restrictions on great states. It is very close to the United States, where there is a mantra of economic growth only for the richest, ”explained Novokmet. In modern Russia, there is a high differentiation of the population by income: the share of 1% in national income is 20–25% - at the US level and China, but still less than in Latin America.

But with the distribution of capital, things are much worse. “All studies confirm that the highest inequality of wealth here is Russia the absolute champion, the rest of the countries is far behind. How much money the richest Russians hold abroad - from $ 800 billion to $ 1 trillion - is comparable to the wealth of all Russians within the country, ”said Sergey Guriev, the chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

A particularly high concentration of wealth is observed at the very top - at the level of 0.1% of the population. “In modern capitalism, inequality is arranged according to the principle of nesting dolls: no matter what unit you take - the upper 10% or upper 1% - there will always be a giant gap inside it. Resources are concentrated in the very tail of any of these sub -assembly, ”says Grigory Yudin.

In addition, Russia is characterized by extremely strong geographical differentiation of regions in terms of living standards. “Sitting in Moscow, we actually live in Europe, while other regions are on other continents,” said the new rector Rash Ruben Enikolopov. Therefore, the only way to get a statistically reliable picture of the middle Russian life is to simply exclude the capital from assessments.

Political economy of inequality

In economic science, there is no consensus on how social inequality is associated with economic growth. The basic hypothesis states that the development of the economy is often accompanied by a certain increase in inequality, but nothing more. Some derive a direct causal relationship from this observation: supposedly, it is high inequality that ensures the growth of prosperity, and any struggle with it leads to socialism and poverty. However, economists in their conclusions are much more careful. They begin by distinguishing many types of inequality that affects economic growth in different ways: inequality of opportunities, income, property, reputation, subjective inequality, etc.

The most harmful is the lower inequality of opportunities when people cannot realize their talents due to different starting conditions (gender, race or social origin). For example, when gifted children from poor families are not able to get a good education and find themselves in a “poverty trap”.

This unhealthy situation is opposed to “fair inequality”, or inequality of outcomes: you work more - you get more. The inequality of outcomes follows from the presence of market incentives, which are believed to be an obligatory component of economic growth. “Bad” inequality, not related to personal efforts, on the contrary, erects barriers to the development of the economy.

Why do ruling elites do nothing to reduce “bad” inequality, because it should be beneficial to increase the common pie? “An independent and self -confident middle class reduces the likelihood of maintaining power. The oligarchs, finding themselves in a competitive environment, often cannot realize themselves. In such a situation, your share is enough for you in a stagnant economy, ”Sergey Guriev explained the main paradox of modern political economy.

In the long run, the biggest problem with inequality is associated with the seizure of institutions - even if the elites really deserve their wealth, all rational incentives push them to fix their position and exclude competition, Ruben Enicolopes agreed. Especially low tolerance to competition is observed in modes based on access to rent.

Economist Andrei Movchan identified two ways to respond to inequality: the struggle to eliminate injustice through collective action or an attempt to use privileges in his favor.

“If we look at Russian polls, we will see that the mass choice is made in favor of the second option: parents want their children to become security forces, students dream of working in Gazprom, etc.,” Movchan believes.

The fact that most people prefer to fight for a place in the sun, and not to change the unfair system, allows the authorities to manage society even with an overwhelming level of inequality. In Russia, inequality is not legitimate, but due to the lack of faith in the collective action, it is felt as incorrigible, the sociologist Grigory Yudin adds.

Now all countries, including countries of the so -called Scandinavian socialism, are faced with the problem of the growth of property stratification. But somewhat relatively successful examples show that in addition to the nightmare of most economists - the total “equalization” that distorts incentives for competition - there are more subtle institutional systems and tools of economic policy that allow you to smooth out inequality. In particular, pickets with co-authors by comparing different trajectories of post-communist transit shows that a sharp boom in the inequalities that occurred in Russia in the 1990s was not at all inevitable condition for the transition to the market.

The most effective and “neutral” methods of combating inequality include developed social security systems and a variety of progressive taxes: property tax, tax on income from capital, and especially inheritance tax. “The progressive inheritance tax should have a high step - for example, receiving the amount of 100 million rubles in inheritance, you pay 30%. This will reduce social stress, ”said Konstantin Sonin, professor at the University of Chicago. “Now is the right time for such measures: Russian oligarchs are just approaching 60 years.”

The progressive scale of income tax in the list of optimal solutions is not included, since it reduces motivation for work and it is more difficult to collect it, but it can be used for ideological purposes, the economist added. The approach associated with the unconditional basic income may be promising, but to expand such an experiment on full scale, so far, not even developed by developed countries.

Efficiency against democracy

Today, even economists of right -handed views pay a lot of attention to the issue of inequality, since there is a large gap between the rich and the poor, no matter how objective its origin leads to the surge of populism and the crisis of representative democracy. As Sonin explained, mainly economists in inequality are worried about two things: the loss of efficiency and the factor of social destabilization.

“Historical experience shows: the poor at some point cease to believe the elites ( *that the system is fair, and they simply do not try to get rich enough.- *A.Kh. ), Burn the presidential palace, and all this can end with a civil war.”

Or, in the best case, the people will vote in the elections for populist politics, which, like a civil conflict, adversely affects the growth of GDP.

Despite the high productivity of economic discussions about inequality, this approach has a number of restrictions. The problem is that between the criteria of economic efficiency and social justice, an insurmountable conflict usually exists. Most often, the economist, without hesitation, makes a choice in favor of the first. But what about the fact that the imperative of economic growth can be subjectively perceived by people as unfair? It is impossible to force the American miner to come to terms with the fact that the Google developer should earn ten times more than him, because these are the needs of the modern economy.

The main argument of the defenders of the market system is that, despite the growth of inequality, the poverty level in the world over the past 30 years has been radically reduced. 200 years ago, most of humanity generally lived in extreme poverty. If the wave lifts all the boats, then what's the difference that some of them rise much higher than others? But for some reason it turns out that there is a difference. Although the American poor man by world standards is a rather wealthy person, from this he no less acutely feels the injustice surrounding him.

“Poverty, as we know since the first social laws in industrial England, is a social phenomenon,” says Grigory Yudin. “People are poor not because they do not reach some kind of arbitrarily established subsistence level, but because they exist in a certain poverty culture: they have no motivation to develop, they are isolated, etc.”. Poverty is relative, which means that even multiple GDP growth will not make people happy if 99% of this increase gets 1% of the population.

“A person by nature feels uncomfortable when a handful of people concentrates all economic resources and deprives him of political power on his own land,” summarizes Yudin. An alternative to a narrower approach, focused on achieving statistical indicators as an end in itself, to admit that the fight against inequality is a political project, and not a technical problem. But at this stage of the discussion about inequality, few are ready to make such a bet.