Two-Thirds of Russians Say They are Poorer than They Are, Gimpelson and Chernina Report

 Paul Goble

            Staunton, September 30 – Poverty is both an objective measure and a subjective one, with the latter being the driver of people’s responses to their situation. In Russia today, two-thirds of people think they are poorer than they in fact are while one in five things he or she is richer. Only 11 percent rate their status accurately, Vladimir Gimpelson and Yevgeniya Chernina say.

            The two Higher School of Economics specialists reached that conclusion after comparing the real as opposed to self-assessed standing of 16,000 Russians as to which decile of the population they were members (“Position on the Scale of Incomes and Its Subjective Conception,” Zhurnal Novoy ekonomicheskoy assotsiatsii 2 (2020): 30-56 at publications.hse.ru/articles/376194026; summarized at iq.hse.ru/news/403243564.htm).

            They found that only 4.7 percent of the population believes they are in the bottom decile although ten percent are, that only 10 percent put themselves in the sixth to tenth decile and not the 50 percent who are actually there, and that 70 percent identify themselves as being member of the third, fourth and fifth deciles, that is, in the middle or just below.

            The average divergence of the difference between real and actual incomes was two deciles, but 22 percent got their status wrong by as many as five, the result of the impact of comparisons they make on the basis of residence, age, health, education and income, in these statistics drawn from 2016.

            High income inequality is a threat to social stability, Giimpelson and Chernina say; but it is self-assessed inequality rather than real income inequality that is the driver. If people are worse off than they believe, the situation may be more stable than if they are better off than they think.

            And they say that their findings are a warning not to conclude that when objective inequality rises or is greater than elsewhere that there necessarily will be more social and political conflicts. How these differences emerge and what governments can do to promote or limit them remain as yet unclear.