Andrey Movchan: “In the fight between the sword and the gum, I am on the side of civilization. "From an economic point of view, the fact that they simply steal, in general, does not really mean anything"
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That is, there will be no steps towards an innovative economy, which Dmitry Medvedev loved to talk about when he was president?
There will be no steps for many reasons. I have named only one. The second is that the Russian power vertical is built on a deal between the government and the pyramid of government, the essence of which is, if you will, in the slogan "loyalty in exchange for rights." Members of the "vertical" receive the right to disregard the laws and rights of people who are not included in the vertical and lower in the vertical, and the interests of society. If we start taking away these rights now, then the loyalty of governors, mayors, officials, and security officials will instantly go away. And this is very dangerous for the authorities, because if these officials do not have incentives to support the central government, then we will very quickly get classical feudal fragmentation. Or even a new government that will be able to confirm the old contract.
There will be no reforms also because there is no order from the population. For him, reforms are the "dashing 90s", bandits, poverty, unemployment, a drop in all economic indicators. Explain that the situation in the 90s is a consequence of the collapse of the USSR, which was predetermined by the very essence of the socialist system, that the reforms of the 90s not only saved the country from a civil war, but also 20 years later in 2014-16 it was thanks to them that Russia experienced the oil shock and survived - it's useless, no one is listening. Another reason - no one knows how to do reforms in our country. Who should do them - to hire "Varangians" from abroad? Russians are afraid of foreigners, as in the days before Ivan the Terrible, we have our own way again. Where can I find such people who have the relevant knowledge and work experience? Not to invite Balcerovich - they will definitely be accused of trying to sell Russia to America!<...>
- What is the historical role of Russia, if it exists at all?
I doubt that the concept of "historical role" makes sense at all. Any country modern world there can be only one positive role - to provide its citizens with a high and constantly growing standard of living, comfort and security, and, whenever possible, mutually beneficial cooperation with other countries. In my opinion, Russia missed its historic chance to become one of the world leaders in the quality of life of its citizens. A chance that really existed after the 1991 revolution and was still preserved in the early 2000s. Now the country is going into a dead end, and society is quickly adapting to this dead end, not only agreeing with it, but also starting to block any objections. We are driving ourselves into a trap of lies - the idea of abandoning material progress is becoming more and more popular because of our alleged moral superiority over the West. But in practice, in terms of crime, the number of abortions and divorces, drug addicts and alcoholics, domestic violence and child mortality, we are orders of magnitude ahead of the West, and in terms of book circulation and the amount of charity we are radically lagging behind.
Another 10-15 years, and the chance for the withdrawal of Russia within its present borders and with the present structure of society into the "major league" will be lost forever. Perhaps there will not be a country called "Russia" in this place by the end of the XXI century, but there will be something else.
The well-known Russian economist Andrei Movchan gave a long interview to Story magazine on a rather unusual topic for himself: the forecast of the future of world civilization. The forecast is the forecast, but the conversation immediately shifted to modern Russia, about which the same Movchan the other day in a completely different, serious economic publication "Harvard Business Review - Russia" wrote:
“By 2018, a conditionally feudal system based on the production of hydrocarbons had developed in Russia, just like feudal systems late Middle Ages were based on the agrarian economy. This system has a significant margin of safety: high oil prices protect it from internal disturbances, and the presence of nuclear weapons restrains external pressure. Apparently, this system is able to maintain stability even in the face of failure foreign policy and falling into a situation of foreign policy isolation ... "
It was on the basis of this position that the economist predicted in his interview two ways of Russia's development in the near future, and only then made an interesting forecast for all of mankind. Novye Izvestia cites Movchan's most interesting thoughts, expressed in this interview:
Russia's lag behind the West
Russia lags culturally and ethically behind the developed West by about 50-70 years. If you look at America in the middle of the last century, at Britain in the middle of the last century, you will see that exactly what is happening now in Russia took place there. And the processes that took place there - from the moment when a black man cannot sit next to a white man in a bus, to a black man of the country's president - happened evolutionarily, without any revolution. The negroes did not take power into their own hands, the prophet did not appear, who stretched out his hands, and everyone fell on their faces. It was a completely evolutionary process of the development of society. Which happened for natural reasons. And we will have it.
So our today's Russian savagery is not geographic, not national, not cultural, not confessional. This is the "correct" wildness of a purely temporal nature. And we display all the same qualities that we showed the developed countries 50-70 years ago - intolerance, aggression, striving for self-affirmation. The same discourse, the same narrative, the same value system.
Bad scenario for Russia
What will happen to Russia? If what is happening now continues - and this can drag on for a very long time - Russia in a hundred years will become a stateless country that has completely left the technology market and the world labor distribution market, having tenths of a percent of world GDP. Such countries exist, they are internally unstable, but, in general, they live somehow ... This scenario also assumes the possibility of dissolution - Siberia, leaving in the direction of China, the formation in the European part of a small state that will gravitate towards the European Union ... After all, Russia is too large geographically and too loose to be tied by any single economic core. Now it binds oil. Because the funds from its sale by the center are distributed to the regions, which only in this way depend on the center. And oil in a hundred years will not be an energy resource, this is already quite clear. Chemical - maybe, but not energetic for sure! Oil is becoming a thing of the past after coal, losing ground. And as soon as this happens, everything will start to burst, because nothing more binds Russia. There are practically no cultural ties, in Vladivostok they say “here in Beijing” and “here in Moscow”. They already have a different picture of recreation, a different language of economic interactions - Chinese. If in Moscow a person who knows Chinese is a pleasant exotic, then in Vladivostok it is a necessity.
And in the middle, Russia is generally cut national republics who even have a different religion. It is more logical for them to gravitate towards other centers of power. I'm not saying that there will be a war of independence, some Tatarstan may well be formally part of a federation, but at the same time openly send Moscow, and ask what to do, from Saudi Arabia or United Arab Emirates... And this is the first scenario ...
About a good scenario for Russia
I would call the second scenario the "South Korean turn" or, if you like, the "Japanese turn" - with a radical change in the structure and the beginning of active interaction with Europe, for which Russia could be vital and even salvific from the point of view of revitalizing the European Union. After all, Russia is almost 25% of the population of the European Union, a huge territory, minerals, which are few in Europe, the closure of some production cycles. Moreover, the population is quite educated, which fits well into European life. A language close to German-Romance - Russians easily learn European languages, but unlike Asian ones. Finally, an absolutely European culture. In this case, not only Russia will receive a lot from the European Union, but also the European Union from Russia - fresh blood, space, a transport corridor Southeast Asia - Europe, along which it will be possible to build logistics and production ...
If this option is implemented, we will get a completely different picture of the world. The European Union, which includes Russia, will have over a billion people. Geographically, it will be the largest united territory in the world with access to two great oceans - the Pacific and the Atlantic - just like it is now in America. Such an education can become the most powerful economic structure in the world!
In addition, the world is gradually moving towards robotization - more and more. And robotization is removing the key advantage of Southeast Asia - cheap labor from the global labor distribution system. They have a lot of cheap labor, but this cheap labor is gradually becoming unnecessary. And this means that not those who can work on the machine will win, but those who can create a robot. And robots are created by engineers, and engineers in Russia are not bad. We know how to train engineers.
Koreans twenty years ago could not do anything, but now they do everything, their cars are cool. For a country like ours, 15-20 years is the normal turnaround time. During this time, it is possible to recreate schools, during which time the generation of 15-year-olds becomes the generation of 35-year-olds, that is, the basis of the entire system. We have not lost everything yet, and if it is not completely launched, if a turn begins in the 1920s, we will survive.
In addition, if we enter into such a powerful alliance, if we manage to agree and normally associate with NATO systems, we will remove the huge problem associated with the military load, which is now simply unbearable. After all, we spend too much on defense and security - more than on the entire medical support system. And the freed up money, human resources and technological capabilities can be used for the development of the country. We, of course, will not stop arming at all, but not on such a scale and now in cooperation ...
Here is a second scenario for you, in which the Russia of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren is part of the largest world union - the European one. And the part is respected, because everyone understands what she brought to this union important elements, practically saved him from stagnation.
On the benefits of robotization
One of the main trends, from which it is necessary to build on, is a decrease in the cost of labor and the need for it. Plus a change in the labor profile. Now dog hairdressers, interior designers and psychotherapists have come to replace telephone operators and operators (who used to manage the various processes that are now controlled by computers). The freed people did not join the army of the unemployed, but mastered new occupations in connection with new needs. And today we use dozens of different specialists who simply did not exist two hundred years ago. Moreover, all of them have one feature - they work in creative professions.
As for the production ... If it doesn't matter where to have a workshop for assembling iPhones, since robots do not need to pay, then why have it in China - so that later these iPhones can be taken to America from there? We will deliver in America! Therefore, China, as the center of the southeastern empire, will have to create its own consumer market. This means that in a hundred years we will have three large unions - European, American and Chinese. This will become the main trading triangle.
But robotization will go further and further, and the value of capital will increase. If you own robots, you are a rich man. If you don't own robots, you must be a good professional in non-robotic fields. And this will be the second estate. And the third estate is the bulk of people without special talent, who cannot apply their labor and will live on a basic income and reproduce the population. It will be such a three-estate world - robot owners, talent owners, and fixed income consumers. Moreover, geographically income will be distributed more or less evenly, since what is the difference, Africa or Europe? But when it comes to personal income, the inequality will be much greater than it is now. Not in the sense that the poor will become poorer. No, they will become much richer than today's poor. And the fact is that the difference in the opportunities of the owner of capital and the recipient of the basic income will be much greater, since many new expensive opportunities will be created - the opportunity to live longer, for example, the opportunity to live in attractive places.
Communication systems are improving so much that the concentration of people who are in active interaction will need less and less.
The drop in income will be enormous. But on the other hand, the main burden is in providing living wage for the population will fall on the owners of capital, unlike today, when it falls on skilled labor. Today, the tax on capital is about 20%, and the tax on skilled labor, that is, on ordinary working people, reaches 50%. This situation will unfold. The owners of capital, that is, robotic complexes, will pay more, and people who receive money for their work may stop paying taxes altogether. What is the point of taking taxes from them, it is more important to motivate them to work, especially since there is someone to pay taxes - capital will cover all the needs for budget revenues... Robots in this sense are the future oil. Why do we have in Russia income tax only 13%? Because everything else is covered in oil.
Oil is not universal. Oil is just oil. Oil cannot be an iPhone, a child's toy, an airplane. And robots produce all goods, including robots, this is a universal resource, moreover, distributed around the world more evenly than oil fields. The only thing that robots will not be able to produce for a long time is an intellectual, creative product.
About the same robots that are already being built. And so we can say that they are a new universal resource that will change the world in the sense that taxes on labor will be reduced, and taxes on capital will rise. By the way, the fact that robots are not mined, but produced, and this can be done distributed and anywhere, means that robots, as a resource, cannot be usurped and on this basis, usurp power, as happened in Russia with oil and power. In this sense, robots are a benign resource that contributes to the growth of democracy. And that is why I am calm about the fate of the world, this world of the future looks better than the world of today. It is similar to Ancient Greece, where robots replaced slaves. And Greece is a flourishing of culture and art, a lot of fundamentally new things for humanity have been created there.
On the structure of the society of the future
The first and simplest line of their occupation is to be idle people. They will consume their basic income and have fun, drink beer, raise children, walk dogs, go to picnics, go to the seaside a couple of times a year, play computers and live in virtual spaces ...
The second area of self-employment that I see is social affairs. Volunteer work will be greatly expanded. Our planet needs a huge amount of volunteer work, which neither governments nor companies seeking to make a profit can do. A huge number of people will not want to spend their lives working for money, so they will, content with the basic minimum, seek and find useful missions for themselves, since a person tends to fill his life with meaning. Garbage disposal, planting trees, helping people with disabilities ...
The third direction is everything that makes up for the lack of communications. People want to communicate. There will be professions associated with this - club organizers, animators, lecturers, consultants on nothing, social workers ... There will be more teachers, as the world moves towards smaller classes - 30, 20, 10 people per class. And then there will be 3-4. This also includes professions that reveal the individual abilities of children and adolescents, who carry out correction at an early age, because the world must finally get rid of crime. After all, crime is a product of psychological trauma that must be stopped from an early age. In general, regarding psychotherapy, I would not be surprised if each person has their own psychotherapist.
The world will invent dozens of social professions to keep people busy. More precisely, they themselves will invent. What they will be, now it is impossible to predict, just as it was impossible to predict the appearance of the iPhone in 1900. Although everyone understood that communication systems would develop! But what concrete they will result in, only the future can show.
About a united world empire
In any case, we are moving towards a united world empire. The culture will become common. This merger has been going on for a long time. Look, the whole world is lined with Indian restaurants that use chili peppers, but chili peppers come from Latin America... And in doing so, he has become an integral part of Indian cuisine. Pelmeni are integral parts of Russian food, although it is a Chinese dish. Buckwheat is considered a traditional Russian food, although it is native to Nepal. And now this convergence of cultures is going faster and faster. The world is being integrated into a single empire, in which English becomes a single world language, culture is a mixture of Anglo-Saxon-Chinese interspersed with minor regional cultures.
Already in Moscow restaurants of Russian cuisine occupy the fourth or fifth place in terms of distribution. Restaurants of Italian, Japanese, Central Asian, Chinese cuisine are in the lead. We shout about braces and identity, but they themselves have stopped eating their own food. We listen to other people's songs, 30% of words in Russian were borrowed during the twentieth century, and 50% - during the last two hundred years. What the hell is originality!
So united empire- not in the sense of the presence of an emperor in it, but an empire in the cultural sense - cannot be avoided. This is a general powerful trend that has been going on for many thousands of years. Empire is the highest form of building a society. The world was swelling with empires here and there, and they were limited only by communication systems. Now the world is one and connected, it can be crossed in 24 hours by plane and reach any point - a ready-made place for a global empire!
Empire is a huge cultural machine that propels civilization forward. Only if two thousand years ago it was created by fire and sword, now it is created by chewing gum and iPhones. Today, the backward periphery is trying to fight off the empire with fire and sword. And in this fight between sword and gum, I am on the side of civilization.
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According to the latest statistics, the decline Russian economy continues. True, the pace of this decline has somewhat slowed down compared to last year. On whether to expect a quick economic recovery, what can serve as drivers GDP growth And how long the crisis will last, Andrei Movchan, director of the Economic Policy program at the Carnegie Moscow Center, told us.
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- By the end of January, the decline in GDP in Russia slowed down to 2.5% per year. At the end of 2015, it was 3.7%. What is behind these numbers: the Russian economy has begun to revive, or are these some statistical tricks?
— In my opinion, there is nothing behind these figures, since it is generally impossible to keep track of monthly changes in GDP - this is a statistically unreliable value. And it will be recalculated and refined many times due to seasonal factors. Let's still consider the annual indicators.
- Let's. According to all forecasts, the decline in Russia will continue this year. Only specific figures differ: the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade says about minus 0.8% at the end of 2016, the IMF - about minus 1.5%, the consensus forecast of the HSE is minus 1.5%. What's your prediction?
— Making forecasts is a thankless task, since GDP is made up of a large number different manageable and not very components. For example, if the state at some point orders 10 thousand new tanks, this will greatly increase the GDP, but it will not mean that the economy has grown stronger. Therefore, it is difficult to say whether we will end up with minus 0.5%, minus 1.5% or minus 2.5%. This largely depends on whether the state will conduct unsecured emission - that is, print more or less money without adequate reserve or commodity support. It also, of course, depends on the oil price. It is more or less expected that our GDP will fall, and its quality will continue to deteriorate. Oil exports, consumption, and industry are declining. The country is in recession and no one denies it. And we will calculate specific figures for the year.
- How long will the current crisis in Russia last, and what can be considered the time of its end?
— And our crisis has already ended. We had a crisis associated with a fall in oil prices, a rather severe shock, and the economy was in an imbalance for some time. Now she is again in a balanced state, albeit at a lower level. What you call a crisis is actually a structural recession. This is a unidirectional movement, not a temporary phenomenon. Our initially unsustainable economy was fueled by drug oil money in the early 2000s. And, slowly dying, she continued to exist due to this drug. Having lost it now, she survived the withdrawal, but this did not become viable. In order for it to live, it must be very strongly reformed.
- And yet, are there any prerequisites for economic downturn in the Russian Federation was replaced by growth? How much can this help anti-crisis plan government that was born in such pain?
— The current anti-crisis plan does not look like a bailout. Roughly speaking, it looks like a bottle of beer in the morning after a stormy party. The oil money that entered the country was not used properly, did not ensure the growth of the economy, which eventually became archaized and became ineffective. And now the entire anti-crisis project is reduced, in essence, to the intention to pour in some money supply into the same old trough. Of course, if the alcohol lover feels bad after the party, you can give him some beer to wake him up. And what to do with it next? There are no answers to this question. Another government program, developed after the recent forum in Krasnoyarsk, very accurately describes our problems, but it does not contain a word about what exactly needs to be done to solve them. It seems to me that everyone is afraid to openly say out loud what we have too high risks for the development of the economy. This is the main problem. We need to make investors want to invest, entrepreneurs want to do it. But risk reduction without the most powerful restructuring of the entire management system state economy will not happen.
- Indeed, according to statistics, both external and domestic investment... Perhaps in these conditions the state will assume the role of the main investor?
—
No state is simply physically capable of playing this role. It is impossible to effectively manage the development of the economy by administrative methods. Moreover, our state cannot play this role. He doesn't have that much money yet. We have a budget deficit in the region of 3-5% of GDP, and the need to cut spending. Our state has already played enough in investments, convincingly proving that all of its financial investments have an efficiency equal to minus 100%. Look at the state of VEB, at the state of Rusnano, at GLONASS, which is now shyly silent about, at the Power of Siberia. The state should not be able to make investments. It should create conditions, and investments will come by themselves. Russian citizens have more than a trillion dollars in European banks, which is comparable to the size of the annual GDP. The state does not even have such an amount. And at foreign investors even more money. Domestically, Russians hold about a quarter trillion dollars. Imagine that they would like, under appropriate conditions, to translate them into real economy... They would invest in the construction of bakeries, small factories, and start producing, say, tubes for droppers and medical beds. Then this quarter of a trillion would multiply in the economy, and then would go to pay wages, consumption, and so on. The state is not an investor, it should be a regulator, and a good one. In an extreme case, the state can become an assistant, partial creditor, guarantor - but not an initiator or shareholder.
- We talk a lot about structural reforms - if Russia does not start them in the very near future, then it will inevitably fall into the category of third world countries. Your opinion?
— We are already in this category in all respects - in the region of Vietnam, Thailand and the Dominican Republic. In terms of per capita GDP - somewhere in the eighth ten countries, in terms of average income of the population - in the ninth ten, in terms of private sector GDP per person - somewhere in 115th - 116th place. We only continue to deceive ourselves with the fact that we have the 15th or 16th economy in the world in terms of GDP.
As for structural reforms, one must clearly understand that for some time they will only worsen the situation. They cannot, relatively speaking, give you a positive effect overnight. It's like renovating an apartment - the result may be wonderful, but your home will temporarily be in a dilapidated state. Now we have much less funds and patience for reforms than ten years ago, when there were oil revenues. And then, according to global practice, the average return period even to the pre-reform level is five to six years. Look at Poland - this is a canonical example of the successful implementation of structural reforms. The country was in failure for five to six years, and then it grew twice as fast as Russia. I am afraid that the Russian authorities simply do not have the credit of confidence for a sharp deterioration in the situation for such a period. She constantly instills in the population that she has achieved stability, that the current recession is slow, calm, without shocks, without fundamental changes, with care for the large dependent sector, which is already used to getting money from the state just like that. It is for this that our power is loved. If suddenly at the top they say that now we will break everything here, raise taxes, that you will have minus 15% of GDP, that you will have to look for work, I am afraid that there will be no trace of the current rating of the authorities. But if we do go for it, then in six to eight years we will see the results of the reforms. At least the road to growth will be cleared. Russia has great potential on which to build a good economy.
- But in any case, it is necessary to move away from the raw material model of the economy. We cannot endlessly sit on the "oil needle"?
— It's not obvious. Even today we have a positive trade balance. And although GDP per capita in Russia is only 8 thousand dollars a year, and in 2017 it may be 7.6 thousand dollars, and then 6 thousand, any fall has a natural limit. If some catastrophe does not happen (which is quite possible), at some point the situation will stabilize, and the economy will continue to exist in an archaic and ineffective form. People will continue to eat, go to the hairdresser, and ride something - even if by trolley, not by car. For the Russian economy, 5.5-6 thousand dollars per person is a fairly equilibrium level. Thank goodness we still have market pricing, market price ruble, and they adapt the economy.
The raw model itself, if you manage to avoid cataclysms such as collapse banking system, infrastructure or clashes of elites, a fairly stable future, we will live with it quietly for another 50-70 years. It is possible that we will have new types of resource income. For example, they will start transporting goods from China to Europe and back through us. We will be able to charge transit money, like our ancestors in the 13th-9th centuries. Or use the territory of Siberia for the disposal of nuclear and other waste. And, gradually creating a three-five-factor model of purely state socialized income, we can be in this state for a very long time. It will be poverty, but stable poverty.
- There are still some drivers for economic growth in Russia? Can import substitution, defense industry play this role, or can we only hope for a spontaneous rise in oil prices?
— Structural reforms are painful, but the only truly serious driver. A driver is an investment attraction. Defense will not save - it is not attractive for animation, the state invests in it centrally. We now sell $ 10 billion in arms a year, a small change compared to our $ 250 billion export. If we, suppose, start selling for 20 billion, nothing will change: a different scale is needed. For example, China's trade volume with South Korea- 300 billion dollars a year.
The same goes for Agriculture... Its share in GDP is only 3%. We don't have some magic business that will make us rich. For a country like ours, conditions are needed for dozens, maybe hundreds different types businesses that will develop. Then we can talk about stable economic growth.