DISCUSSION.

Professor Garfield Cox in his research paper published in the March 2, 1936 issue of the journal "The American Economic Review," has made one assumption which may be open to question. For example, he infers at the beginning of his paper, that we are now in the thirty-third month of recovery. With this statement, nearly every one will doubtless agree. The evidence that there has existed in American business a cycle having an average wave length of about forty months is very strong. In both cases, our belief in their existence depends solely upon empirical observations. In view of past experience, it is not probable that the sharp peak in business in 1933 may best be regarded as the crest of an almost submerged forty-month cycle wave, a wave struggling upward but sadly impeded by the downward movement of one of the longer waves, or perhaps of several waves of different lengths acting in combination. Professor John M. Clark showed, a number of years ago, that production in such industries as the manufacture of equipment must necessarily magnify greatly fluctuations in the demand for consumption goods. When the national income shrinks, is it not inevitable that the public will buy goods and other perishable articles before buying durable goods which can be made to last a while longer.