Selling Welfare Reform: Work-First and the New Common Sense of Employment Book

This book brings to mind the putative Mark Twain quote about everyone complaining about the weather but no one doing anything about it. Everyone knows Russia is cold, but few have the temerity to ask why. Yes, Russia is in the North, but on its own that wouldn't be so terrible. Moscow is on about the same 55 degrees North latitude as Vilinius, and just a little North of Berlin and London. Moscow is also about the about the same latitude as Siberian towns like Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk, and Krasnoyarsk. The problem, however, is that the great Russian land mass is isolated from warm ocean airs, and exposed to the Arctic, which means that temperature drops faster growing East than going North (St. Petersburg is warmer than Moscow, even though it is Northwest). Moscow's average January temperature is about -10 degrees Celsius, while Novosibirsk is -20, and further East cities like Yakutsk are -35. The greater mystery, however, is why Russia has such big cities so far East and North in Siberia, and over 30 million people living in them?

The reason for Russia's peculiar coldness is bad Soviet planning combined with Russian nationalist ideology. The authors construct a national "temperature per capita," and show that while Russia started out about -11.6 degrees TPC around the Russian Revolution, they dropped more than a full degree on average over the next seventy years (a semi-equivalent country like Canada got a degree warmer over the same time period). Frozen Siberian cities like Novosibirsk, Omsk, Yekaterinburg and Perm were built up to over a million people, due partially to "Engel's dictum" that industry should be spread equally throughout a country, and also partially to the need to keep voyenno-promyshlennyy kompleks (VPK) or defense cities, away from European aggressors. Even today, nationalist ideologues from Alexander Solzhenitsyn to Alexander Dugin celebrate the peculiar Russian benefits of Siberia and the frozen taiga. They should instead celebrate people moving away from them.

The Soviet build-up of isolated archipelagos of frozen towns had numerous negative consequences. For one, it inhibited a natural urban network. Outside of the two big cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia has a complete absence of any "medium-sized" cities in the 4 to 1.5 million range that are typical in almost all large nations. Also, the great number of million-plus Siberian cities also are much less efficient and comfortable than warmer cities would be. At -20 degrees manual construction workers are about 50% less efficient than at 0, and equipment is about 25% less efficient. At that temperature, compressors in internal combustion engines stop operating, tower cranes start to collapse. A little lower and unalloyed steel breaks, and fuel tanks must be insulated. During the Soviet period, cost was rarely calculated, however, so these Siberian areas were subsidized at about 25% of all expenses from the European "mater
ik" or mainland. Now, the government still subsidizes, at around 2-3% of GDP, but at a lower level, so many people are trapped in freezing and impoverished cities.

The authors offer no obvious solutions to Russia's dilemma, except to gradually move people away from Siberia and the North around the Arctic Circle (where which 7% of Russia's population lives, while in countries like Sweden its less than 1%), towards natural urban networks around Europe, with the help of gradually diminishing subsidies. Although the book often repeats itself and reiterates the same issues, this is about as original a look as one will get at Russia, one which takes into account demography, geography, and, above all, that greatest Russian curse, purblind ideology.