CONFERENCE BOARD INDEX 33 
major items in the cost of living by average wage earning 
families in July, 1914. While no total expenditure require- 
ments are expressed or implied in this distribution, it serves 
a convenient purpose if it be assumed that $1,000 annually 
was divided as follows: food, $431; shelter, $177; clothing, 
$132; fuel and light, $56; sundries, $204. The budget 
distributions used, the number of families represented and 
the methods of combining them to obtain the weightings 
adopted as representative of July, 1914 are shown in Table 2. 
Having determined a representative apportionment of the 
aggregate cost of living among its component parts in 1914, 
but not knowing, through the collection and analysis of 
consumption data, the complete details of the goods and 
services included, nor finding it practicable to collect, as 
often as would be desirable, prices of all the goods and 
services entering into a complete budget, it next became 
necessary to select a number of articles which would ade. 
quately represent each item and to determine how these, in 
turn, should be weighted to represent the major group itself, 
Shelter 
The determination of housing requirements was based on 
careful study of prevailing standards and existing housing 
Accommodations, and also of more general considerations, 
such as the demands of health, safety and sanitation. While, 
at first, inquiries related only to “housing such as is usually 
occupied by wage earners,” by 1920 more definite specifi- 
cations were made. It had been determined, for example, 
that health and comfort required four or five rooms for an 
average family; that, except under unusual circumstances! 
modern dwellings for working men are built with bath 
rooms; that, except in a few large cities, none of them are 
heated. The standard adopted in 1920 and used ever since 
1s, therefore, “a house or unheated apartment of four or 
five rooms with bath, such as are usually occupied by wage 
carners.” Further than that, no specifications are made, 
In some places the rents secured are for cottages, in others, 
‘Such as cottages in the southern cotton mill towns, for example: some of 
these are now being built with modern bath rooms.