The SDGs are a quest for human progress. They symbolize the call that all recognize a shared humanity, acknowledge human failure and accept responsibility for together building a better world. They are equally products – some would say tools – of global politics and the gulf between the aspiration for a better world and the political reality is enormous. The intention in this chapter is to identify means of bridging this gulf.

In the 2000s, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) served to protect the United Nations (UN) when under attack by powerful nation states that view intergovernmental organizations as threats to their sovereignty (Chapter 2). The SDGs continue to give the UN credibility: no politician will be elected on a mandate to increase poverty; hence, it is difficult to criticize the UN for seeking to reduce it.

However, each SDG is a compromise in which the influence of powerful nations is writ large. SDG Targets 1.1 and 1.2 were intended to engage the rich world in obligations that they avoided during the time of the MDGs (Chapters 2 and 3). However, the targets are inherently divisive, referring to different conceptions of poverty: absolute and multidimensional. The former target is internationally prescribed for the developing world and the poverty must be eradicated; in the latter case, the target is nationally determined by developed countries and poverty needs only to be halved (Chapters 1 and 3). While both targets are affordable when set against global wealth, that applying to the poorest countries is considerably more ambitious (Chapters 4 and 5).

Successful fulfilment of the SDGs is also contingent on global politics and especially on the willingness of countries to collaborate and to make sacrifices for the global good. However, as the poorly coordinated response to the Covid-19 pandemic illustrates, political commitments to global solidarity and to multilateralism are typically more rhetorical than real (Chapters 6 and 7). The Covid-19 pandemic worsened the relative position of the least developed countries, further increasing global inequalities and poverty (Chapter 5).

The limited commitment to collective working is further evidenced by the lack of quantifiable targets for SDG17 – the all-important partnership goal – which, as a result, is almost purely aspirational.

As explained, achieving SDG1 requires concerted action by national governments and a global partnership that entails the developed world providing financial and other support to less developed countries. However, there is no obligation on national governments to achieve SDG1 nor, as discovered in Chapter 7, much evidence to date that richer countries will actively assist less developed countries in their efforts to eradicate poverty. Aware of this reality, the architects of the SDGs, as noted in Chapter 1, placed their hope in the world's people. The vision was that “We the people” would join in a common mission, demanding that governments put an end to all forms of poverty. A lot, therefore, is resting on “we the people”.

The dependency on the people reflects both the extreme weakness of global governance and the propensity of intergovernmental organizations, when captured by rich countries, to exacerbate world poverty. As UN Secretary-General António Guterres explained to the General Assembly in January 2022: “The global financial system is morally bankrupt. It favours the rich and punishes the poor.”

The United Nations itself, as explained in Chapter 7, although having moral authority as an assembly of nominally equal states, is often riven by divisions and an arena for geopolitical competition with nations vying for the status of “primus inter pares”, first among equals. Launching the SDGs, the hope was that “We the people” could disrupt this competition, disempower the rich nations that have traditionally shaped policies to further their own interests, and demand policies that benefit the planet's majority.

It is far from clear, however, that the people can be relied upon to demand the eradication of poverty. A simple Google search (28 November 2021), “support for the SDGs”, generated some 239 million hits and was headed by paid advertisements by organizations offering support in raising funds or soliciting contributions to support work in relation to the SDGs. Searches have increased over time, which suggests growing interest, but ones relating to specific goals were relatively few in number and characterized by high variability, which does not speak to sustained concern (Figure 8.1).

This chapter marks a turning point. The origins of the Sustainable Development Goals, their form, and the disappointing progress to date have been documented in Chapters 1 to 5. In addition, in Chapter 4 it was established that it is perfectly feasible, in terms of global financial resources, both to eradicate extreme poverty and halve poverty in all its forms – that is to reach Targets 1.1 and 1.2 by 2030. Indeed, it is a humiliating failure of international governance that these targets have yet to be achieved. In this and the remaining chapters, therefore, attention shifts to explore how more rapid progress can be made and whether this is likely. The fundamental causes of global poverty are first considered before discussing the kinds of policies that need to be pursued if poverty is to be eliminated.

6.1 On the causes of inequality and poverty

Poverty, whether conceptualized as being absolute, relative or multidimensional, results from the unfair primary and secondary distribution of resources. The primary distribution is market-driven. It takes place within and between countries through the production and sale of goods at home and/or abroad which generate income in the form of wages and returns on assets and investments.

The secondary distribution is that engineered by governments through taxation and transfers which determine the resources that populations can access and deploy. For the most part, the secondary distribution currently takes place within nation states but does occur between national states in the form of overseas development assistance (ODA), discounted loans made available by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and charitable aid dispensed by non-governmental organizations.

The distributions are unfair to the extent that they lead to, or do not prevent, poverty. In a narrow quasilegal sense, this is the case because it has been internationally agreed that poverty should be eliminated or, at least, reduced by half or more. The distributions may be unfair in the wider sense of structuring patterns of well-being that cannot be justified with respect to commonly accepted moral criteria. Given the context, the focus in this chapter is on unfair-ness narrowly defined.

The Russian economy has always served the foreign policy needs of its leaders by providing the capabilities necessary for securing power at home, expanding the country’s borders, and staking its claim as a great power. The previous chapter showed that the Russian economy nevertheless has, on occasion, posed a national security risk by dragging down growth such that keeping up with competitors while maintaining domestic stability has proven difficult for Russian leaders. In those dire situations, they have permitted the adoption of a pro-market orientation to provide the boost necessary to alleviate specific crises. Vladimir Putin found himself in similar situations to his predecessors, but his recourse to the market has declined over the decades he has spent ruling Russia. Whereas his direct predecessors Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin found themselves in economic crises and sought high-risk strategies to grow their way out of trouble, Putin has instead accepted the tradeoff of lower economic growth in exchange for greater political stability. This is the same strategy earlier pursued by Joseph Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev to increase resilience to external shocks and rival powers. Like Stalin, Putin has prioritized increasing political centralization and resiliency; like Brezhnev, Putin relies on energy revenues to buttress state capacity.

This chapter tells the story of Putin’s economy in two broad ways while later chapters delve deeper into the mechanics of the contemporary economy. First, it places the contemporary Russian economy in comparison, with respect to the baseline figures countries usually measure themselves against, to the other states Putin has considered Russia’s peers: the United States, China, Japan, Brazil, Germany and India. At the broadest levels, these baseline figures include gross domestic product (GDP), GDP per capita, and GDP in purchasing power parity terms. At more specific levels of the economy, international comparative statistics for Russia and those states in workforce participation and productivity tell a worrying story in the long run.

Peter the Great’s first task in establishing an imperial state was to find a way of formalizing the relationships between the nobility and landowning class, existing but weak state institutions, such as the treasury and tax collection, and the thinly distributed class of bureaucrats governing Russia. The pre-Petrine state commanded a vast territory that was under-governed and institutionally backwards relative to other European imperial powers. Fiscal and financial power was decentralized among tens of regional chanceries managed by individuals appointed by the tsar far from the royal court. Informal networks between merchants, state officials, the nobility, and the royal family held the state together. Peter sought to build an imperial state modelled on European empires’ formal institutions. He did so, but instead of eliminating the informality of Russia’s governance, he imposed a formal structure onto it. A newly centralized treasury and state bureaucracy provided the facade of new institutional structures, while much business continued as usual “under the rug” and traditional informal practices of power continued in modified forms. Over 300 years of reform efforts in Russia since have proven that combining formal institutions with informal power networks has endured up to the present day and have shaped why pro-market economic reform always appear attractive and are never pursued to their completion. Varying means to solve the problem of under-governance and the split between formal and informal institutions have been deployed over time, and in this chapter the pattern is laid bare from the end of the nineteenth century to the present.

This chapter begins with the end of the nineteenth century because that is when Russia first encountered globalization that provided a true challenge to its traditional autarchy and mercantilism. As contemporary Russia emerged from the inheritance of its medieval past and the growing rivalry with the liberal states of Western Europe, during the tumultuous nineteenth century, Russia’s absolutist model proved successful in the war against Napoleon when its leaders were willing to abandon Moscow and let the Russian winter defeat the French army.

The basic argument of this book has been that Russian political culture is based on leaders optimizing for political stability instead of for economic growth. The first chapter outlined this tension between power and the market through a series of leadership lessons from Russian history. Chapter 2 outlined how, at several points in modern history, Russian leaders adopted market-oriented mechanisms to boost growth when external or internal security, political, or economic conditions threatened that stability, betting that market reforms could be adroitly managed not to threaten political stability. Leaders, from Nicholas II to Vladimir Putin, accomplished this task (mostly) successfully by delegating the reforms to subordinates (reformers), which permitted those leaders the latitude to assess the economic and political consequences of reforms and thereby maintain or end those reforms through personnel moves by keeping the reformers in place or removing the reformers, respectively. The key evidence to the contrary was the experience of Mikhail Gorbachev, who attached his personal brand and prestige to far-reaching economic and political reforms. When those reforms did not produce the success he wanted, he generated opposition from across the entirety of Soviet society: hardliners who felt that the reforms had gone too far and were threatening the Soviet Union’s international position; liberals who felt the reforms did not go far enough in ending the Communist Party’s monopoly on power; and nationalists who wanted freedom from Moscow’s dominance, including, in the end, Russian nationalists who wished to jettison the other economic drain imposed by the other republics. When all of Gorbachev’s opponents agreed that the status quo no longer served their interests, Gorbachev started to face challenges to his leadership that brought the entire Soviet socialist political system to an end.

Chapters 3–5 explained how the current Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, identified Gorbachev’s sincere enthusiasm for reform as the key reason the Soviet Union fell apart. They then explained how Putin rebuilt a system founded on resilience to external and internal challenges that would have been acutely familiar to the Soviet and tsarist leaders who ruled before Gorbachev: Putin optimized political stability by maximizing the extent of the state’s role in the economy and eliminating competition to the state from the international economy, from elite sectors of society, and from the population at large.

A classic story of “Russian” folklore finds Nasreddin Hodja deep in an old and faraway Central Asian khanate. The ruler of the land, the khan, is cruel yet vain, seeking adoration from all, even as he inflicts cruelties upon the people. Though the khan appears to be very strong, reports of rebellions in far-flung provinces and collusion with foreign invaders have started to reach the capital, leading to rumors of intrigue around the palace.

One day, Nasreddin seeks an audience with the khan, an extremely audacious request that shocks and impresses the ruler’s court. The khan, taken with the boldness of this simple man, grants the audience and is interested to know why an unknown commoner would approach the ruler. The khan’s capriciousness and cruelty are well known, so any insolence certainly would be punished severely and swiftly.

As the khan’s retinue and hangers-on focus intently on this impudent character, the ruler bellows out, “Who are you and what do you seek!” To this command, Nasreddin bows low and, from his stooped position, addresses the khan in the softest and most obsequious of tones, “O grand and wise khan, I come to you with a simple request. Although it will cost a small fortune, I beg for the opportunity to train a goat to sing a song in your praise, a poetic ode to your genius and strength. Although it will take at least ten years to train the goat, when I have completed this task … you will have the only talking and singing goat in the universe. Your fame will last for every generation and your enemies in every land shall hear of your feats and cease their disturbances”.

The court was shocked! Nasreddin will surely find himself in a dungeon soon for such an impertinent request! Yet the khan takes a moment, furrows his brow, breathes deeply and says to the surprise of all, “Yes. My fame is great, but a talking and singing goat will spread my fame across the lands for every generation”.

Will the practice of power in Russia ever change? The argument of this book has been that the longevity of tsars, general secretaries and presidents relies upon that leader’s ability to balance elite factions and provide order and direction to the bureaucracy, which then does the same onto the general population. This description may be an ideal type, but the leaders who last a long time are not the ones who optimize growth or freedom, but instead optimize their own indispensability. The origins of Russia’s political culture described in Chapter 1 and the numerous promarket episodes described in Chapter 2 provide a clear sense of how the system works and why economic reform that would challenge or undo that system is pursued only when the external geopolitical environment is threatening and dropped as soon as possible thereafter.

The Russian system has worked for centuries. While it is prone to regime collapse, as seen twice in the twentieth century (1917 and 1991), it works very well in the meantime for rulers who adhere to first principles of elite balancing and control over the bureaucracy. In this regard, the system built by Vladimir Putin is not new, but instead the restoration of a system that existed for centuries in Russia prior to the tentative attempts at democratization by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Chapters 3–5 described how Putin turned the country he inherited from his predecessors into one recognizable to his ancestors: optimized for resilience and stability and ready for shocks such as Covid-19 and the war of choice against Ukraine. As of June 2022, Covid-19 has caused more than a million excess deaths and the invasion of Ukraine has created a generation-defining change to the European security environment, Russia’s international commercial isolation, and an economic downturn of unknown depths.

This chapter does not make any specific predictions about how long Putin will continue to serve as Russia’s leader, nor the way he might exit office. Instead, the chapter examines how setting the rules of the game, namely by instrumentalizing opacity and transparency and managing elite corruption and mass consent, largely inoculate Putin from the shocks of Covid and Ukraine but will make the work of his successor largely impossible.

Over Vladimir Putin’s first two decades in power, much of his enduring popularity with the public can be traced to improvements in public health, a stabilization of population trends, and, through general economic improvement, the presence of a more welcoming environment for family planning as compared to the late Soviet and early Russian periods. Many demographic measures showed severe setbacks in the 1990s: alcoholism, drug use, and the spread of communicable diseases, such as tuberculosis and HIV, which worsened dramatically. The rapid deindustrialization and deep recession experienced between 1992 and 1998 led to a great decline in the basic capacity to provide public services, with cuts in education and healthcare spending, and the general social trauma of state failure led to natural population declines through a combination of emigration, declining births and increasing deaths. When Putin came into office, restoring the state appeared to be a matter of public welfare. In large part, Putin has been successful relative to the past but middling compared to Russia’s current peer competitors.

This chapter outlines the health, life prospects, and economic culture enjoyed by Russians today. The last cardinal success of the improvement of most demographic, health, and socioeconomic indicators has been the emergence of a strong consumer culture in Russia. High GDP growth rates and rising state spending on social programmes such as pensions in the 2000s led to large rises in household incomes. Western firms and brands established a large presence, luxury goods flooded into large cities, and Russian businesses serving domestic tastes and preferences grew. The decline of real incomes since 2013 has reversed some of these gains and been accompanied by a proliferation of efforts to encourage consumption of domestic equivalents, from cars to television series watched using domestic streaming services. Stagnation ultimately interacts with every other component of these various socioeconomic and demographic indicators since the state of the economy affects public budgets, family formation, the demand for labour, and more. The conservative, statist model that has emerged over the last two decades will continue to evolve and adapt to a low-growth environment affected by Putin’s policy choices and social trends that are beyond the Kremlin’s control, especially the consequences of war, sanctions and deglobalization.

The historical practice of power in Russia is important to understand modern-era economic reform and to illuminate how, over time, Russian leaders have understood the limits of reform. The country’s rulers have made similar decisions over time because they have been in similar positions with similar limitations, regardless of whether they have served as tsars, general secretaries, or presidents. It is as true today as it was in the time of Peter the Great that Russia is territorially vast with few natural barriers to external threats, possesses an unevenly distributed population that makes sustained development difficult, possesses numerous valuable export commodities, and suffers from capital deficiency that makes leaders reliant on patrimonial relations with elites and puts the country’s external economic relations in a peripheral position to more advanced states.

This chapter outlines why and how the practice of power in Russia is different from that in other states and the historical processes by which the “rules of the game” came to exist. Many states are weakly democratic or authoritarian, or have had authoritarian periods in their history, but what makes Russia different is how the country’s leadership seems to toggle consciously between “opening up” and “closing down”. The switching is usually understood in reference to the “West”, and this chapter begins by explaining the two major images of power in Western historiography about Russian leaders: the “Iron Tsar” who rules vertically by forcing his will upon subordinates, and the “Balancer” who rules horizontally by being first among equals with other powerful actors and balancing different elite factions. A tremendous amount of scholarship focuses on which type any one ruler may be – the dictator who coerces his subjects or a master of palace intrigue – but I break from the conventional wisdom by showing that leadership in Russia is not one or the other style but, instead, different phases of governance. Individuals in Russia might take power by demonstrating coercive capabilities, but they can sustain power only by balancing different factions.