DIFFERENCES IN LABOR COSTS 167
ican and the German beverage. Merely on the basis of quan-
tity, it would seem that Germany had a comparative advantage
in beer over brick and coal ; that is, in the phraseology suggested
elsewhere in these pages, she had an inferior disadvantage. The
productivity of her labor was less than that in the United States
for both groups of commodities — beer on the one hand, coal
and brick on the other — but the disadvantage was less marked
in the first-named group. Perhaps, in the land of Gambrinus, a
better quality of the product makes the disadvantage even smaller,
the comparative advantage more marked.
Between the United States and Great Britain (i.e. the United
Kingdom) some most interesting comparisons of wide sweep have
been worked out by Mr. A. W. Flux. That able economist and
statistician has used for the purpose the census returns of pro-
duction for the year 1907 in Great Britain (the first returns of the
kind gathered in that country) and those for the year 1909 in the
United States. Here, as with the coal figures, what concerns us
is the product per man for each several commodity in the two
countries, the total physical output in each of the selected indus-
tries being divided by the total number of men employed. Simple
tho this may seem, it is by no means easy to arrive at usable
results. In order to render the figures for the two countries
comparable, it was necessary to make sure that the demarcation
of each industry was the same in both — that there was no
divergence of classification and scope. Allowance had further to
be made for the difference of two years between the census dates
(1907 and 1909) and for differences in the activity of trade and
industry which might affect the output. The last-named factor
was most carefully considered by Mr. Flux, but, as it happened,
proved not to be of much moment for the inquiry. More impor-
tant was the need of confining the inquiry to industries turning out
the same homogeneous product in both countries. Differences in
quality might obviously restrict comparisons. Mass products,
the same the world over, turned in such large amounts that the
census authorities can scan them with ease and that minor errors
