dissident wrote:
The GDP doesn't care about what activity is being performed and its absolute value. The main thing is for money to circulate. This is why all the shock therapy from the 1990s and the associated non-payment of meager salaries for months on end was total criminal idiocy. I highly doubt that Russia's pool of people who can work on ABM systems and on this nuclear engine is so small as to make such projects mutually exclusive. If they really used all the 600 million to line their pockets then there would be nothing to show at the end of the project. This is not credible given that Russia develops weapons systems (e.g. Bulava, S-400) without blowing trillions on them, which would be the case if 4th world corruption levels were an accurate description of the current state of the country.
GDP doesn't really matter that much. 4th world corruption levels are unnecessary, the Russian levels would suffice to make Bulava's test success rate similar to North Korean's - Bulava's testers have had every other rocket launch going screwed this or that way. Corruption is not particularly important, you can institutionalize corruption by legislating it in - as they did long ago in what is called "advanced western democracies" - or making it a part of the business customs. You can convert "illegitimate" bribe into "legitimate" profit by way of some legislating and business structuring, in the same manner as tax structurers convert taxable income into non-taxable capital gains. Corruption nowadays is mostly an empty buzz word for monetarist influential weeklies to express their general unhappiness with some remote overseas country or government.
There is too much fat and useless "business and managerial talent" - product of the "free market" reforms - in the space-military complex in Russia, while the engineering work is pulled by poorly paid people in their 60s-70s, and the quality of material procurement is appalling, despite the abundance of the "managerial talent" overseeing it. But all the test or operational failures are of course to be blamed on engineers.
We don't have excess money. Pull the money from underneath the "oligarchs", who for some unexplainable reason appear to be entitled to the bulk of the country's natural resource rents, stop the idiotic puppet policy of reserves accumulation and "money sterilisation", cut the "business and managerial talent", but in absence of these - put a plug on that space odysseys, invest in the military development, or in the high school, which is in shambles. Stop free eduction, with engineering talent leaving for serfdom in the west exploiting their student-loan-free status - this serfdom is still better than homeless miserable existence under the enlightened guidance of the "business and managerial talent" in their home country. Give the undergraduates the student loans, give them on graduation subsidized mortgages for buying housing and land - we have land in abundance, what can be better for the talent retention. Pay the rocket engineers to have them lecturing in the universities. Better then sending a piece of precious metal to the infinity in space. Straightforward things, no complex monetarist theories explaining why you have to be deep in sh*t for another **ty years , but then - of course, there are "vested interests". Lots of chest trumping and pompous imperial rhetorics produced for the populace (who already laugh at it), but in substance the behavior of a colonized laggard.
Bottom line - no excess money. If you have 600 million and human resources to do a task, - then unconditionally prioritize the vital tasks and discard everything else and direct the money and people there, as far as Russia is concerned.