Forecasting the Yield and the Price of Cotton. E-book. Formato PDF Henry Ludwell Moore   -  Forgotten Books, 2017  - 

Without a doubt great values are at stake. If the size of the cotton crop of 1914 is taken as a standard, an error in an official crop report which should lead to an ultimate depression of one cent a pound in the price of cotton lint would cost the farmers or more. A corresponding error leading to a similar rise in price would entail upon manufacturers and consumers a comparably heavy loss. The Department of Agriculture has rendered its reports continuously for some fifty years, and yet, as far as I am aware, no one has either measured the degree of accuracy of the information it supplies con cerning crop conditions and prospects, or attempted to see whether, by different methods, more truth might not be gained from the stores of raw figures that its Bureaus collect. Government Departments seeking appropriations are very likely, out of administrative necessity, to stress their successes and suppress their failures. In the January number of the official Crop Reporter, for 1900, this illustration is given of the value to planters of the Government crop — reporting service.

Generating Economic Cycles. E-book. Formato PDF Henry Ludwell Moore   -  Forgotten Books, 2017  - 

The rainfall of the Ohio Valley ?uctuated in clearly defined eight-year cycles during the seventy-two years from 1839 to 1910; The cycles in the Ohio Valley were congruent with those in the United States considered as a unit. The course of rainfall before 1839, when there were no meteorological records in the middle and western portions of the United States, may be a subject of dis pute, and one may have individual doubts as to the course of rainfall in the unrealized future. But the revelations of the existing record of eighty-three years describe a sequence of regular natural changes of such magnitude and of such economic importance that the observant explorer in quest of economic regularities will not ignore their suggestiveness. They supply a clue to the intricate economic disorder.