The CIO news. (Cumberland, Md.) 1942-????, 1944-01-31
Looking Ahead
By Len De Caux

10y @Vtb NC NUN
MOST people regard statisticians as slightly
w cracked, but harmless-until they're hit over
the head by the business end of phoney percent
age, until they into statistics that really
make sense.
After you've given your wife twice as much
money for groceries, and seen her come back with
half as much food of half good quality, you can
pick up the papers any day and have a morbid
chuckle over some statistics about living costs
going up only some small percentage.
It's like reading weather report about "con-
tinued dry" in the midst Of a rainstorm.
You wonder what would happen to the Dept. Of
Labor statistician who believed his own index and
gave his wife but 24.3% than before the war
to feed and clothe his family and meet all other
living expenses-though living costs have actually
gone up twice that much.
The mathematics of living costs quite simple
to the housewife and most other practical folks.
You remember how much you used to pay week
or a month for food, clothing, rent, etc., and you
know darned well how much you're paying now.
So you just compare the two totals to get the
increase in your living COSTS and you say nuts"
to anyone who tells you different.
But somewhere in the rarefied and air-condi-
toned recesses of the Bureau of Labor Statistics
there toll statisticans, spinning fine theories Jug
Cling logarithms and square roots, and coming out
periodically with statements about the cost of
living that defy all human experience.
But you can't dismiss such stuff with a wise
crack these days. For every wage question now
lands In the 1ans of achinCton ctatisticanS
They get out their slide-ruIes their charts
their adding machines, their theories and their
formuas-and the question of whether Joe Doaks
and his wife shall get enough to pay their grocery
bills gets all tangled up in the most arbitrary and
tyrannical percentages.
It all sounded simple enough when Congress
said wages and living costs should be stabilized at
the level of Sept. 49, 1912.
Even the Little Steel formula didn't seem 10
complicated. The BIS Index reports living costs
up 1870 since JAM l. 1871, 1t said, and it wouldn't
be nice for them to go up any more after Sept Is.
1912, in defiance of all our good intentions. There
fore wage rates may be increased 1870 above that
Jan. level, but not one cent more
X
But, nice not, living costs didn't pay any
attention to the Little Steel formula, nor to Con-
gress Except to say thanks boys for the big boost
you're giving us). They just kept going up after
Sept. IS, as If that were only another day on the
calendar.
Even the BIS statsticans couldn't do much
about it. They juggled their figures this way and
that. but still their darned Index kept pushing up.
till they let 1t 60 up to 1880 as of today.
OF course even 24.3% makes monkey Of the
Little Steel formula Looked at from any angle
It's still $50 more than 159o-which means quite
a cut in the real wages Of the worker frozen at
the Sept IS level
i
Meanwhile the folks who really know their liv-
ing costs, from what they have to pay live were
getting more and more impatient with theories and
formulas and indices that don't correspond to
known facts.
"Let's find out how much the cost of living has
really gone up," their union representatives told
the President, and he appointed n committee for