Journal Article On a Passage of Professor Taussig's International Trade Get access Achille Loria, Achille Loria Turin, Italy Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar F. W. Taussig F. W. Taussig Harvard University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 46, Issue 1, November 1931, Pages 187–189, https://doi.org/10.2307/1883926 Published: 01 November 1931
The Review of Economics and Statistics193113(2), 68
MONTHLY data for the building and construction industries available for the period since the War make possible a fairly satisfactory measure of the cyclical fluctuations in building activity. In an earlier issue of this REVIEW, a detailed analysis of building statistics for the United States was presented and certain important conclusions were drawn concerning the general character of fluctuations in the building industry.' The following pages are devoted to a brief description of the post-war cyclical fluctuations of building activity and to discussion of the data, methods, and statistical background of our adjusted indexes of building and real estate activity.
Nature of the problem, 309; of the data, 314. — Evidence as to geographical mobility of labor, 316. — Duration of unemployment: before first job, 324; time on first job, 329; time lost during period of survey, 329; unemployed at end of survey, 332: — Quality of jobs obtained, 334. — Change in annual income, 339. — The dismissal wage: purpose, 342; utilization, 343; adequacy, 345.
Abstract Methods of the usual, present, orthodox type are unstabilized because they ignore all lack of uniformity in the value content of the measuring-unit in which the depreciation is expressed. If, for instance, a building cost $50,000 in 1910 and had an expected life of twenty years, with no final scrap value, the depreciation, according to the customary, straight-line method would be the unstabilized one of $2,500 for each of the twenty years regardless of whether, as thus stated in the dollar value of 1910, it was equivalent to $2,500 in the average general price level of each of such twenty pars. Orthodox calculation of depreciation thus assumes that the original cost, when distributed as depreciation over subsequent periods, will continue to have the same economic significance as it had when incurred-or, in other words, that the monetary standard of measurement remains stable in value. The chief merit of such an unstabilised depreciation method is the greater ease in theory and application resulting from the assumption of a higher degree of simplicity in the measurement of facts than is actually there.