Knowledge that Transforms

'WHERE has been such an expansion of inI formation in the United Kingdom during the past decade that it has become very hard for the statistician keep up with developments in fields outside his own: the more ordinary citizen wanting figures has difficulty in discovering even what information is available, let alone what it means and what it is worth. It was therefore welcome news hear a few years ago that the Royal Statistical Society had started a program of papers by authorities on the sources available in each field. For some time we have been reading these papers in the Journal of the Society, and the first twenty of them have been published by Oliver and Boyd as Volume One of The Sources and Nature of the Statistics of the United Kingdom, at the very reasonable price of twenty-one shillings. The authors were asked to observe three requirements: they should broadly survey all the statistical information in the chosen field, unofficial as well as official, they should call attention pitfalls in interpretation, and they should give references enable a student follow up the subject if he wished. The table of contents is as follows:

pOSTWAR Japan is deeply obsessed with the export or expire kind of fatalism, in spite of the remarkable manifestations of economic recovery from the devastating effects of World War II. The end of the boom due to the Korean war drove home the realization that Japan depends more than ever on external for internal viability as well as for co-prosperity with other nations. Thus we find the Japanese Diet (parliament), the press, and the economics profession all joining in a grim debate on import austerity, disinflation, yen devaluation, and China trade as possible remedies for the post-Korean dollar and sterling gaps 1 a debate reminiscent of Britain's prior to the I949 devaluation.2 However, Japan's balance of payments difficulties are far more deeply rooted than short-range policy discussions would indicate. For this reason I shall endeavor, in this paper, to discuss Japan's position in the context of the changed structure of the Japanese economy and with reference to the shifting pattern of world trade. Such a discussion may also throw useful light on the general problems of foreign and economic development in postwar conditions.

HOW stable are consumer expectations? In view of the growing awareness of a relationship between expectations and consumer buying, and the concomitant rising popularity of intentions surveys and attitudinal surveys as indicators of consumer purchases, this question assumes a new importance. To what extent, for example, can attitudes and expectations ascertained at one moment of time be extrapolated six months or a year in advance, as is implicitly done when information of this type is used either alone or in conjunction with other material to predict the future course of expenditures? ' Basic to the use of attitude and expectations data in explaining and predicting human behavior and basic to the design of surveys for obtaining such data is the question of the length of time these data retain their validity. Some light is thrown on this question by data collected during an experimental monthly consumer panel operation conducted by the writer with the aid of the Bureau of Economic and Business Research of the University of Illinois. The results of an analysis of these data as they relate to this question are presented here.