Ideas and Ideals

The author focuses his attention on life and research activities in 1965-1973. He characterizes lecturing in Novosibirsk State University. The author draws special attention to a student research group and the conflict with the administration of the Institute of Economics and Novosibirsk State University because of a “wall newspaper” prepared by the student research group at the end of the 1960-s, which became the reason for his leaving the University. The author describes the content of a doctorate thesis (a dissertation for the degree of a candidate of sciences) on the problems of planning in the Soviet economy and also he shows its innovative character. The paper presents the discussion of the dissertation at the Novosibirsk State University and the Higher Attestation Commission (HAC) and also gives the reasons for rejecting the dissertation by HAC. The author explains his motivation for turning to studying stock exchanges and presents the essence of his doctoral thesis on stock exchanges. The paper also examines the research climate at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the USSR Academy of Sciences at that period. The author outlines the content of work at the Systems Research Institute and describes the team of the Foreign Economic Relations Laboratory of the Systems Research Institute as well as the interaction with the State Committee on Foreign Economic Relations. Much attention is paid to the work of the Institute of Economics of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, its leadership and team. The author also describes social atmosphere in the USSR and Academgorodok at that period, explains the reaction of the former government to 1968 events in Czechoslovakia and tightening of the political regime in the USSR after these events. The author touches upon the life conditions in Academgorodok at that period and describes his friendship with some researchers.

The paper continues the author's series of publications on the history of colonization and development of Siberia and analysis of its current socio-economic situation and development prospects. The author reveals the influence of institutions on the dynamics of demographic and socio-economic processes. Having compared the development of Siberia and Canada in the long-term retrospective, the author shows how formal governance institutions influence on the population migration and success of socio-economic development in these countries. The processes of development and colonization in Siberia and Canada observed in the early twentieth century were mostly determined by natural resource factors and their economic and geographical location. This is why these processes took place on a parallel track. Siberia was a leader in the speed of colonization, especially in agricultural development of the territory, since it had an overland route and fewer alternatives for migration. In the twentieth century the development models of these mega-regions varied, and this has affected all aspects of their life. The development of natural resources in Siberia in the time of the Soviet Union went through several stages, some of which were accompanied by a sharp drop in living standards and resulted in human losses. The periods of the forced industrial development were followed by periods of stagnation and out migration. The specifics of the Siberian institutional and governance patterns have repeatedly led to the centralization and monopolization of its economy. In the post-soviet time this resulted in a spot character of the development of natural resources and in the strengthened raw material specialization of Siberia. Such a model of development of Russia and organization of its budget have brought negative demographic consequences and stagnation of domestic market in this megaregion. These challenges are advisable to be considered in forming development programs for Siberia and its parts.

The purpose of the study is to identify and compare the revealed theoretical approaches to the moral economy in order to substantiate the fundamental foundations of the integrative anthroposocial approach. Closely interrelated moral anthropic origin and moral social order are given as such foundations. The subject of the study is the existing approaches to the moral economy. The study is a theoretical analysis of the approaches to the moral economy, united by the author in two aggregated schools– anthropic-moral and socio-economic. The research methodology is the integrated approach for a comprehensive examination of the subject; general scientific principles of complementarity, diversity and unity. The results of the study, which constitute the scientific novelty: 1) it is revealed that there are the corresponding concepts of a moral person – Homo moralis – in all approaches reviewed, and it allows to establish the moral anthropic origin as the first foundation of the moral economy; 2) in the analyzed approaches, the main forms of sociality are revealed and characterized, functioning as “village community”, “religious community”, “Orthodox labour brotherhood”, “social institution”, which allow to define moral social order as the second foundation of the moral economy. The theoretical and practical significance of the study is that by identifying and comparing the existing approaches to the moral economy, its anthroposocial nature is defined 1) as the effective economic activity of a new person of high moral character; 2) as a set of intersubject economic relations based on the ideas of moral humanism. As a result, it becomes possible to compare existing approaches to the moral economy, when there is a person in its centre who respects humanistic morality in interpersonal relations of the economy of the society.

K. Marx fragmentarily presented the theory of industrial cycles in “Capital”, which investigated the formation and development of capitalism up to the maturing of free competition. A brief review of this theory shows that J. Schumpeter’s criticism is superficial. K. Marx did not deduce the mathematical laws of crises. The present paper partially fills this gap for the state-monopoly capitalism on the basis of the laws of surplus value and monopoly profit. Two models are considered, the transition from the first TM-2 to the second TM-2m is an ascent from the abstract to the concrete.Whereas TM-2 endogenously reproduces cycles in the positive growth rate of net output, TM-2m endogenously generates industrial cycles with decreases in net output in crises. This is achieved by converting a key parameter of the automation function into a new discrete variable, depending on the excess accumulation of capital. In addition, proportional control over the rate of capital accumulation has been introduced.TM-2m allows comparing impacts of economic policies on industrial cycles and on long-term trends in the US economy depending on a target rate of capital accumulation chosen by the State and financial capital in distinct scenarios.In 2018, the crisis will start, opening the next industrial cycle ending in 2025 according to scenario 1 or in 2026 according to scenario 2. The state monopoly-capitalism is entering a new period of over-production when sound economic policy becomes even more critical.

The article is devoted to the substantiation of the status of Marxism as a revolution in economic science. To achieve this goal, the author has to resolve a number of methodological difficulties associated with the interdisciplinary nature of Marxism, as revolutionary changes may relate to the philosophical, sociological, political spheres of Marxism, but do not affect the economic area. The author shows the role of the ideological filter accompanying Marxism, which for a long time did not allow to grasp an idea of authentic Marxism. In addition, Marxism in its development has gone through several stages, so you need to choose a starting point to assess its revolutionary character. In the course of the study, the author comes to the conclusion that Marxism has led to fundamental changes in economic theory, having formed an independent direction of economic thought, which remains in demand in our time. However, from the standpoint of T. Kuhn’s theory of paradigms Marxist political economy is not the result of a revolution and a new paradigm in relation to the classical political economy, but it can be considered as its continuation in the form of synthesis of ideas of classical political economy and German classical philosophy, especially Hegel dialectical method and materialistic approach to understanding the nature of social relations, suggested by L. Feuerbach. However, the theorists of Marxism evaluate it as the result of revolution in economic science, since the development through contradictions and qualitative jumps constitute the essence of Marxism.

The placement of Marx, together with Marxism, in a religious context may seem strange, at least to those people who still remember “opium for the people” and “a sigh of the oppressed creature”. There is a habit of associating the author and his teachings exclusively with the forms of scientific knowledge. However, it turns out that a more careful and consistent examination shows that despite the prevailing stereotype of the exclusively scientific identification of the Marxist doctrine, referring Marxism precisely to the religious context allows to understand its true place in history and culture. As the Russian philosopher of the Silver Age, S. N. Bulgakov, said, religion carries “the highest and last values that a person recognizes above himself and higher than himself, and that practical attitude, a human being is put in, in relation to these values”. But what are values? Values are the ultimate basis of choice and goal setting. Religion is the social form of the hierarchy of values existence. The article substantiates the thesis that the genesis of Marxism was the product of a complex collision in a general cultural process that embraced philosophy, science, and religion in their interrelation. The features of the interaction of these cultural phenomena in a certain social context explain the culturological features of religion, which are inherent in Marxism.

The paper analyzes K. Marx’s theoretical heritage from the modern standpoints, especially regarding his political and economic works. The author tries to answer the question – why his ideas were popular in the past and remain popular at present. The author discusses K. Marx’s scientific program and paradigm and shows that his scientific program fundamentally differs from those of other leading economists of the first half of the 19th century and his paradigm – from that of classical economics. Marxism created his own original paradigm which combined elements of classical economies and historical school. The paper also shows how K. Marx’s scientific program and some basic elements of his economic theory influence the works of scientists working within alternative schools. The author presents his critical notes to several elements of K. Marx’s theory, namely his historical concept, sociology, and especially, political economy. The author pays special attention to the terms used by K. Marx which allow making ambiguous conclusions and avoiding the critics. The author highlights the influence of Marx’s works on the choice of the subject and statement of problems made by researchers of neoclassical, Austrian, and institutional schools of economics. A major achievement of Marxism is that K. Marx states the problem of how modern bourgeois societies emerge, develop, and die as well as their institutional systems which define the economic dynamics and distribution of public wealth. The way how the Marxists explain economic processes (such as dynamics of prices, profits, and incomes, cyclical patterns of production development, and many others) as well as theories of historical dynamics, why states rise and fall, class structure of societies, and inefficiency of decentralized market economies have not been verified. However, at present K. Marx’s works are very attractive due to the ambiguity of his criticism of bourgeois society and, above all, an aphoristic nature and emotionality of his works. The reason for this is an integrated character of K. Marx’s political, economic, sociohistorical, and even ideological and psychological doctrine. As compared to Marx’s doctrine, modern science is comprised of specialized sectors and, therefore, it is less attractive and understandable.

The article analyzes the phenomenon of cryptocurrency. The authors reconstruct three versions of its creation: 1) it is a scam in the spirit of the Mavrodi pyramids, 2) it is new money that allows to earn adequately, 3) a conspiracy version. The authors sort out the myths about cryptocurrency. Namely, that money must necessarily be provided by gold or the economy of the country, and also be material (visible and perceived). Today, money is not provided with anything, and the "materiality" of money lies in their importance and efficiency. In this case, the authors characterize the efficiency with the help of four classical functions of money: money as a measure of value, a means of circulation, accumulation, and a means of payment. In addition to these functions, two more are singled out: money as a social institution and money as a tool for regulating economic relations. Cryptocurrency in its functions and structure is correlated with the sphere and functions of conventional money. The conventional money and cryptocurrency are two different systems of principles and conditions. In the first system, the state and elites are interested in manipulating conventional money and therefore created financial and other institutions that guard these manipulations. In the second one - financial institutions and consumer societies are still developing, but, in terms of their principles, they look like opponents of the first system. The authors suggest a hypothesis that the idea of creating cryptocurrency is to block manipulations with conventional money (their source is the state, economic and financial elites). With further improvement, as well as the disappearance of feverish demand, the cryptocurrency is likely to be able to more or less effectively perform the first four classical functions of money, and it wasn’t supposed to provide the other two functions (if we are talking about the existing system of management, economy and supporting social institutions). The paper considers different variants of the development of cryptocurrency and the possible interrelationships of crypto-communities with the state. The authors come to the conclusion that the victory of the state over the crypto-communities is not predetermined, both because of the crisis of modern civilization and its institutions, and the lack of control over these communities by the state.

Fundamental goal-setting of the functioning of economic systems is manifested in the intention for the sustainable development in the environment which is represented by “chaos” and is filled with uncertainty and the fundamental goal-setting is limited to “fundamental stochasticity” and “fundamental instability”. This feature stimulates the development of theoretical and practical aspects of new control mechanisms which include robust control that is a control configured to dampen uncertainty in an application to open systems. The article considers the development of the concept of robust control of economic systems in the continuum of fundamental paradigms “subject-object”, “subject-subject” and “subject-polysubjective environment” which determine the evolutionary view of control. The research is aimed at revealing the changing environment of the functioning of economic entities and developing models of reflexive and robust control of their interaction.             The model of market (polysubjective) environment used in the analysis takes into account the chaos and uncertainty and reflects the fundamental characteristics of the behavior of market participants: the existence of different pictures of subjective perception of the surrounding reality, the need for decision-making in the conditions of uncertainty, the emergence of reflexive processes that accompany the interaction of market actors. The methodology of introdu robust control into the polysubjective environment is based on the approach to structuring a reflexively active method, where the business situation, regarded as the carrier of uncertainty, and the elementary organizational structure, is the "subject-subject" interaction as its elementary organizational structure. The action in the context of "subject-subject" is determined by the generated model of reflexive control, which differs from the model of J. Soros, by the introduction of an interpreting function. It is shown that the result of interaction between economic entities is a random variable and to assess the admissibility of making a decision in the "point of agreement" it is necessary to seek compliance of the meeting result with the constraints imposed by the robust limit. The image of the process of generating control actions is represented by means of functions of reflexive governance acting within the limits of a robust limit.

The formation of human resources of a certain quality is a complex and time-consuming process. It is implemented both at the macro level (country, region, industry), and at the micro level (organization, people). The subject of the study is management relations (methodological approaches) arising in the process of shaping the quality of human resources. In the course of the research it was found out that the subject of management in the process of shaping a certain quality of human resources can be, both an individual himself/herself and the managerial staff of the organization, the country. Approaches to the formation of the quality of human resources differ at the individual, organizational and state levels, depending on the interests and needs of subjects and management objects. The object of management is the quality of human resources. It is a set of characteristics of human resources that meets the requirements that are formed in the external and internal environment of the system in the process of creating their competitive advantages. The subject of the study is management relations. Requirements for the quality of human resources are permanently changing. They are manifested at different levels: at the state level (for example, regarding the qualification level of employees and the level of productivity of their work), at the organizational level (for example, regarding the competencies of employees and the efficiency of their activities), at the individual level (as an attitude toward the process of formation and application of his/her human capital).