Feldman, Grigory Alexandrovich

Origin and career start

Born in the family of a native of Odessa , a graduate of the mathematical department of the natural faculty of the Imperial Novorossiysk University , a large industrialist Alexander Yakovlevich Feldman (1860—?) ^[5] , deputy chairman of the Rostov Exchange Committee, chairman of the board of the joint-stock company Sulinsky Zavod , Azov Coal Company, and "cloth trade Association Jacob Feldman" in Odessa , director of the "Theology of the mining company", board member of the "Russian export trade company" Azov -Donskogo Commercial Bank "Russian commercial shipping company society», «Armavir water supply", "Universal Construction Company", "the Russian mining community of commission" and the Taganrog Metal Works. Grandfather, a merchant of the 1st guild, a hereditary honorary citizen Yakov Anisimovich Feldman (? —1878), founded in 1875 the Association of Cloth Trading Yakov Feldman, one of the largest companies in this field in southern Russia. The family settled in Rostov-on-Don in 1886 in house number 25 on Bolshaya Sadovaya Street , and since 1912 has been living permanently in St. Petersburg on Admiralteyskaya Naberezhnaya , house number 6 ^{[6] [7] [8] [9]} .

He received the qualification of an electrical engineer in Germany and Russia, graduated in 1912 from the Imperial Moscow Technical School with a degree in Long-Distance Electric Railways. He was fluent in three foreign languages. After graduating from IMTU, he worked as an electrical engineer in Petrograd, then as an assistant to the head of the Electrical Department of the Supreme Economic Council in Moscow. As an employee of the electrical department, he took an active part in the work of the State Commission for Electrification of Russia , gained experience in the field of national economic planning . Later, as a member of the board and the presidium of Electrocredit , he dealt with issues at the intersection of electrical engineering and economics ^[10] .

At the USSR State Planning Commission

In February 1923, at the invitation of G. Krzhizhanovsky, he joined the State Planning Committee of the RSFSR (since July 1923 - the State Planning Committee of the USSR ) in the department of world economic conditions. Since 1924, he published in the journal " Planning economy " reviews of foreign economic conditions , mainly in relation to Germany and the United States ^[10] . In 1927, he published a work devoted to the analysis of the US economy from 1850 to 1925 and the prospects for the development of the Soviet economy until 1941 ^{[11] [12]} . In this work, he proposed a new indicator of the efficiency of social production - the ratio of national income to productive assets, based on the long-term dynamics of this indicator in the United States from 1850, he put forward a forecast for the development of the national economy of the USSR until 1941 ^[10] .

In 1928 he became the head of the planning department of the USSR State Planning Commission ^[13] . At this time, the State Planning Commission worked both on the plan of the First Five Year Plan and on the so-called general plan for a period of ten to twenty years. Feldman was instructed to prepare a theoretical model as the basis for this plan ^[14] . Based on the historical data he had previously collected, he developed a mathematical model of balanced development rates for use in long-term planning of the national economy of the USSR ^{[12] [15]} . He presented the developed model in his report “On the theory of the rate of national income” to the Commission of the General Plan under the USSR State Planning Commission in 1928 ^[3] , the report was published in the November and December issues of the journal “Planning economy” for 1928 ^[16] . In his research, Feldman substantiated the need for mathematical methods and actually applied them when planning the national economy. “This study shows how rapidly the scientific growth of Feldman, who worked as an electrical engineer five years ago, and now appeared before us as a major researcher of the problems of planned economy” ^[10] .

In 1929, he published an article that popularly described his proposed method of planning calculations ^[17] , this method was the basis of the working hypothesis of the general plan for the development of the national economy of the USSR for 1930-1945. The results of work on the master plan based on the Feldman model were presented in the report of N. A. Kovalevsky “Towards the construction of the master plan” at the Institute of Economic Research on February 25, 1930. Feldman spoke in the discussion on the report, according to A. Weinstein and G. Khanin, this was his last appearance in print ^{[18] [10] [19]} .

Years of obscurity

During the discussion of the 1930s, the predictions of Feldman and Kovalevsky on the growth of the efficiency of social production were characterized by their opponents as too optimistic, and the demand for a balanced growth of sectors of the national economy was rejected, but the criticism was still scientific ^{[10] [12]} . In the subsequent period, until the mid-1930s, their opponents began to make increasingly biased accusations, including in the open press (for example, in the newspaper “ For Industrialization ”). In January 1931, Feldman was forced to leave Gosplan and went to work at the Planning Academy , where in 1931-1935 ^{[20] [12] [21] he} was the head of the department of technical constructions, and then a teacher. In 1933, he prepared a work on the problems of capitalist reproduction, but it was not published ^[10] .

In 1935-1937 - the head of the group of the master plan of the Main Directorate of the Northern Sea Route . According to I. Osadcha , he was repressed in 1937. According to Weinstein and Khanin, after 1943 he “worked in engineering positions in various cities of the Soviet Union. Being a highly erudite engineer, he finds application everywhere to his knowledge. Some inventions and copyright certificates for drilling oil wells, etc., have been preserved. ” In 1953 he returned to Moscow, already seriously ill and no longer dealt with economic issues. He was rehabilitated shortly before his death. He died in 1958 ^{[4] [10] [12]} .

In the 1950s, the American economist E. Domar , co-author of the Harrod-Domar model , wrote that “the study of Soviet society is one of the few methods available to social scientists (unlike its more successful colleagues in laboratory research) to review its entire intellectual apparatus in the light of a socio-economic system that is different enough from ours to make the experiment useful, and yet not so great as to make it impossible ” ^[22] . To find Soviet models of economic growth and compare them with existing ones in the West, he studied Soviet publications of the 1920s. At the prompt of he discovered Feldman's work “On the theory of the rate of national income” and outlined the essence of this work in one of the chapters of his 1957 book Essays in the Theory of Economic Growth " ). Domar concluded that the 1928 Feldman model “is strikingly reminiscent of the models that the West has developed since then,” while the Feldman variables differ from the “ ” and “ habitual for Western scientists” ". Based on the theory of Marx, Feldman “divided the entire economy into a capital goods industry and a consumer goods industry, each with its own coefficient, and used as a key variable the share of total investments allocated to the capital goods industry to increase their output " ^[23] .

In his 1928 study, Feldman for the first time in science created an economic model based on synthetic, aggregated indicators . “The fact that this method arose in the USSR, the first country of a [centralized] planned economy, is not an accident: the development of planning practice urgently required the development of such a method. He appeared abroad later, after the great economic crisis of the capitalist economy in the early 1930s in connection with the theory of the economic cycle of J. Keynes ” ^[10] .

The Feldman-Mahalanobis model was named after Grigory Feldman and Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis , who independently of Feldman in 1953 developed a model of economic growth , similar to the one that was previously developed by Feldman, as the basis for the (1956-1961 gg.).

E. Domar wrote in 1957 about the model developed by Feldman: “Soviet models of [economic growth] are more developed than similar attempts made in the West, with the exception of Leontief's work ...” ^[24] . S. Bartenev notes that, in contrast to the Harrod-Domar single - sector economic growth model , which was only a theoretical analysis tool, the Feldman’s two-sector model served to justify a real growth policy and was suitable for practical use ^[25] .

In the mid-1920s, V. Bazarov , one of the economists of the State Planning Commission, made a distinction between the “genetic” and “teleological” approaches to economic planning. He called the “predictive” approach, based on the extrapolation of economic development trends, and the “teleological” approach, the directive approach, based on the priority of targets ^[26] . Bazarov himself considered it necessary to combine both approaches in planning the national economy of the USSR ^[27] . E. Carr wrote in 1969 in the 10th volume of his “ ” that Feldman expressed his “teleological” views on the development of the national economy of the USSR in an extreme form when he asserted that “they cannot and will not resist the petty-bourgeois elements the rate of industrialization of the country should be limited, only material opportunities with the strain of all working people of the Union on the verge of physical and psychological endurance can serve as limits ” ^{[28] [29]} . At the same time, Russian researchers note that “the work of G. A. Feldman showed the need for a combination of teleological and genetic approaches” ^[30] , “the merit of G. A. Feldman is primarily in the fact that he proposed methods, the essence of which is to study economic genetics. By genetics, Feldman understood the laws of development reflected by the statistical dynamic series of the main indicators of economic progress over the longest possible number of years ” ^{[31] [32]} .

In his 1972 book, N. Yasny evaluates the work of Feldman (whom he calls the “chief planning specialist”) and as the “bacchanal of planning”: “Feldman and Sabsovich were champions of the idea of ​​accelerated economic development and the main vehicles for bacchanalia planning. " (...) According to the maximum variant of the plan developed by Feldman, the national income for 12 years (from 1929 to 1941) was supposed to increase 45–49 times. This follows from (...) the tables compiled by Feldman ” ^{[33] [34]} . In their 1968 article, Weinstein and Khanin also write that “Feldman-Kovalevsky’s forecasts of changes in the efficiency of social production for the coming period turned out to be overly optimistic,” explaining this with little historical experience in developing a planned economy and unjustified extrapolation of the recovery growth rates of the 1920s to the subsequent period ^[10] . At the same time, later Russian researchers, based on an analysis of historical data, state that the minimum version of the plan drawn up by Feldman turned out to be very close to the actual growth rate of the USSR's national income until 1940 ^[35] and even before 1950 ^[20] .

The economic discussions that took place in the USSR in the 1920s, including the work of Feldman, influenced the post-war development economy outside the USSR. In particular, according to A. Nouv expressed in 1979, one can trace the line of influence from Feldman through Domar ^[36] . According to G. Fonseca of the , Feldman influenced A. Löve and the ^[37] .

In 1967, L.V. Kantorovich and A.L. Weinstein wrote:

“... The priority in building a macroeconomic dynamic model and formulating the basic conditions for sustainable and continuous economic growth belongs to ... Soviet economist-engineer, prominent specialist of the USSR State Planning Commission G. A. Feldman, who spoke in 1928 with two articles in which he outlined his the theory of the growth rate of national income ” ^[38]

According to Weinstein and Khanin, “Feldman’s greatest merit is that he was the first in planned science to correctly solve the problem of [compiling a national economic plan based on the balance of the national economy] and at the same time lay the foundations of a new direction in economic science, the theory of economic growth” ^[10] :

“... For decades, Feldman’s models were ahead of the single-sector models of Domar’s economic growth and the two-sector Mahalanobis model. The theory of economic growth, the founder of which was our compatriot Feldman, occupies an increasing place in economic theory ” ^[10] .

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• Fonseca, Gonçalo L. Grigorii Alexandrovich Fel'dman, 1884-1958 (neopr.) . HET. The History of Economic Thought Website . Date of treatment September 5, 2019.