Page:Indian Journal of Economics Volume 2.djvu/140

 128 VIE W$ OF BOOKS a given capital "cannot produce as much on 100 acres as on 1000 seres," which is usually true, but might fail in the case o! a river valley running through a desert. For the most part, the theory is excellent. In the theory o! distribution there is an especially fine explanation o! the relation o! diminishing returns to marginal producti- vity which is made by assuming tha. t all the agents of production remain eonslant, and showing how a stable equilibrium 'tends to result in the division o! Products among them. Diminishing returns is illustrated by examples o! constant capital and constant labor, as well as o! constant land. According to the author, the law of diminishing returns has to do with the relative p. roportions of land, labor, capital, and enterprise. But the laws of increasing or decreasing cost assume that the factors of' production are always combined in the most effective manner. The relation of inventions and new methods to decreasing cost has apparently not been considered. An unusual departure is made in employing the term "value in use," not to mean-utility, but to mean the marginal utility multiplied by the number of articles in the supply. The questions at the end o! every chapter are strictly confined to the text, and the supplementary reading is chosen from a few standard books. The brief index makes no mention of Adam Smith or Ricardo, although. they are elsewhere' mentioned, but it contains the names of Raffeisen, Le Play. Engel, and others even less generally known. The author is familiar with all the most recent developments, for example, he cites the eelusions o! Streightoff with regard to consumption in America, and gives a most clear explana- tion of the new United States Federal Reserve Act. '' Altogether for brevity, for clearness, for conciseness, and for simple, straightforward thinking the book is one of the best we have seen. But the issues i raises cannot, of course, be settled so briefly and so simply. CHARLES THOMPSON, JR. The $izteentk Financial vmd Eeonomia [with Statistics DEPARTMENT OF Printing Office. Annual of Japan to end of 1915]. Published by the Facr. Tokyo: The Government 1916. pp. vii, 196, 3. Nothing is an unmixed evil--not even war on an u- csdented scale..Thus while most of the great nations .of