the amount of the annual income of the American people, its division between what are commonly classed as capital and labor, and its further division among the classes of labor. It proved impossible for me to carry out that ambitious plan in its entirety owing to the absence of essential data. It is fortunate that this work was taken up and brought to a more satisfactory conclusion by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
I mentioned further that Dr. Arthur L. Bowley had published a similar analysis of the national income of Great Britain before the war. Although he made a far better study for British conditions than I was able to do for American, he encountered similar difficulties, and remarked that “material for such a task is of that uncoordinated, incomplete and sporadic nature which is familiar to all those who have tried to obtain general results from official statistics.”
The same fault may be found with respect to American official statistics. It is not satisfactory that out of the great mass of statistics that are collected and published in Washington there is nothing given for what ought to be a fundamental figure, namely, the amount of the total national income, nor even sufficient data to permit that figure to be deduced. The same lack of data is troublesome in making a study of the national wealth.
In the greatest economic disturbance of the world’s affairs that there has been since the Thirty Years’ War, and possibly that there has ever been, nothing but imperfect statistical information respecting the wealth and income and earning capacity of the countries of the world exists. John Maynard Keynes in his book on the “Economic Consequences of the Peace,” the most
