The essays in this volume have been written since the publication of my first collection, Essays in the Theory of Economic Growth, in 1957. Although all but two of them (Essay 3 and the Special Appendix to Essay 11) have appeared in print before, I hope that, being collected in one place, they may still be of some use to my fellow economists and even to a few historians (Part IV).

A number of minor changes and corrections were made in the original texts.

Unlike the earlier essays which had a definite focus – the theory of economic growth – this book appears to lack one. Actually, most of the essays in the first three parts do have a common theme: the comparative performance of different economic systems, particularly of American capitalism and Soviet socialism (at least as it had existed before Gorbachev's perestroika). My ventures into Soviet economics have not been sufficiently deep or frequent to claim the title of a sovietologist, but they have continued to be a rich source of ideas. They have also aroused my interest in the history of serfdom and slavery, which led to the three essays in Part IV.

Let me now describe the origin and nature of each essay and end with a few brief comments on the perestroika, to the extent that these essays are relevant to it.

The first three essays (Part I) are discourses. They are rather general and nontechnical with one formula and one diagram for all three.