Some Unpleasant (and then Some Pleasant) Transition Arithmetic
Some Unpleasant (and then Some Pleasant) Transition Arithmetic

Summary/Abstract: Twenty-one years ago, Thomas Sargent and Neil Wallace wrote an article entitled “Some Unpleasant onetarist Arithmetic” (1981). I am no Monetarist, but I do pay attention to what Monetarists say, and I heerfully acknowledge that these two Monetarists thought up a clever title for the paper they wrote for he Minneapolis Fed’s Quarterly Review back in 1981. Here in 2002, the subject I address in the paragraphs below is not Monetarism, but instead the experience of transition economies. In particular, all attention to some arithmetic that can help organize our thoughts with regard to some of the ardships a country endures and some of the successes a country achieves during the transition from entral planning to free markets. I focus on equations involving important stocks and flows of people in such a country in transition, subsequently citing data on those stocks and flows between the years of 992 and 2000 here in Latvia.

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