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...steel industry, reported that a strong upturn in the steel market is making it more difficult for customers to get delivery on rush orders. Confirming an earlier Commerce Department report, a new McGraw-Hill survey shows that industry's capital spending plans for 1961 have been revised upward a bit since last fall. Even unemployment, the economy's most serious long-range problem, declined slightly more than seasonally between mid-March and mid-April...
...Consumer Price Index, which charts monthly changes in the prices of some 300 items in a "market basket" bought by the average city dweller. Every time the index rises a half point or more, it triggers automatic wage hikes for 2,600,000 industrial-union members. By moving upward over the past two years (it is now at a record high of 127.5), the index has conditioned most Americans to believe that the U.S. is gripped by creeping inflation. Last week, in hearings before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, some distinguished economists suggested that the C.P.I, has a "systematic...
Artificial Rise. A chief cause of the upward bias, said the University of Chicago's George J. Stigler, presenting a report by economists of the National Bureau of Economic Research, is "the failure of the price indexes to take full account of quality changes, which have on average been quality improvements." By simply reporting that consumers pay more for goods, the C.P.I, fails to take into account that buyers often get better clothes or more complex cars for their money. Many other economists, including Harvard's Seymour Harris, agree that quality improvements may offset many of the higher...
Another fault that tends to tilt the index upward is its failure to list new products quickly enough. New products generally come out at a fairly high price (as color television did), later drop in cost when the market expands and competitors enter the field. The index usually does not record new products until their prices level off, and then possibly rise a bit as a result of increasing public demand. If new products were entered earlier, the argument goes, they would better reflect the eventual drop in prices, tend to pull the whole index average downward. Delaying their listing...
Commissioner of Labor Statistics Ewan Clague, whose department is now working on the C.P.I.'s regular ten-year revision, denies that any "enormous rise" in the index could be caused by a failure to measure quality improvements, but concedes that there may be some upward bias in his much-respected index...