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74 physical and psychological―of a cataclysmic nature. Mr. Hoover himself has recognized this, for in an article in Forbes’ Magazine in the early part of 1922 he said, in discussing our ability to compete against foreign imports and sustain our scale of living―

There is only one practicable remedy, viz. to increase our efficiency in production, manufacture and distribution. Increase in efficiency means not only more able production, but also elimination of great wastes. If nothing is done to cut down waste and increase productive efficiency, the people of this country must inevitably suffer a reduction of their standard of living to meet the lower standards of Europe.

I pay great attention to Mr. Hoover for he is both an engineer and economist of extraordinarily high attainments. There is perhaps nothing inconsistent between his two opinions, of a little more than a year apart, that I have quoted. I can not, however, deduce from our statistics that we are producing a larger quantity of commodities per person than ever before in our history. I propose to deal with that subject in this paper. In a subsequent paper I shall take up the matter of our present scale of living and shall throw great doubt upon its being at the Present time any better than it was 10 years ago.

The production of the principal raw materials in the United States, all converted into tons of 2,000 lb., in comparison with the population at the middle of each year, and with computation of the production in tons per person, appears in the table on page 75:

The estimate of the production of raw materials is based on the data of the U. S. Department of Agriculture and the U. S. Geological Survey, but the original data are converted into tons so as to get the same denominator, i.e., bushels of wheat, bales of cotton and thousands of board feet of lumber are computed