Reviewed by Louis Goldberg, Professor Emeritus Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia

When Henry W. Sweeney’s book, Stabilized Accounting was reissued in 1964, that author included as a prefatory essay a paper entitled “Forty Years After: Or Stabilized Accounting Revisited.” Among the many points that he made in that essay, was one to the effect that “the literature of even the 1920’s was often superior to many of the pseudo-scientific ‘vanity’ outpourings since 1936.” Sweeney’s observation is borne out by the papers on accounting problems arising from changing price levels which are reprinted in this volume, all of them having appeared between 1918 and 1935.

The papers are reproduced by a photographic process from the original publications, complete with some few misprints, which are not serious in themselves, and the original page numbering, which results in the absence of consecutive numbering of pages throughout the volume. The need to reduce the size of the various journal pages to the format of an octavo book has resulted in different sizes of type, that of one article being so small as to be difficult for any but the sharpest eyes to cope with.
Of the eighteen papers included, nine are by Sweeney himself, two by W. A. Paton, two by Fritz Schmidt, and one by each of Livingston Middleditch Jr., H. C. Daines, Max J. Wasserman, Ralph Cough-enour Jones and Solomon Fabricant.

For the most part, these early articles are written in readily under-standable English, uncluttered by jargon or verbiage, and the arguments are clear, direct and forceful. In an introductory essay, the editor, Dr. Zeff, explains that when Stabilized Accounting was published in 1936 it represented only a portion of Sweeney’s doctoral thesis, from which, because of publishing constraints, much of the theoretical material had been relegated to footnote references to journal articles. The nine Sweeney papers in this volume now give us back most of this theoretical material. They are supplemented (or should it be complemented?) by the other articles from writers who so early recognized the accounting problems arising from what Sweeney aptly described as the rubber dollar. A considerable proportion of the writing relates to the European, and especially the German, experience of rampant inflation in the early 1920’s.

The result is a valuable collection of articles in advocacy or ad-justment designed to counteract the influences on accounting state-ments of variation in the “value” of the monetary unit. For this, the student of the history of accounting thought in the twentieth century will be most grateful.

However, two reflections might exercise his mind. The first is: If the arguments for adjustment were so cogently and so forcibly put forward as early as the 1920’s, why is it that after fifty years, in which period the arguments have been reinforced and amplified and the number of proponents greatly increased, the accounting profession in most countries is still taking only tentative steps towards implementation of appropriate corrective measures? Have accountants, in fact, as much power to induce change as is implied in much of the discussion? Have businessmen, investors, creditors, taxation authorities, been made sufficiently aware of the arguments? Perhaps a process of education of the community is necessary as well as accounting conviction. Sweeney himself, in his “Forty Years After” essay of 1964, allocated the blame, in the U.S.A., to the accounting profession, business management and the federal government, with each of these indulging in something of a buck-passing exercise. Whether he was correct or not could well be the topic for an ambitious Ph.D. candidate in the field of accounting history.

The second reflection, which is not unrelated to the first, is: The early writers included in this volume were all clearly committed to advocating departure from historical cost. They were the protagonists of change. Were there no antagonists, and, if there were, who were they and what did they say in these early days of discussion? A companion volume of this most welcome collection might result from some researcher’s digging into this part of the field.

Such potential stimulation, together with the historical content of these essays, constitutes ample justification for the initiative of the editor and the publisher in making this anthology now readily available.