The magic country of Rosstat: how fabulous reports are drawn for the authorities

In this situation, the government of the Russian Federation decided to rely on… Rosstat. It is this department, apparently, designed to save officials from bad news.

Victoria Pavlova

Rosstat is showing enviable success on the front of creating mass illusions. The department became especially productive after the appointment in May 2022 of a new head - Sergey Galkin. One of his most recent achievements is the publication of data on material inequality in society, calculated according to the new method. Now the distribution of income is being studied for ten percent groups of the population. It turned out that 10% of the richest Russians in the II quarter. 2022 accounted for 30% of all cash income - this is 5.82 trillion rubles. And 10% of the poorest Russians earned only 2%, which is 388 billion rubles. The average income in this group was 8,850 rubles, which is 40% below the subsistence level.

Social stratification and inequality in all its glory! We are waiting for the people with pitchforks and torches to dispossess wealthy Russians? Let's not wait - these Rosstat data can be deployed in such a way that Russia will turn out to be almost a stronghold of social justice. And don't be surprised later why the highest ranks report successes in all areas and are in no hurry to sound the alarm, throwing all their efforts into saving the economy. And here's how they checked it.

According to Rosstat, the average income of the richest 10% of Russians is only 132,920 rubles. Such an amount is not impressive even in the provinces. And it will not work to maintain yachts with such a salary either. Any thinking person will doubt and think about the fact that the real incomes of the richest Russians are much higher. But such a sweeping division of the population into ten percent groups helps to smooth out inequalities. Here in the US, the wealth of 0.1% of households is equal to the wealth of 90% of the households of the lower strata of the population. That's where the real inequality and injustice! That's just in the United States in the first half of 2022, ordinary people were able to buy 6.92 million cars, and in Russia - 352.1 thousand. Everything depends on the wording of the news. And it is not difficult to guess which wordings are reported "upstairs".

Rosstat is also preparing to make us all richer - let's say thanks to Sergey Galkin! According to the agency, when calculating the income of the population, it is worth taking into account income from assets in the financial market, non-cash transfers between individuals outside the region, and bonuses accrued by retail chains. There are no big questions about financial assets. If a person really could earn something, then this should be taken into account. But accounting for transfers between individuals can greatly distort the picture. A banal example: there is a family where the husband, registered in Moscow, receives a salary, and the wife takes care of the household and the family, formally registered in the region. A money transfer from a husband to his wife will be considered "extra income". There is only one money, but it will be counted twice. With bonuses, the situation is no less interesting. They are used by retail chains to mask discounts on goods; these bonuses cannot be cashed out in any way. Just a marketing ploy. But Rosstat will consider them as additional income. By the way, Rosstat employees themselves are not able to develop a new methodology - this process is outsourced to a third-party company for 6.7 million rubles.

People will have a lot of money, and the rise in prices for goods and services will be moderate. Already by the beginning of August, Rosstat managed to change the procedure for calculating inflation four times since the beginning of 2022. The days of calculating weekly inflation were the first to change, with the exclusion of weekend fairs from the statistics, in early August, Rosstat, at the suggestion of the Russian Academy of Economics. Plekhanov included in the consumer price index housing services - insurance, repairs and rent. In a sagging real estate market, this was a very relevant measure to curb inflation. Only in June, the average cost of rental housing in Russia decreased by 1%, and in St. Petersburg, the drawdown was 5.7%.

Sergei Galkin had a good teacher - his predecessor, and now the governor of the Ryazan region Pavel Malkov. At the end of 2021, he changed the order of the poverty rate: previously it was the cost of living based on the price of the food basket, and now it is the median wage. Once, and the country has become 2.8 million poor people less. And where do these crowds of discontented people come from?

While the government lives in an illusory world that exists only on paper, people have to fight for survival on their own. Both small private enterprises and large factories are closing in the country (Nissan and Toyota recently announced their final withdrawal from Russia, and Ikea announced the dismissal of 10,000 employees). And it's good if there is a large defense enterprise in the region that works to its fullest. At least it won't let you die of hunger. But you should not count on state bounty either. For example, a design engineer at NPO Novator, who makes popular Caliber cruise missiles, receives from 45 thousand rubles, a chemical engineer - 50 thousand rubles, an electrician - from 38 thousand rubles. Rosstat offers people who save every penny to believe in a benevolent picture, convincing that by August 2022 the number of unemployed people has decreased to 2.9 million people, which is 16% or 550 thousand people less than it was in August 2021. high offices, apparently, they already believed, having long since moved from reality to a magical land drawn in folders with reports.