On May 5, the Discussion Club of “Caravan of Knowledge” hosted a seminar on “Seven phases of socio-political development: politometrics instead of political alchemy” by professor A.A. Gafurov. Dr. Gafurov has a long-term experience working on politometrics theory and his work has attracted attention at the international level.
Here is a brief outline summarizing the key points of the discussion:
– Research works on social and political issues within humanities remind the work of alchemists due to speculative and unjustifiable statements; rigorous science is often replaced by subjective opinions;
– there is a wide range of opinions on the matters of democracy, correct state organization and the development routes of a country. There is no single basis to answer these questions;
– humanities always were in need of a rigorous theory using the tools of science, i.e. quantitative methods;
– there had been attempts to create a world development model based on formal methods, for example, it was done by The Club of Rome and WOMP – World Order Model Project, meaning that the task of formalizing the analysis on development is relevant;
– politometrics operates with three motivations of the human behaviour as a basis for analysis: economic (e-motive), administrative (a-motive) and moral-ethical (m-motive), believed to determine any behavior of a person in society;
– politometrics works on the ways to measure these motives and develops equations based on which, mathematical rates of changing motives can be calculated;
– according to politometrics, it is necessary to have at least a 50% of middle class to build democracy;
– Dr.Gafurov argues that revolutions had never led to democracy and the best way is to follow the evolutionary path of development;
– capitalism and democracy are not the best forms of state; according to politometrics, capitalism is followed by an order conditionally called “socialism” (conditions under which the M-motive reaches its maximum);
– first of all, it is necessary to build a state governed by the rule of law and to adopt efficient laws.
The key question remains open: how can one calculate or what is the magic mathematical law of a transition to democracy? How to define the transition point within a society with such a wide range of motives? How to achieve the desired ratio of motives and how to grow the middle class size to 50%?
An international bestseller by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robin “Why Nations Fail” (2012) was quoted. The authors are in a similar search for a fundamental law of countries’ development, they introduce the concepts of inclusive and extractive institutions and conclude that geographical, cultural, historical, nor religious features of countries and human societies determine wealth or poverty and the dominance of the key institutions. The authors conclude: “In general, our theory states that different societies achieve prosperity in a similar way – by transforming their institutions from extractive into inclusive. But even without a profound analysis it is clear that there are no simple recipes for such a transformation”.