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Chapter IX

Our Dollar Wealth

 

(B) Calculation of the total wealth of the United States in terms of the dollar.

 

We must approach this problem rough-shod and risk a rupture with the statistician. The first brutal question is, what dollar are we going to employ? An American dollar, of course, as we look with great suspicion on any other national brand. But of what year?

The simplest thing to do would be to take the dollar of 1913; but this, at the outset, seems too much in the nature of prehistoric speculation. The dollar of 1913 is like a comet, once sighted, that has since swung off into a region of dark stars. Regardless of the sanguine calculations of the deflationists none of us really hopes to see it again.

For the sake of very excellent company, let us take the dollar of 1918, the year in which it was last sighted by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Incorporated,^[1] since it has become a well-grounded convention in Economics that two surmises are better than one—particularly if we are permitted to split the difference.

The calculation of our wealth in terms of the dollar is not a novel one. It is attempted every ten years, by the Bureau of the Census—quite light-heartedly—for an error of a few thousand million “dollars” that have long since multiplied like rabbits makes no apparent difference to anyone.

It will be well along in the year 1923 before we get any new figures in terms of the up-to-date “gold” dollar which we are now trying painfully to adapt to the inelastic needs of our families; but we can probably project our values from the years

1. “Income in the United States.” Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York, 1921.

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