 Failures of society: How to understand, regulate and manageA. Gorodetskii
Journal of the New Economic Association, 2025, vol. 66, issue 1, 245-255 Abstract: The paper presents the main points of the discussion that formed the basis of L. I. Yakobson's publication "Pitfalls of nonmarket self-organization". The main points of the concepts "self-organization" and "failures" are considered were reviewed. The discussion of self-organization failures was generated by the formulation of the problem of failures of society, raised on the platform of the theory of patronized goods, its creative development in the form of the economic theory of the state, and further, in continuation of the topic, the evolution of the paternalistic state. One of the significant results of the evolution of theoretical knowledge within the framework of this scientific school was the interconnected system of ideas and concepts of market failures, state failures and failures of society, which, under certain circumstances, lie in wait for human communities, society as a whole, on the paths of civilizational, economic, political and social development. Failures as violations and dead ends of development, are connected not only with objective limitations of corresponding social forms and institutions, but also with individual and collective motives, aspirations and actions of people involved in goal-setting, implementation of power, organization (self-organization), management. Ideas and arguments that different types of failures still have a common internal logic and cause-and-effect relationship are assessed positively. It seems debatable that, voluntarily or involuntarily, failures of society are identified with failures of self-organization, which can and should be argued. Self-organization is not the only attribute of society. It has the properties and functions of self-development, self-regulation and self-management. And, what is not less important, self-criticism and self-healing. And this is the guarantee that it is capable of correcting not only the mistakes and shortcomings of the state, but also its own, ensuring the unfading dialectic of the sociodynamics of the entire metasystem as a whole (A. Ya. Rubinshtein). From this point of view, the controversial issues of the article by the respected professor L. I. Yakobson are discussed, in particular, the vision of trends in public administration systems from the point of view of confronting failures. An assessment is given of the prospects for the formation of a network society and its role in the formation of a system for preventing and neutralizing the fundamental causes of failures of the market, state, and society. And, as a final conclusion and chord: the discussed position provides an excellent opportunity to make a more precise assessment of what thirty years of experimentation with economic, political and social reforms in Russia have resulted in, what options for the future can be topics of discussion among professional economists and the subject of public choice of our fellow citizens, how to steer the ship of Russian statehood between the Scylla and Charybdis of traditional temptations and temptations of the Russian history, which have repeatedly led to great upheavals instead of the desired Great Russia. Keywords: self-development; self-organization; failures; Pareto's criteria of optimum and efficiency; differences and common features in the structure of the bases of failures; network state; network society; public administration (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nea:journl:y:2025:i:66:p:245-255 DOI: 10.31737/22212264_2025_1_245-255 Access Statistics for this article Journal of the New Economic Association is currently edited by Victor Polterovich and Aleksandr Rubinshtein More articles in Journal of the New Economic Association from New Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC. |
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