Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Wealth and Income of the American People (1924).pdf/170

148 mere conjecture, which has no other foundations than the census report of 1912 and the knowledge that a large part of the population increased its equipment during the period of extravagance in living. The estimate of $100 per person, which is written down to pre-war prices, implies an equipment of $400 to $500 per family, and that seems not unreasonable. Upon these premises the nation’s capital in furniture, etc., is computed at $9,154,980,000 at the middle of 1916 and at 10.6 billion dollars at the middle of 1920.

This item has to be estimated in the same way as furniture, etc. The census for 1912 showed $44.90 per person. For 1916 I estimated $45 and for 1920 I assume $50. These figures give totals of $4,577,480,000 for 1916 and 5.3 billion dollars for 1920.

This is a difficult, perhaps an impossible, item to estimate with even a reasonable degree of accuracy, yet it is the great form of the liquid wealth of the country and the immediate factor in the determination of prices and the swaying of markets. Let an emergency befall a country, its only immediately convertible assets are its stock of consumable goods and its gold, and the latter counts only because it will command goods from other countries. In the early years of the war the rise of prices in the United States was started by Europe bidding for our stock of goods. When the proletariat seized the property of the bourgeois class after the second Russian revolution the chief thing of use to itself that it secured was the