The Accounting Review Vol. 11 No. 1 1936
COMMENTS ON PROFESSOR LITTLETON'S PAPER BY WALTER STAUB.
Abstract
Professor Littleton's paper seems especially timely in view of the present day ideas accounting as a record of original prices and widely fluctuating prices as a normal pattern-there seems to have come the conviction that accounting for outlay cost can no longer be considered a dependable guide to those who look to accounts for essential information. And the conclusion then follows that account keeping or financial statement practice must be modified to suit the new background. The assumption that problems of income distribution dividends, income tax, speculative security profits are of more importance than problems of the measurement of the income generated by the creation of new wealth or the rendering of acceptable services. The assumption that accounting has a more important obligation to supply data useful in managerial pricing policy than it has in facilitating the comparison of past input of services costs with past output of services revenues. The assumption that accounts and statements are merely tabulations of statistical data related to social income and as such are open to any desired manipulations by statistical methodology, such as weighting by index numbers, reduction to averages, elimination of seasonal variations, etc.
- DOI
- 10.2308/tar-7075746
- Volume
- 11
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 15-18
- Language
- en
- Sources
- openalex crossref