MONEY: Professional Opinion

How to manipulate money for the good of the U. S. is not entirely a question of public sentiment. It is also a matter for expert judgment. So, ever since the Administration began tinkering the dollar, there has been argument whether 1) only a few wild-cat economists approved the experiment, 2) only a few old fogy economists opposed it. To find out how expert opinion stood, the inflationist Committee for the Nation polled economists but declined to publish the results, alleging that economic opinion was “divided.” So the Economists’ National Committee on Monetary Policy, composed of 90 leading economists including Kemmerer of Princeton, Reed of Cornell, Angell of Columbia, Sprague of Harvard — most but not all of them hard money men — took up the job. Last week the results were published.

To avoid charges of bias they had the Independent Journal of Columbia send out a questionnaire to 2,560 members of the American Economic Association, had the 845 answers tabulated and analyzed by the secretary of the American Statis tical Association. Questions on which there were clear majorities :

1) Against efforts to raise prices by more monetary tinkering 73.3%

2) Against gold buying such as the RFC did last autumn 79.6%

3) For the view that inflation can be controlled 66.6%

4) For the view that it will not be controlled 58.1%

5) Against Government purchases of silver 85.2%

6) Against bimetallism 95.8%

7) Against symmetalism 91.2%

8) Against silver in bank reserves 87.8%

9) Against the attempt to raise prices to 1926 level 65.6%

10) Against immediately returning to a gold standard 60.3%

11) For eventually returning to a gold standard 84.5%

12) Against returning to the old (100¢ gold standard 75.3%

13) Against a dollar as low as 50¢ 87.2%

14) For a gold bullion standard (no gold coins in circulation) 78.4%

15) Against a commodity dollar 63.3%

Closest question in the poll: For the view that the present trend is toward dangerous inflation of money, 51.4%; for the view that the present trend is toward dangerous inflation of credit, 55.9%.