Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/18

4 indemnity upon Germany without any rational consideration of the amount of Germany’s wealth and earning capacity. Another mistake that is being made from the absence of knowledge is that which is going on now in the United States on the basis of the preposterous idea that this country grew rich out of the war and that a relatively small class of the people profited especially.

We must find it easy to forgive such mistakes when we consider that they are made in ignorance and that it has been only within a few years that anybody has undertaken to make estimates of national wealth and income. Recognition of the merit of such studies is still confined to relatively few people. It has not yet begun to permeate among the great body of the public. It is not enough merely to make these studies. It is important that they be made in a way to command general acceptance as being of indisputable nature, and having arrived so far it is next in importance to broadcast them so that they will be generally known. Finally, the facts must be properly interpreted.

My friend, Dr. B. M. Anderson, Jr., economist of the Chase Bank in New York, was the first to undertake an annual estimation of the national income of the United States, which he did during a series of years in articles published in the Annalist. As we look back in the light of superior knowledge we find that Anderson’s estimates up to 1916 were superb. In 1916 he went astray owing to the disturbance of his method by the chaotic economic conditions that began to develop strongly during that year. I made subsequently an estimate for 1916 by a totally different method, which was eventually proved by others to be