Agriculture
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Abstract
is less positive than Kuznets about the comparative rates of productivity growth in the capital goods and consumer goods industries (pp. 160, 291, 303). He agrees with Kuznets that the available figures for the early 1800's understate the probable productivity gain (pp. 288-89). His justification for omitting the value of humans and intangibles (pp. 249-50) need not be inconsistent with Kuznets' position, but there is something more satisfying in the latter's insistence that income and wealth measures are not sufficient for the long-term study of growth; that they must be supplemented by a consideration of the importation and cumulation of knowledge and the immigration of "living carriers" of other civilizations (pp. 219-20). Like Kuznets, Goldsmith also accepts various questionable index number conventions. Witness his assumption that the deflated wealth figures represent estimates in 1929 dollars; and his remark that selection of the 1929 base avoided the "bias which would have been introduced by using a year near one end of the period" (p. 262).