WAGES AND SALARIES 479 



"Values to the extent of $100 are paid to * labor' or in the form of 

 ' compensation ' or of ' wages and salaries.' How is this $100 actually 

 divided up among those who participated in its production?" The 

 answer to that question can not as yet be made final; to the careful 

 searcher after truth it is far from satisfactory ; yet those who have eyes 

 to see will find in it many suggestions of the situation that will stand 

 revealed when all of the facts in the case are made available for study. 



The tentative answer as to the disposition of service income will 

 indicate for the various classes of industries what the situation of the 

 ordinary, or "modal," person is. Of course the answer will not cover 

 individual cases. No general statement holds true of individual in- 

 stances. It will, however, show for certain occupations the general 

 scale of service incomes. 



JSTo one can overstate the danger of trying to deduce from a state- 

 ment of averages, or other general ideas referring to a class of things 

 or persons^ the condition of individuals in that class. It does not fol- 

 low because the average for machinists on a certain railroad is $1.90 

 per day that the machinists on that road all receive $1.90 per day. 

 It does not even follow that any one machinist is receiving exactly 

 $1.90 per day. Some are receiving more, and some less. The mathe- 

 matical computation derived from these individual rates of daily wages 

 yields the average, $1.90. 



The average is, at best, a crude method for the statement of in- 

 comes. Convenient because of ease in handling, it is misleading in the 

 extreme when employed for purposes of generalization. It bespeaks 

 not instances, or laborers, or families, but abstract deductions from 

 the relation existing between these highly humanized economic facts. 



The classified wage is far more satisfactory as a method of state- 

 ment than is the average wage. Instead of averaging the wages of all 

 machinists and stating the result as $1.90, the statement is made in this 

 form: "Of 100 machinists, 5 receive less than $1.50 per day; 12 re- 

 ceive from $1.50 to $1.74; 40 receive from $1.75 to $1.99; 20 receive 

 from $2.00 to $2.24," and so on through the list. The result is a pre- 

 sentation of earners by groups in a way that tells the size of the group 

 and the amount earned by each number. Out of 100, 40 earn from 

 $1.75 to $1.99. That is a very different matter from saying that the 

 average wage is $1.90. If care is taken, generalizations regarding 

 types and tendencies may be made without doing too much violence to 

 individual instances. These generalizations should, wherever possible, 

 be based on classes, rather than on averages. 



Classified wage figures do not permit of such ready generalizations. 

 They do, however, decrease error. People have assumed that the steel 

 industry is a very lucrative one because certain individuals have made 

 millions in it, or that there is an abundant chance for rapid advance- 

 ment in the railroad industry because certain railroad presidents came 



