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Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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Part:         Session:         Page of 915

You first make an inquiry and find out what it is that working class families but. You take samples in different cities and different parts of the country of people who work in different kinds of factories. You go to their homes and interview them about what they but. Then if enough of the sample appear to buy that article, you then regard it as a common habit and not as a unique, personal habit of buying.

So even Stuart Rice came around to the feeling that the more articles you put on the list that were really bought by working class families, the nearer you came to a real index. But it's only an index anyhow. It never is an actual cost of living. It's only an index to a cost of living. I still think we would have been better off with a short list of basic commodities and not with manufactured goods, and not with bothering about what the different groups of people ate, wore, used for furniture, and so forth and so on. Many of these things like electric toasters are bought by a lot of people, but are not essential to living. Things like that go on because when you're going to price a long list of articles, as opposed to a short list of commodities, you make an inquiry in various parts of the country as to what people in the working class income range but. You send out investigators who go from house to house, working from a list of people who are known to work in the automobile industry, or the clothing industry, different industries, You go from house to house and ask them what they bought





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