Analysis of the Level of Social Development in Russia

Abstract

The article shows a retrospective of the problem of social development and presents various forms of perception of "living standards"; "individual and social welfare"; "basic needs", et el. At the same time, the leading criterion of social development is quality of life (living standards and well-being of the population) formulated by Aristotle. The government should ensure high quality of life, and the good is a means of living and well-being. The work identifies the stages of evolution of the concept of social development from the individual well-being (preferences) to the social one. The emphasis is on the need to take into account the regulatory and distribution principle which can have an ordering and leveling effect on the financial situation of certain groups of the population, mandatory satisfaction of basic minimum needs and improvement of public services, respect for human rights. The changes in the method for assessing the level of social development from the criterion of freedom of choice to the "Human Development Index" are analyzed. The changes in the approach to assessing social development are due to the fact that for highly developed countries material security and basic needs are secondary while in the developing countries they remained relevant. In addition to expanding the number of criteria, researchers and society pay attention to crosscountry comparisons to assess the development. The relevance of the study is due to the transition of assessing the level of social development from quantitative to qualitative indicators in accordance with the methodology of crosscountry comparison of the main indicators of the "Human Development Index". The article analyzes the transition from the general study of the level and quality of life, measuring their characteristics, analyzing the applicability of certain groups of indicators for international comparisons and assessing socioeconomic policies (International society for quality-of-life studies, ISQOLS; Organization for economic cooperation and development, OECD; International social survey program, ISSP and other) to the Human Development Index (Human Development Reports. United Nations development program)-a simple and informative picture of the state of society (ender-related development index, GDI; gender empowerment measure, GEM; income-distribution-adjusted index, IDAI; human poverty index, HPI and other). As a result of assessing the level of social development, it was revealed that Russia can reach either the level of "Above"