388 MARINE FISHERIES OF NORTH CAROLINA 



the United States. The top curve is a composite curve of all fish production 

 of nine northern European countries. There is not available for comparison 

 a composite international European index of industrial production curve. 

 Nevertheless, the influence of the trade cycle is obvious in this curve, and 

 notwithstanding the many fears for "exhaustion" of the fisheries in European 

 waters, the volume at the end of two decades was greater than it was at 

 the beginning. The depression is known to have struck with full force later 

 in Europe than it did in the United States. 



Comparison of Money Curves. Fig. ii exhibits three pairs of money- 

 curves; the lower of each pair is the actual money value in terms of year- 

 by-year current buying power; the upper of each pair is the money con- 

 verted to United States (or Canadian) dollars of constant purchasing power, 

 1926 = 100. In the United States, the curve of money value of all food fish 

 produced is an almost exact copy {on a smaller scale) of that of the national 

 income. In Canada the likeness is striking in comparison with the United 

 States national income (a comparable curve for Canada not being available 

 for the whole period). For the value of all United States fishery products, 

 food and non-food, the curve of money values*^ in Fig. 4 shows, again, 

 a faithful copy of the curve for United States national income.^" 



Fig. 3 presents, for the Atlantic-Gulf coasts only, the same categories of 

 information on food fish as is contained in Fig. 4 for the whole country. 

 Here again, in Fig. 3, we see the same now familiar patterns of goods and 

 money behavior, but representing only a part, though a large part, of the 

 whole, it does not conform quite so perfectly to the pattern of national in- 

 dicators as does the national total. 



Economic vs. Biological Determinants of the Quantity and Value of Pro- 

 duction. In all the data so far presented, no evidence is seen that abundance 

 or scarcity of any kind, or of all kinds, of fish had any effect on the total 

 quantity or value of the product of the food fisheries. If a biological expla- 

 nation were invoked to account for the failure of production to keep pace 

 with growth of human population from 1887 to 1920 (Fig. 7), it would also 

 have to account for the sudden increase of the supply at 192 1 and the 

 faithful following thereafter of the economically turbulent business cycle 

 to 1940. There appears to be no biologically reasonable explanation of this 

 behavior, nor is there any sign in the historical record that the many in- 



49. Drawn to a slightly smaller scale on the abscissa or horizontal axis. 



50. "National income" has been variously defined and reported in equally various series, from 

 time to time revised and adjusted to new concepts of accounting. The data of U. S. national 

 income plotted in Fig. ii, are those credited to the U. S. Department of Agriculture by Standard 

 & Poor's Basic Statistics (1942). The Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce (1947) has 

 published three revised series running from 1929; our (bottom) curve, Fig. 11, agrees closely 

 from 1929 onward with the new series, "National Income by Distributive Shares 1929-46" (place 

 cited, p. 19). This series is the sum of all incomes of persons private, military, and government 

 civilian, all farms and all unincorporated and incorporated enterprises, including inventory 

 adjustments. 



