THE balance-of-payments statistics of the United States have received a thorough examination at the hands of a distinguished committee chaired by Edward MI. Bernstein in a report submitted to the United States government in the spring of 1965.1 The committee was asked to review "basic conceptual problems, problems of presentation and analysis, and technical statistical problems" pertaining to the balance of payments. The committee produced an excellent document, useful not only to government officials but also to all users of balance-of-payments statistics. Its Report follows several other valuable reports on U.S. government statistics that bear on measuring economic developments and interpreting them for the formulation of economic policy. The National Bureau of Economic Research submitted a report on the national accounts in 1957 (NBER, 1957), the Stigler report on price statistics appeared in 1961 (NBER, 1961), and the Gordon report on unemployment statistics was released in 1962 (President's Committee To Appraise Employment and Unemployment, 1962). These excellent reports not only aid in pursuit of the tenet of American economics,

Richard N. Cooper, Elizabeth Niebuhr, Summary of Proceedings, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 42, No. 3, Part 2. Higher Education in the United States: The Economic Problems (Aug., 1960), pp. 129-135

Monetary economics conveys the impression of great disagreement within the economics profession, and indeed the professional debates have often been heated. But behind the debates over policy there is a great deal of consensus on the importance of monetary variables for the working of national economies and on the mechanisms through which they exert their influence. title of this session reminds us that twenty-five years ago this was not so. When Howard Ellis wrote The Rediscovery of Money, the postwar revival had just begun. There was general skepticism about the ability of monetary policy to influence the economy, and the Oxford surveys were widely cited as the empirical basis for disbelief in the effect of monetary policy on investment. Despite the emergence in the intervening years of wide agreement about the importance of monetary policy, the empirical basis for many of our beliefs, and a fortiori for distinguishing among our differences, has remained weak. In casually accepting our present assignment, failed to appreciate just how complex the question posed in the title is. This is true even when the subject is confined, as here, to the monetary economics of the business cycle, leaving aside both microeconomic and steady-state growth considerations. What does it mean to say have learned something? And to whom does the we refer?