During three days in St. Petersburg I questioned various Russians, especially our tour guides, on the question of welfare.
In the Soviet times, every able-bodied adult worked. There were no stay-at-home parents, for example. On the other hand, if you worked the government would make sure that you had a house, food, health care, etc. On the third hand, the “house” might not be so great. One of our guides described living with her parents and brother in a “communal apartment” in which her entire family of four had one room and then shared a kitchen (“three tables”) and bathroom with two other families. “As you can imagine, the line for the bathroom could be long in the morning,” she said, “and we were very happy to get our own apartment in 1975 after 14 years on the waiting list.”
Do Russians offer a plethora of means-tested programs in which the less you earn the more subsidies you get (see “The Redistribution Recession” for an economics professor’s analysis of some of these)? No. It seems that the only government handout that is available is an actual handout of cash. Disabled? You get a “pension”. Single mother? You get a small cash subsidy. Unemployed? You get some cash. (If you continue to be unemployed you will also get training; as in the U.S., the Russian government does not subscribe to the Glengarry Glen Ross “a loser is a loser” theory of employee quality. (near the end of the video clip)) An apartment in the center of the city in a brand-new building, as some low-income families in Manhattan, Cambridge, or San Francisco might enjoy? No. A special debit card that you use to buy food? No. A different price for health insurance than what others pay? No. Once you’ve gotten the government cash you go into the market economy and buy whatever you can afford.
Note that the overall amounts of these cash handouts are small compared to what an American welfare family might get and therefore the welfare standard of living is low (though of course the standard of living for a working family outside of a major city may be quite low by American standards as well). “Your primary safety net is friends and family,” said one Russian.
Isn’t there any way for an able-bodied person to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle without working? “In our school there are mothers who stay at home if the husband has a well-paid job,” said a guide who teaches English in K-12 in what she described as a “wealthy” area. What if the mother was never married and perhaps only slightly acquainted with the father? “She can get 25 percent of his income [as child support], but once men have to pay this they will try to stop working,” she responded. Is there any limit to child support following a brief sexual encounter? The teacher/guide wasn’t sure but she didn’t personally know any women for whom single motherhood, without being preceded by a marriage, had enabled a work-free life.
[Note that the Russian 25 percent formula, if taken on a post-tax basis, would be roughly comparable to the New York or Wisconsin 17 percent of pre-tax income. If in fact there is not a limit, Russia would be unlike Germany and some other Civil Law jurisdictions. Russia would be more like U.S. states such as Massachusetts in that a woman will have a higher spending power if she has sex with a couple of high-income men compared to if she entered into a long-term marriage with a medium-income man.]
Russians with low levels of skill and education and/or who live in obscure parts of the country need Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton rather badly. According to one guide, minimum wage is only slightly over $100 per month (confirmed by CNN; compare to about $2595/month at $15/hour). An apartment in St. Petersburg, on the other hand, costs about $2000 per square meter. The same guide said that a typical apartment was about 75 square meters and therefore cost about $150,000 (i.e., about 115 years of minimum wage income if we use CNN’s numbers). How about getting a mortgage? The interest rate in rubles is typically around 14 percent.
What’s the end-result of this rather meager and extremely simple welfare system? Are people reduced to begging in the streets? Certainly there are fewer beggars in St. Petersburg than in San Francisco or Los Angeles. Compared to the U.S., it does seem as though there are more old people working in retail jobs. One gets the impression that there are quite a few Russians doing jobs that they would rather not do because they need the money.
There are also quite a few Russians dying because they need money and/or services they cannot get. Look at their life expectancy.
I guess after Snowden defecting from the US to Russia and US politicians accusing Russians of meddling in their elections – things which are clearly upside down – the time has come for the US to learn from Russia about welfare. Well, good luck with that.
In the soviet times there was a social stigma associated with people who avoided work. It was considered very shameful to be a parasite (тунеядец). I wonder if this would work in the US.
I don’t think it was a social stigma as much as a punishable offense. Worked especially well when the state denied you every job you applied for, then jailed you for being a parasite.
> No. Once you’ve gotten the government cash you go into the market economy and buy whatever you can afford.
I’m not sure that’s the best description given that heath insurance is free for users, including the unemployed. That health insurance normally only takes care of the doctors, and doesn’t pay for the drugs – except for the pensioners, who are explicitely and implicitely (price controls) subsidized.
> Do Russians offer a plethora of means-tested programs in which the less you earn the more subsidies you get
There’s been some talk of means-testing pensions recently, I believe.
> It seems that the only government handout that is available is an actual handout of cash.
The “apartment queue” continues to exist, it’s just even less efficient than in Soviet times. According to my search, theoretically every low-income resident of St.Petersburg can attempt to get a government flat, but with a waiting time of about 30 years.
By the way, a big chunk of the population continues to live in the same flats as in Soviet time, theoretically renting them from the government for about $30 a month (those are basically people who could privatize the flat for free, but chose not to). Those “rental”s are, of course, anything but, as it would be politically impossible to raise the prices or terminate the rental.
I think Russian life expectancy for women today is pretty comparable to other western countries (after a dip in the 1990s). The men though are doing horribly, albeit also improving. Proof that economic downturns hurt men more than women.
Since women have much longer life spans compared to men – at about 8 years more on average – this is “life gap” is an injustice to the hard working men in this world. Just like women’s pay gap in the work place, men have been suffering for millenia under this life gap. I propose that this inequity in life outcomes to be compensated with earlier retirement for men. Women should continue working until they are 70, and men should stop working at 50. When will Hillary think about the men! 🙂
@ GermanL,
the gender longevity gap that you’re talking about is very much real, though it is called something else, more convoluted, in the actuarian tables. It reappears in TV news every time a new reporter discovers that her Gran is getting a smaller pension than her same-age Granddad. It usually peters out after the State Insurance company’s spokeswoman for that topic, oftentimes herself in late 50s, didactically explains the reasons why, quotes the longevity projections, and mentions that for women who live longer than the median, the insurer will continue to pay out the pension. Of course, that longer life span is never mentioned in debates of the pay gap, the underlying causes of greater aggregated physical wear on mens’ bodies leading to earlier deaths, etc. Or maybe not exactly never: I once actually heard a leading feminist joke it away with the words that “maybe the men then shouldn’t be working as long and hard as they do” [APPLAUSE with the subtext: share in the domestic duties instead] – as if that was up to Men, a voluntary leisure activity.
Maybe Phil could propose such a shift to his Senior Domestic Management, in exchange for said SDM bringing in the moolah? (for safety do it from the other side of the exquisite kitchen island).
As for his cash-welfare observations above: it is always refreshing to hear someone attempting to explain the realities of Russian surreality in standard Amerenglish terms. Other readers here are better suited to debunk the apparent shallow (doesn’t mean “untrue”) answers that the tour guides were able to feed Phil with between their main duties of explaining the significance of that statue on that boulevard to that other statue on another boulevard (or something). I can just contribute this one thing:
Wrong correlation: everybody, and especially those not fully able-bodied, limbless invalids from the Great Patriotic War, say, of whom there were plenty, worked, or at least were on employee rolls somewhere, because that was the ONLY ticket for subsidized meals in the factory etc cafeterias, medical treatment, half-price bus fare, and ALL OTHER communal services (the meals were sinewy meat chunks accompanied by mashed carbs with wilted greens in yellow-brown gravy; could be carried out for reheating at home). I’m not sure if I read this in a Russian, or another East European context, but the overall work-ethic principle appears to have been we play-act working, the government play-acts paying us (maybe some ex-Russian here will confirm having heard that?)
In towns, there were people officially employed as e.g. janitors or park guards, who never showed up at their “jobs,” because in reality they tended a “private initiative” flower stand (=2 buckets with tulips and roses) outside popular tourist spots, rendezvous cafes, etc. Usually they kicked back something to the beat cop, their brigadier and work colleagues, and still came up tops. This is how that society worked, penny corruption at all levels.
ObLitRef: “Mother Russia” by Robert Littell (yes, that RL, but no spies here.)
There were able-bodied people, mostly hippies, writers and artists, who did not work [in the sense “within the system”], but who survived by hook or by crook nevertheless. In periods of cracking down on dissidents’ internal growling and occasional sudden eruptions of samizdat, Soviet authorities went after “social parasites,” fig-leaf for dissidents, supposedly the asocial and work shy elements even when they effectively were prevented from holding down any job they might have found: the Soviet path to “self-chosen” starvation of the unwanted.
Other paths included: as late as early 2000s, when phoning for ambulance, the dispatcher would first ask for age of the patient, and, above certain number, basically no ambulance showed up (one instance that I know of, but apparently common enough). The truly disabled/ mentally ill/ unable to work/ or speak for themselves died soon enough in the State’s abysmal care.
Similarly, there were also stay-at-home parents, because there were never enough places in kindergartens, and so mothers polled their resources and watched over others’ kids alongside their own (as happens all over the world). The authorities knew of this, through the network of “building concierges” indebted to the housing authority for the apartment, but what could they do about it? City Hall could only budget for that many kids in usually already vastly overcrowded schools, and here at least all but one of parents of that clutch of kids worked full time (we’ve discussed women in the Russian society before.)
ABOVE ALL, HOWEVER, it needs to be pointed out that, just as their 72-year long experiment with “Communism” was a novel instance of native ageless despotic rule, so is present-day Russian social welfare methodology to a large degree a continuation of the tradition of alms spritzed out by church, aristocracy, and the Tzars to “pecuniarily-challenged” peons (indentured and paid in produce off the land they tilled until 1863). Nobody could live off these then—and now—welfare handouts, and nobody expected to… people survived by other devices, with medieval/ feudal barter of goods for services as the main method. I don’t know how much of that survives to this very day, but wouldn’t think that it disappeared entirely.
(I’m not keen on discussing macroeconomics, only saw this that seems to provide some EU context to Phil’s newly acquired Russian cash handout welfare insights):
Cash handouts are best way to boost British growth, say economists
In letter to the Guardian, 35 economists state that providing money directly to households would be most effective policy: |https://gu.com/p/4pgyq
@ Moderator: Hotlinked URL at end; please delete previous #7
(I’m not keen on discussing macroeconomics, only saw this that seems to provide some EU context to Phil’s newly acquired Russian cash handout welfare insights):
Cash handouts are best way to boost British growth, say economists
In letter to the Guardian, 35 economists state that providing money directly to households would be most effective policy: https://gu.com/p/4pgyq