A RECENTLY published analysis of the structure of United States foreign trade concludes that widely held opinion that as compared with the rest of the world the United States' economy is characterized by a relative surplus of capital and a relative shortage of labor proves to be wrong. As a matter of fact, the opposite is true (p. 343). Conflicting as it does with so many current notions, this unequivocal conclusion is highly provocative. It would seem to imply that the economic pressures of the American economy operate in the direction of population emigration and capital inflow. It appears to be inconsistent with other empirical evidence: the performance in the United States by machine of tasks undertaken by hand methods abroad; the low portion of the American labor force employed in agriculture, as contrasted with allegedly widespread concealed underemployment in many agricultural areas overseas; even the use of labor-saving consumer durables in middle class American households but employment of domestic servants by comparable families in poorer countries. Is a major re-shuffling required in our preconceptions about relative factor endowments, or has this new study somehow gone astray? Specifically, the study purports to demonstrate the following argument: if the total volume of exports were reduced one million dollars, while holding the proportional composition the same as in I947; if competitive imports were similarly cut by one million dollars; and if the foregone imports were obtained instead from domestic import-replacement industries; then more domestic capital and less labor would be required to produce the imports at home than had been incorporated in the former exports. The relevant data, which provide the basis for Figure i of the published study (pp. 34041), are plotted on the scatter diagram. When the capital-labor ratio is taken as the independent variable, the predominance of labor-intensive goods among the export items and of capital-intensive goods among the imports is by no means as clearly discerned (p. 346) as one is led to expect. The overwhelming bulk of the points cluster closely about the line of zero net trade. Any measure of the relation between capital (labor) intensity and imports (exports) therefore tends to be dominated largely by a few points with strong net export or net import positions, and more particularly by a single extreme point near each end of the scale. The following are the sectors which, in the base year, contributed more than $25,000 net exports or net imports (per million dollars of United States exports and of imports):