Journal Article The Economic Issues of Compulsory Health Insurance: Comment Get access I. S. Falk I. S. Falk Social Security Administration, Washington, D. C. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 66, Issue 4, November 1952, Pages 572–586, https://doi.org/10.2307/1882106 Published: 01 November 1952

Journal Article Taxation and Incentive in Mobilization: Comment Get access Harry S. Schwartz Harry S. Schwartz San Francisco, California Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 66, Issue 4, November 1952, Pages 600–605, https://doi.org/10.2307/1882110 Published: 01 November 1952

PREDICTION usually requires counting, dating, and measuring, and so plunges us at once into semantics, the perpetual bugbear of statistics, the endemic disease that more or less infects all our figures. For statistics begins with counting, and counting begins with definition of the thing to be counted -and inventions can hardly be defined. Patents are not quite so bad, and we shall take them up later. Inventions, like many things and notably people, don't stay the same, but are perpetually evolving, growing, squirming out of their definitions. You may have heard of the Irishman who complained that his pig wouldn't stay counted. That is supposed to be a joke on the Irishman; but he was dead right it was the pig that was false and unstatistical. For that pig began as a little shoat, and ate and grew night and day until he became a 5oo-pound hog, a creature utterly different in every pertinent aspect from the little suckling piglet. So he couldn't stay counted Similarly in invention, suppose we consider television. That sounds simple, since we all know what television is. Or do we? Was it already television in I847 when Souvestre satirically predicted it? Or did it begin in I877 when the first apparatus was built, or in I882 when the scanning disk was added, or in I9OI when Fessenden designed a wireless system? Or was it Zworykin's modern cathode ray receiver of I929 that constituted the invention of television, with the kinescope, and some experimental broadcasts the next year? Or is our date I928 or I937 when regular broadcasting began? Or should it be some future date when with color, three-dimensional vision, binaural hearing, and worthy programs, the art will at last enter the prodigious destiny of the home theater? And is this television, at whatever stage, to be counted always as invention? If so, our statistics mean no more than that one pig. Definition of invention

Reviews the book "An Accounting Technique for Reporting Financial Transactions," by R.K. Mautz.

Abstract To some groups, price stabilization is a matter of profit or loss and perhaps of adjustment within one business or industry. To the U.S. Office of Price Stabilization the subject is exceedingly complex. People must consider not just costs, profits or losses of a single group, but also their relationship to other businesses and industries, as well as to the nation as a whole. Now when Office of Price Administration (OPA) was set up, there was for most goods a general balance between supply and demand. There were sufficient unused production facilities to make supply quite sensitive to changes in demand. OPA's job, therefore, at first was merely to control the price of a few commodities whose demand was beginning to outrun supply because of defense requirements. Actually, this was not inflation control, but war cost control. The present emergency caught us at a time when there was very little slack in the economy to permit a self-adjusting between supply and demand. The sudden expansion of defense buying had an immediate effect upon prices.

Abstract While there have been few spectacular happenings during the year 1950, steady progress is evident on all sides. There has been a substantial increase in the membership and the financial condition of the American Accounting Association continues to be satisfactory. The Association owns sufficient securities to enable it to survive a period of stress caused by war or other conditions. Nearly 500 members and guests attended the annual convention held at the University of Denver. This was one of the largest groups ever to attend a convention of the Association. The periodical "The Accounting Review," under the editorship of Frank P. Smith, has continued to serve instructors, students and practitioners with a series of significant and helpful articles, book reviews, solutions to Certified Public Accountant examination problems and news items of members of the Association. It has an impressive international reputation as a scholarly publication in the field of accounting. One of the greatest satisfactions received is from the splendid cooperation of committee members. Around one hundred and sixty members of the Association have contributed generously of their time in the conduct of its committee activities.