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The paper provides a critical appraisal of the normative program of behavioral economics known as 'new paternalism'. First, it explores the theoretical foundations of behavioral economics, describes major behavioral anomalies associated with bounded rationality of economic agents and discusses its normative principles and political implications. It then discusses the main empirical and conceptual drawbacks of new paternalism and provides arguments for the alternative non-welfarist normative tradition based on the idea of freedom.

The paper provides a critical appraisal of the normative program of behavioral economics known as 'new paternalism'. First, it explores the theoretical foundations of behavioral economics, describes major behavioral anomalies associated with bounded rationality of economic agents and discusses its normative principles and political implications. It then discusses the main empirical and conceptual drawbacks of new paternalism and provides arguments for the alternative non-welfarist normative tradition based on the idea of freedom.

The paper provides a critical assessment of an authoritative study "From Soviets to oligarchs" (2017) on evolution of economic inequality in Russia by F. Novokmet, T. Piketty and G. Zucman where Russia is portrayed as a country with abnormally polarized income distribution by international standards. The author examines main quantitative results obtained by Piketty's team, describes peculiar methodological features of their measuring procedure and analyzes how they dissect available empirical data sets. A general conclusion is that the trio uses an unconventional methodology that does not allow to apply equivalence scales; their argument suffers from internal inconsistencies (different units of observation and different definitions of income are used); they misunderstand the nature of data that form a base for their calculations (simulated estimates are perceived as raw survey data, post-tax incomes as pretax ones, etc.); deduction and declaration coefficients that they impose on tax data are empirically improbable; their final estimates of income inequality for Russia are higher than empirically realistic ones approximately by one third (Gini coefficients 0.5—0.6 instead of 0.3—0.4 by other researchers).

The paper provides a critical assessment of Pan-i nstitutionalism — an approach which tries to explain the course of the world economic history by changes in formal economic and formal political institutions. This approach is mono-causal since for it formal institutions do not simply matter: in fact they are all that matter. The most complete and elaborated versions of Pan-institutionalism were presented i n two famous books — "Violence and social order" by North, Wallis and Wei ngast and "Why nations fail" by Acemoglu and Robinson. Their ideas were taken by the Russian academic community as the last word in the modern economic and political sciences. The paper demonstrates methodological narrowness, conceptual inconsistency and historical inadequacy of Pan-institutionalism. In particular, it fails to provide a coherent explanation of the turning point of the world economic history — the Industrial revolution in England in the mid of XVIII century, i.e. a transition from Malthusian to Schumpeterian economic growth.

Using published estimates of inequality for two countries (Russia and USA) the paper demonstrates that inequality measuring still remains in the state of "statistical cacophony". Under this condition, it seems at least untimely to pass categorical normative judgments and offer radical political advice for governments. Moreover, the mere practice to draw normative conclusions from quantitative data is ethically invalid since ordinary people (non-intellectuals) tend to evaluate wealth and incomes as admissible or inadmissible not on the basis of their size but basing on whether they were obtained under observance or violations of the rules of "fair play". The paper concludes that a current large-scale ideological campaign of "struggle against inequality" has been unleashed by left-wing intellectuals in order to strengthen even more their discursive power over the public.

Economic growth in Russia in the first decade of this century almost doubled the country's GDP but was accompanied by substantial reallocation of labor to the unregulated sector while formal employment was on gradual decline. The paper overviews evolution of the Russian labour market during the period of 2000-10 and discusses most general implications of informality to employment and earnings as well as the associated political economy challenges and consequences.

The paper discusses how the Russian labor market has been evolving over two decades of the transition. It starts with tracing key labor market indicators such as employment, unemployment, labor force participation, working hours, and real wages. Their dynamics indicate that the labor market tends to operate in a non-conventional fashion and far from the patterns expected initially. The authors argue that the current Russian labor market represents a peculiar model that is different from what is observed in the rest of Europe outside of the CIS. Having established this, they look at the institutional foundations that make this unconventional performance possible and proceed with discussing political economy and welfare implications. The findings are compared with the experience of other post-socialist countries.