Psychological state of Russian society and Its prospects

 Numerous attempts at measuring the level of moral well-being of the Russian society has been made lately. Among them arguably the most fruitful is the index of macro-psychic state of society, developed by A. Yurevich, D. Ushakov and I. Ysapenko of The Institute of Psychology of The Russian Academy of Sciences. The authors built a model of the most important aspects of the social life as special indices (suicides, psychic distempers etc.), which afterwards were integrated in a compound enabling to diagnose the problems of today’s society.

As appears, the macro-psychic index behaved quite variously. Since the beginning of economic reform in the country, it was going down from 100% in 1990 to 58.8% in 2002, after which it began a steady growth. Russia has featured the worst value of that index compared to nearly all countries during that period and after it (see table). If Ukraine’s macro-psychological index has exceeded that of Russia by 16%, Sweden is ahead of us by 66%. One can see that the psychic health of the Russian population is much worse than that of the developed countries of the world, and in several cases worse than that of other post-soviet nations.

Macro-psychic Index of the Developed Countries of the World.

The above calculations suggest a close link between the macro-psychic index and the country’s GDP. Moreover, the resulting one-factor model explains 82.6% of the macro-psychic index’ dispersion, hence possessing the higher degree of plenitude. Outside the framework of the model remains only 17.4% of the salient magnitude’s dispersion, and that can be explained by some other factors, unrelated to the model. Therefore, the rough material factor in the form of GDP per capita is the determinant cause of the psychic well-being of the Russian.  Such conclusion largely justifies the concept of “economic determinism”, which maintains that economic factors are primary and should be at the epicenter of the current reform.

This model calls for another important conclusion: the Russian population is almost entirely focused on the material constituent of life. It’s noteworthy that at the current level of social development the Russians have not learned to spread their attention to a wide range of life’s aspects. That’s why all the significant issues of their social being are being relegated by them to the heap of secondary factors. The “secondary” factors are bureaucracy and corruption of the entire system of state government, quality of economic and political institutes, rampant crime, cultural level of the social environment, ecological situation, rhythm of life etc. As it is, we can witness the existence of a primitive “materialistic” system of values and interests of the Russian population.

Meanwhile, the formulated conclusion has had an unexpected positive consequence. Namely, according to calculations, Russia may catch up with nearly all the developed countries of the world by its macro-psychic index within a year or two. By re-establishing its per capita GDP registered in 1990, Russia achieved such a high level of material well-being in 2007 that it can easily bridge up the gap which separates the psychological state of its society from that of the most developed societies in the world.

The fact is entirely dependent on the character of interconnection between the macro-psychic index and the GDP: exactly as the drop from per capita GDP of 1990 drastically deteriorated the psychological state of the people, so the growth of per capita GDP above the level of 1990 leads to the growth of macro-psychic index. One can say that today’s Russia is in a very favorable state, which offers an opportunity to cut down, and quickly enough, its lag behind the developed countries of the world. Besides, current Russia is characterized by amazingly high rate of economic growth, and this helps to make quick leaps forward.

Also, the phenomenon in question has the other, rather dangerous side. The domination of material aspect in Russian people’s system of values (and the growth of the appropriate index), leads to their disproportionately rising satisfaction with their situation. The thick flow of oil money to Russia for the last few years is a source of real incomes of many Russians and stimulates a state of social euphoria. Such a situation is extremely unstable. The society as a whole becomes highly vulnerable to exogenous shocks. If the energy prices tumble down or the GDP shows symptoms of slumping or whatever else happens, it can completely undermine the psychological state of the Russian population. This is the main deficiency of the modern Russian model of formation of the psychological social background. And that should be borne in mind by whoever intends to make long-term investment in Russian economy.

19.05.2010     Balatsky Evgeny Views: 461 Comments: 0