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INTERNATIONAL TRADE

count of yarn the average Japanese spinner tends about 240
spindles while spinners in an American mill, with some assistance
from a doffer, tend at least 1,000 spindles and frequently more.
Similarly, in weaving staple cotton sheetings, the Japanese weaver
seldom operates more than two plain looms, while the American
weaver, with perhaps some assistance in supplying fresh bobbins,
 normally tends from eight to ten plain looms, and on looms
equipped with automatic filling batteries, 20 looms per weaver is
normal, and 24 or 26 is not uncommon.” ! It is true, of course,
that the product for a given outfit of machinery is not necessarily
the same in the two countries. What difference there is, however,
 would be in favor of the American mill; its machinery, we
may safely assume, runs faster and more continuously, turns out
more per hour and per day, than the Japanese. Not only as
regards the specific operations of spinning and weaving, but for
all the mill labor and for the mill product in its completed form,
the physical product would doubtless be found at least four times
as great in the American mill.
The figures on money cost — accountant’s cost — for the two
countries reflect the same situation and substantiate the conclusions.
 Money wages in Japan are much lower. Japanese
weavers, for example, get one-fifth to one-sixth of what American
weavers get. But so much greater is the effectiveness of weavers
in the United States that the weaving cost (money expense) per
yard of cloth is three-eighths of a cent ($0.00375) in a Japanese mill
and about one-fourth of a cent ($0.00270) in an American mill
working with automatic looms. In spinning, with the same
differences in money wages, the manufacturing (“conversion”)
cost of a pound of number 20 yarn was $0.087 in Japan, $0.112
in the United States. The final figure in this case is higher for
the United States, wages being lower in Japan more than in proportion
 to the lower effectiveness of labor. If account were taken
of the poorer quality of Japanese yarn, the effective money price,

1T may add that since the time when this was written (1921), the number of
automatic looms tended by an American weaver has still further increased, and in
some mills was in 1924 double the number stated in the text.