ABSTRACT
The provincial town of N. contained so many barber shops and funeral establishments that it seemed that its inhabitants came into this world merely to get a shave and a haircut, freshen up the scalp with hair tonic, and to die immediately thereafter. A large literature has arisen along these lines, and much has been learned in the process, but few conversant with the methods would vouch for a consistently high order of accuracy of the results obtained heretofore. Measuring the unmeasurable remains a problem. The Soviet second economy, like a Western underground economy, is a market economy. Insofar as it is illegal and produces for exchange, it can but be a market economy—though, naturally, one with its own peculiar institutions and limits. In a private communication, Peter Wiles has justifiably pointed out that ‘the ratio of black to official unskilled hourly pay is of great importance in all questions of time budgets.
