Excerpt from Cost of Living For this phenomenon, taken in itself, the phrase high cost of living would be a very misleading designation indeed. If it so hap pened that the price Of everything had increased in the same ratio, including in everything the price Oflabor and Of personal services in general, the rise in the general level of prices would not mean, in any real sense, a rise in the cost Of living at all. If the price Of every commodity had risen by 60 per cent., and at the same time wages and salaries of all kinds had also risen by 60 per cent., then - at least so far as the wage-earning and salaried classes were concerned - living would not cost any more than it did, in any substantial meaning Of the word. A mile is about 60 per cent. More than a kilometre; and if we were suddenly to adopt the metric system, but preferred to keep the good Old name Of mile to denote what the French call a kilometre, we should have to walk sixteen miles where we now walk ten, but the walk would not be a whit more fatiguing nor take a whit more time. And if every man got to-day sixteen dollars for the same work for which he used to get ten, he could pay 16 cents instead of 10, instead of without finding that living cost him any more in the. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.