gressive scarcity of goods in general but rather an increased abundance and that this increased abundance probably continued in the United States even during the war.
Professor W. I. King, in his Wealth and Income of the People of the United States, shows that "real income' " (that is, income in terms of commodities instead of dollars) has risen every census year since 1850 (excepting only 1870, following the Civil War, when there was a slight diminution)![1] The volume of general trade in the United States has increased, on the average, faster than population. According to the statement of Nat. C. Murray of the Bureau of Statistics of the Department of Agriculture, the per capita production of the ten leading crops in the United States has increased during the last twenty years.[2] Professor E. W. Kemmerer[3] and the present writer[4] find that the volume of trade has increased greatly and continuously during that time.
This was true even during the war. Professor Wesley Clair Mitchell has made a study, under the War Trade Board, on the production of raw materials which indicates that the raw materials used in the
- ↑ King's figures (in terms of the average purchasing power of the dollar in the years 1890-99) for the successive census years from 1850 to 1910 are 69, 79, 82, 111, 169, 232, 262 (p. 129).
- ↑ Monthly Crop Reports, U. S. Department of Agriculture, November, 1917.
- ↑ "Inflation," American Economic Review, Vol. VIII, No. 2, June, 1918.
- ↑ "Will the Present Upward Trend of World Prices Continue?" American Economic Review, Sept., 1912; "Equation of Exchange," American Economic Review, June, 1919; "The New Price Revolution," Department of Labor, Information and Education Service, March, 1919.
