In a 1980 article, Adam Przeworski tried to estimate the likely costs to workers in rich capitalist nations of a transition to socialism. He concluded that they were sizable enough to be a serious deterrent to socialist preferences.

History turned in the opposite direction: less than a decade later eastern Europe began its transition to capitalism. In The Economist‘s 2008 year-end special issue, Laza Kekic offers a two-decades-on estimate of the costs of that transition.