Note 247 — Chapter XIII

In a letter to the writer, Professor Fisher states that the figures for the physical receipts at the cities, which dominate his index for T, have not been available for recent years, and that since they were discontinued, he has relied chiefly on the indirect calculation of T via the other factors in the equation. These figures were discontinued in 1912. In the American Economic Review for June, 1916 (p. 457, n.) Professor Fisher states that the indirect calculation of T has always had more weight in his figures than the direct calculation. This would serve in some degree to lessen the errors of his index of variation. The extent to which he has allowed his T as directly calculated on the basis of the index to be modified by the indirect calculation, is indicated on p. 302 of the Purchasing Power of Money, as follows: "The alterations in T, as shown in Figure 16, though still greater than the preceding, are nevertheless so small and uniform as to preserve an almost perfect parallelism between the original and the altered curve. The differences rarely exceed 10%." Even an indirect calculation of T, however, would not avoid the criticisms here urged, since the other factors, MV, M´V´, and P are all, as we shall see in the chapter on "Statistical Demonstrations of the Quantity Theory," calculated by methods which give very excessive weight to trade outside New York City and to non-speculative transactions.