Keynes Trilemma from the Viewpoint of Kleiner Tetrad under the Cataclysms in the Society

Objective: to study the relations of a pair of the social system sectors in G. B. Kleiner’s tetrad, the state and the society, in different situations; to confirm the hypothesis about the difference in the society’s demands and the state’s response to environmental change, including the current crisis; to investigate the factors and possible ways to balance the interactions of the pair of sectors.

Methods: the trilemma of J. M. Keynes is studied in the application to the internal policy of the state from the standpoint of the systemic economic paradigm developed at the CEMI RAS under the supervision of G. B. Kleyner.

Results: using the tetrad model, the conditions for balanced interactions between the state and society are identified in the interpretation of the Keynes trilemma from the standpoint of welfare, freedoms, and justice. Based on the spatial-temporal analysis, Keynes’ hypothesis of the incompatibility of these goals simultaneously in the state policy is confirmed. The importance of adaptive policy is growing in a period of instability, when the structure of people’s requests is changing: the need for freedom becomes less relevant than the request for protection and quality of life.

Scientific novelty: based on the idea of the cyclical nature of the interaction between the state and society in the course of social development, patterns of sporadic occurrence and reproduction of threats to society in the absence of a reactive response to changes in the requests of agents during the exchange of resources in the macro-system are established. The key factors include the immanent basic conditions and foundations of human existence, which are the root cause of the shifting balance in the dynamics of relations (the balance of expectations of society and state policy), depending on how these needs are met. The hypothesis of a close connection of these driving factors with the critical signs of social relations in the existing model of the economy of the Russian Federation and other countries is empirically confirmed. The expansion of knowledge of the relationship between the structural and functional characteristics of the macro-system contributes to the solution of the central task of systems research.

Practical significance: the results revealed the prerequisites for the shifting of the public policy accents under the modern cataclysms. The joint use of the Keynes trilemma and Kleiner’s tetrad in such a research perspective can contribute to the formation of a synthetic approach to the analysis and modeling of mutual expectations of the key agents, the coordination of requests, and the development of divergent policies that contribute to the system harmonization.

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