Ideological Drift in Russian Economic Science

The article analyzes modern Russian and foreign literature devoted to studying ideology in economics. In contemporary Russian scientific economic discourse, a significant variety of values and ideological attitudes determine the vision of economic processes, which ultimately affects the basic theoretical foundations and subject area of study and can also influence normative judgments and research in economic policy. Moreover, analysis, apologetics, and criticism of ideology in economic science have a deeply rooted scientific tradition. The article develops D. North's approach to studying ideologies as mental models. Based on a systematic review of scientific papers from eLIBRARY.RU, ScienceDirect, Lens. org and Google Scholar databases analyzed in this article, the authors have come to the following conclusions: firstly, the approach defining ideologies as general mental models is rooted in economic science; secondly, the presence of ideology in economics is often underestimated; and, thirdly, the dualistic approach to the study of ideologies is widely represented. According to the authors, this dualistic approach should be transformed into a multiple one to studying ideologies in economic science, which includes a comparison of five economic ideologies: neoliberalism, socialism, dirigisme, special path, and environmentalism. On the one hand, this typology of ideologies is not political and is directly related to economic science and the corresponding theoretical narratives (proto models). On the other hand, it will avoid emphasizing the antagonism between ideologies.

The article examines the role of ideological concepts and attitudes in economic science present in explicit or implicit forms. The article scope is ideology and its impact on economic science, which is traditionally considered as objective and independent from subjective ideological attitudes. Economists formulate ideological concepts that are reflected in social, political and socio-economic life and, in turn, are influenced by similar ideas. Theoretical analysis of the role of ideological concepts and attitudes in economic research has shown that in economic science ideology can be present in explicit or implicit forms and can influence economists’ mindset and development of economic policies. The authors explore the ideological component of the process of choosing theoretical prerequisites in economic sciences within the framework of D. North's theory, which defines ideology through the presence of three components: (1) groups of individuals; (2) mental models that individuals use; (3) the way positive and normative knowledge on the world around, economy in particular, is formed through these mental models. Based on D. North's approach to ideology, the article identifies widespread theoretical narratives as the dominant economic ideologies, which reflect the entire spectrum of relevant socio-economic interactions: neoliberalism, socialism, dirigism, a special path and environmentalism. The explicit acceptance of the premise of the importance of ideology in a positive and normative economy allows us to direct efforts to research and discuss the content and influence of certain ideological attitudes on the development of science itself and how the ideologized theories of economists influence the evolution of economic orders.

The article develops narrative economics approaches to analyzing ideology as an important component of theoretical narratives in economic science. On the one hand, many economists cannot eliminate the influence of ideology on scientific research. On the other hand, ideology continues to be considered as something that rather hinders objective scientific research. However, through the prism of mental models, ideologies directly related to actors' collective and individual interests form a worldview relevant to adherents of a particular ideological position or attitude. In this article, the authors offer a working definition of ideology based on North's approach to defining ideology. Ideologies are shared mental models for groups of individuals. Through mental models, groups of individuals explain the supposed and real connections between means and results for implementing policies aimed at transforming society. Of key importance are groups of individuals (scientific schools, political organizations, etc.) and their actions to establish and promote supposed or real connections between means and results. Ideology in social sciences often takes the form of theoretical narratives, one of the research narratives used in narrative economics. The theoretical narrative in economic theory differs significantly from the narratives linguists work with. For economists who use the concept of narrative, first of all, it is essential to know what ideas, morals or rules are transmitted along with history or narrative. Here, it is vital to understand how theoretical components or simplified models are related to historical or national contexts. Theoretical narratives are either closely related to or include elements of historical narratives. Together with theoretical ones, historical narratives allow us to reconstruct and create explanations of critical historical events to promote a particular ideological agenda. Using the ideologies of socialism and neoliberalism as an example, the authors examine theoretical narratives that have an ideological component and are used to justify the economic policy and explain important development patterns of the Russian economic order.

Ideology plays a significant role in forming economic theories and models, although its influence is often underestimated or denied. In economics, the desire for objectivity prevails. However, historically, economic theories often bear the imprint of certain ideological attitudes. In this paper, the authors analyzed the ideological component of Russian economic science from 1992 to 2023. The total sample consisted of 134,124 scientific publications divided by year. As a hypothesis, we identified five economic ideologies: neoliberalism, socialism, dirigisme, special path and environmentalism. In this work, we classified economic scientific articles based on their ideological coloring using vector representations of texts (embeddings) obtained using the SciRus-tiny model and the LSTM neural network, which acts as a classifier. The accuracy of the model on cross-validation was 77.45%. The array of scientific articles was classified by ideology in the following proportions: dirigisme – 29.86%, environmentalism – 18.85%, special path – 16.60%, neoliberalism – 14.53%, socialism – 12.16% and 8.00% of articles remained unallocated. Our hypothesis was confirmed during the machine analysis of article texts since the smallest number of texts was undetermined during the classification. Further, the authors analyzed the representation of bigrams and trigrams. As a result, bigrams and trigrams found in each ideological group were determined, and the first ten were identified in prevalence for each ideological group separately. Using factor analysis (principal component analysis), we identified ten key micro-themes in each period (1992–1997, 1998– 2002, 2003–2007, 2008–2012, 2013–2017, 2018–2023). Based on the interpretation of the obtained factor loadings of the principal components in each group and the correlation of the bi- and trigrams identified for each ideology, we analyzed how different ideologies manifest themselves and what scientific problems they are associated with. The analysis showed that the most discussed issues in the articles were the problems of government regulation, the labor market, and industrial development throughout the entire period.

Modern Russia is currently undergoing a turbulent period of reforms affecting its political, economic, and social aspects of public administration. Amidst these transformations, the issue of spiritual education among youth assumes critical importance to ensure that shifts in ideological priorities – from socialism/communism to capi-talism and market relations – do not disorient younger generations within the national value system. Neverthe-less, a perceptible gap persists between the perspectives of youth adapting to these new conditions and older generations acquainted with socialist paradigms. This article undertakes a comparative examination of Soviet-era and post-Soviet models of generational spiritual experience. Methodologically, the study employs analysis and synthesis, deduction and induction, idealization, formalization, abstraction, empirical generalization, and comparative approaches. A socio-philosophical framework guides the axiological and ontological aspects of analysis. The research reveals substantial disparities between modern spiritual values and those prevalent during the USSR. Notably, modern values increasingly emphasize consumerism, individualism, and moral relativism, diverging significantly from the collectivist and ideologically driven ethos of the Soviet era. This shift raises concerns about its implications for national security within the Russian state. In conclusion, the ongoing promotion of consumerist values and individualistic ethics poses a profound risk to Russia’s national cohesion and stability. Addressing these challenges necessitates a nuanced approach to spiritual education that recon-ciles historical legacies with modern realities, ensuring continuity and coherence in the national value system.

.Significance: Fourier ptychography microscopy (FPM) is a computational optical imaging technology that employs angularly varying illuminations and a phase retrieval algorithm to achieve a wide field of view and high-resolution imaging simultaneously. In the FPM, LED position error will reduce the quality of the reconstructed high-resolution image. To correct the LED positions, current methods consider each of the LED positions as independent and use an optimization algorithm to get each of the positions. When the positional misalignment is large or the search position falls into a local optimal value, the current methods may lack stability and accuracy.Aim: We improve the model of the LED position and propose an accurate and stable two-step correction scheme (tcFPM) to calibrate the LED position error.Approach: The improved LED positions model combines the overall offset, which represents the relative deviation of the LED array and the optical axis, with the slight deviation of each LED’s independent position. In the tcFPM, the overall offset of the LED array is corrected at first, which obtains an approximate value of the overall offset of the LED array. Then the position of each LED is precisely adjusted, which obtains the slight offset of each LED.Results: This LED position error model is more in line with the actual situation. The simulation and experimental results show that the method has high accuracy in correcting the LED position. Furthermore, the reconstruction process of tcFPM is more stable and significantly improves the quality of the reconstruction results, which is compared with some LED position error correction methods.Conclusions: An LED position error correction technology is proposed, which has a stable iterative process and improves the reconstruction accuracy of complex amplitude.

The article examines the influence of ideology on economic science in the context of digitalization and artificial intelligence (AI) development, based on the interpretation of ideology within the scientific tradition of Douglass North and Joseph Schumpeter. In North’s framework, ideology is understood as a set of mental models shaping the perception and interpretation of economic phenomena. In Schumpeterian logic, the emphasis is on the inevitability of ideological influence in science through pre-scientific cognitive acts that form the research framework. The study demonstrates that automation of scientific procedures using AI enhances the impact of ideological attitudes on the process of cognition. The article identifies five key ideological trends in Russian economic science (neoliberalism, dirigisme, socialism, special path, and environmentalism) using machine learning methods. The results indicate the dominance of dirigisme, which is explained by historical and institutional factors. Digital transformation, by boosting mechanisms of increasing returns, not only alters data processing methods but also creates new meanings, amplifying the role of ideology in economic and political sustainability. The article focuses on neoliberal ideology, which, in the digital economy, manifests through algorithmization, technocratic optimization, and the promotion of market efficiency. Neoliberalism dominates global discourse and promotes marketization even in the public sector, leading to an increasing dependence on metrics and indicators. This, in turn, leads to excessive bureaucratization and a focus on short-term goals. Special attention is given to the concept of prompt-knowledge, which emerges from human-AI interaction, where excessive AI use can lead to a shallow understanding of knowledge and reduced motivation for creative activity.

Clifford Gaddy's and Barry Ickes' paradigm of the has fundamentally changed the way people think about Russia's economy. Circulated at the highest levels of the Russian and U.S. governments and reported in leading publications worldwide, their thesis--that Russia's economy is based on illusion or pretense about nearly every important economic yardstick, including prices, sales, wages and budgets--has forced broad recognition of the inadequacies of the intended market reform policies in Russia. More important, their work has provided a coherent framework for understanding how and why so much of Russia's economy has resisted reform. Gaddy and Ickes now use the virtual economy concept to project the near- and middle-term future of the Russian economy and suggest possible policy responses. Drawing on new empirical material from published and unpublished sources and from their own extensive field work in Russia, the authors examine critical aspects of the virtual economy: manufacturing enterprises, households and the public sectors, both local and federal. For the first time, they will also integrate the financial and agricultural sectors into their model. Gaddy's and Ickes' book can be expected to be a seminal work for understanding the inner workings of the Russian economy. Clifford G. Gaddy is a fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution and a member of Brookings' Center on Social and Economic Dynamics. He is the author of The Price of the Past: Russia's Struggle with the Legacy of a Militarized Economy (Brookings, 1996) and coauthor of Open for Business: Russia's Return to the Global Economy(Brookings, 1992). Barry W. Ickes is associate professor of economics at Pennsylvania State University and director of research at the New Economic School, Moscow.

The presented article is devoted to changes in the scale and qualitative characteristics of objective and subjective poverty in Russian society over the past 20 years. Based on the data of all-Russian empirical studies conducted by the Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2003, 2013 and 2023, the dynamics of the number of objectively and subjectively poor Russians, the areas of intersection of these groups, their living conditions, their perception of their situation and ideas about the future of the country are traced. The obtained results indicate a noticeable reduction in both objective poverty (by income level) and subjective poverty (by self-assessment of their financial situation) among Russians over the past 20 years, which mainly occurred in the first half of this period. The reduction in the shares of objective and subjective poverty was accompanied by their divergence. As a result, an ever smaller share of Russians find themselves in the poverty zone simultaneously in both of these dimensions, and the portraits and characteristics of these groups differ increasingly. The objectively poor differ less in their assessments of their situation and opportunities in various spheres from the population as a whole, which indicates, on the one hand, the relatively shallow nature of income poverty, and on the other, the modest standard of living of the “typical Russian”. The subjectively poor are characterised by more noticeable differences from the population as a whole, in particular, negative assessments of many spheres of their lives. A similar situation is observed with the socio-psychological well-being of representatives of these groups: although over the past 20 years it has improved both among the poor by income and among the poor by self-assessment, positive changes in the first group occurred faster. As a result, the poor by self-assessment are characterised by a higher level of pessimism and anxiety compared to other Russians. In terms of assessments of Russia's development path, both objectively and subjectively the poor differ little from other Russians, demonstrating a public consensus: the population believes in a bright future for the country, but on the condition that it follows a special path that allows for social stability. Finally, it is important to note that the subjectively poor cannot be reduced to pensioners: the data confirm that this group is heterogeneous in its composition, which determines the absence of a clear portrait and the impossibility of identifying it as a "single addressee" of socio-economic policy.

The article examines three perspectives of studying the middle class in modern Russia. The first perspective is presented as a brief excursion into the history of the development of middle class studies in the post-Soviet period. The second perspective is devoted to the consideration of methodological issues of studying the middle class, the criteria for its identification in the social structure of Russian society and the definition on this basis of the quantitative characteristics of the middle class. The third perspective is presented by the results of the analysis of the middle class in accordance with the author's methodology of its identification by three criteria - material standard of living, education and self-identification with the middle class. The methodology is applied to the analysis of the middle class using data from the all-Russian monitoring conducted by the Center for the Study of Sociocultural Changes of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences from 1990 to the present day. It allows us to trace the dynamics of the middle class in the post-Soviet period, its composition by professional characteristics, by areas of employment, by strategies in labour activity and other aspects. The latest wave of monitoring (summer 2023) focused on the population's attitude to the choice of the path the country should take and the respondent's self-identification with a particular model of Russia's development. The middle class in its majority (67%) chose a special Russian path of development for the country and for themselves personally, practically rejecting the path followed by Western societies, developed Muslim countries and China. At the same time, in second place (30%) we find the opinion that Russia should use all the best experience of other countries. At the same time, respondents declared themselves to be supporters of democratic forms of government, insist on the observance of human rights and freedoms, primarily in the economic and social spheres, as the closest to the everyday interests of people. The results of the study concluded that the majority of Russians, and especially the middle class, understand the original path for Russia as the path of a sovereign state based on traditional and humanitarian values, and does not at all mean a desire to live in a traditional society that has lost many of its features under the influence of decades of modernisation.

An 80-year-old patient with Ebstein anomaly and prior implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) implantation was sent to our heart center because of right ventricular (RV)-ICD lead dislocation. Positioning of the new RV lead was difficult, no stable position could be found, and sensing and threshold measurements showed weak results in the RV basis, apex, and septum. So, we conducted positioning of the lead in the RV outflow tract where a stable position with good sensing and threshold parameters was found.

12 Germany’s Special Path? Economic Sciences and Politics in the Federal Republic, 1945–1970

Using data from 21 voluntary blood drives over a five-year period, we establish connections between undergraduate students’ blood donation behaviors and their demographic, academic, leadership, and military characteristics at a military college in the United States. We find that blood donation participation rates for students at this military college are much higher than the national average for the 18- to 24-year-olds. Certain characteristics such as fitness, athletic status, academic performance, and intent to pursue a military career after graduation are significantly correlated with blood donation. We also find that college students’ blood donation behaviors may be influenced by their attitudes toward civic responsibility, time constraints, incentives, peer effects and the characteristics of blood collection agencies. This study provides new insights into individual characteristics that correlate with blood donation. It also highlights the role of unique military education and institutional characteristics in promoting better fitness, the pursuit of a military career, and selfless service among young people, all of which might help explain demonstrated higher blood donation participation than their peers elsewhere.

Asset development policies have been promoted as a means to create a more inclusive "ownership society." During the past few years, asset-building scholarship has begun to focus specifically on marginalized groups, including people with disabilities. Using a sample of individual development account (IDA) program participants (N = 376), the authors examine effects of disability status on IDA saving performance. They also assess variations in saving performance by individual and programmatic characteristics. Results suggest that disability status, in addition to a number of individual and program characteristics, is associated with saving performance in an IDA program. Implications for practice and scholarship are presented.

Funding AcknowledgementsType of funding sources: None.BackgroundLumen-less leads (LLL) and stylet driven leads (SDL) are currently used for left bundle branch area pacing (LBBAP). We sought to evaluate the acute performance of SDL during LBBAP in comparison with LLL.MethodsThis is an observational retrospective study including consecutive patients undergoing LBBAP at our institution.Acute lead performance was evaluated including implant success rate,electrical parameters,ECG characteristics and lead related complications (intraprocedure LBBAP lead dislodgment after having being penetrated into the septum in an stable position needing lead repositioning, septal perforation, coronary venous fistula, development of complete AV block not previously present and LBBAP lead damage during implant).Conduction system capture criteria were assessed before patient discharge during asynchronous ventricular pacing. Ventricular lead position within the septum was evaluated using paced QRS axis, fluoroscopic orthogonal views and post-procedure TTE, and classified as basal,mid or apical septum.Results451 consecutive LBBAP implants were included, 333 using LLL and 118 using SDL. LBBAP acute success was significantly higher with LLL (91.6% for LLL vs 79.7% for SDL,p=0.001).Among patients with successful LBBAP,LBB capture criteria were achieved in 53.2% for LLL vs 36.4% for SDL,while left ventricular septal pacing (LVSP) was achieved in 39% vs 44.1%,respectively (p<0.0001). A basal lead position was more frequently obtained with LLL (19.8% for LLL vs 13.3% for SDL),while SDL were more frequently located at mid to apical septal positions (86.7% for SDL vs 80.1% for LLL, p=0.003).Paced ECG axis was inferior in 43.9% of LLL vs 28.9% of SDL and superior in 24.5% vs 42.1%, respectively,p=0.001.Intraprocedure lead dislodgment occurred in 9.3% of SDL vs 2.1% of LLL,p=0.001.In 5 cases of SDL (4.2%),lead damage occurred during lead implant needing lead replacement due to helix entrapment or malfunction with no such cases registered among LLL patients.Acute LBBAP lead-related complications were significantly higher for SDL vs LLL (29.1% vs 12.6%, respectively, p<0.0001,table 1),none of them needing additional interventions.Among patients with LBBAP criteria at the end of the procedure,34 (7.5%) experienced loss of r prime wave in V1 with paced QRS widening before hospital discharge,more frequently in patients with SDL (17.8% vs. 9.4%, respectively,p<0.0001) indicative of lead microdislodgment.ConclusionsIn our experience,acute lead performance is different between LLL and SDL.LBBAP implant success rate is significantly higher with LLL with higher percentage of patients with LBB capture criteria in comparison with SDL.SDL are associated with a more mid to apical and inferior lead position in the septum.A significantly higher rate of lead related complications during the implant procedure as well as higher rates of acute microdislodgment after implantation were also seen in SDL,none of them needing acute re-intervention.Table 1Table 2