ABSTRACT
Countries are unique, and while we can be confident that a greater reliance on legal markets will be good for Russia, we cannot know what the best mix of market institutions will be. Many aspects of the final destination will only be learned through an evolutionary process. Western economist Richard Ericson notes that a final lesson for successful reform taught by the nature of the traditional Soviet-style system is to abandon the Faustian urge to control, to know in advance, and thus to allow economic outcomes to arise naturally as the unpredictable consequences of market interaction. With a Western-style capitalist economy providing the destination, the starting point and the transitional path are the other elements of the journey that must be specified. In the current US economy, whether discouraged workers can be characterized as ‘implicitly unemployed’ may be largely a matter of semantics.
