INTRODUCTION 
5 
involved in reaching a single figure were all necessarily 
sxtremely costly.! 
In 1917, in order to settle the constant disputes in the 
shipbuilding industry, the Shipbuilding Wage Adjustment 
Board of the Emergency Fleet Corporation entered into an 
agreement with the unions involved to readjust wages at 
intervals of not less than six months, if the majority of the 
craft or crafts at a plant requested it, on the basis that there 
had been a “general and material increase in the cost of 
living”? To determine if there had been such an increase 
and to ascertain its amount, the United States Bureau of 
Labor Statistics late in 19173 undertook investigations in 
the principal shipbuilding centers. Expenditures of families 
in 35 communities in 1917 or in 1918 were taken, and through 
prices collected from local merchants the increases in cost 
between 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, and 1918 were computed. 
No attempt was made to establish desirable standards of 
living, but only to measure changes in the cost of maintaining 
the existing standard on the basis of changing rents and 
retail prices. These estimates for separate localities were 
not combined into an index for the country as a whole, but 
prices in 18 of them later served as the basis, through 
December, 1917, for the Bureau’s present index of the cost 
of living in the United States.* 
In the meanwhile, in June, 1918, the first estimate of 
changes in the cost of living made for the country as a 
whole, based on a complete budget with retail prices weighted 
according to consumption, was constructed by the National 
Industrial Conference Board. This was designed to meet 
the growing demand of industry in general and of the em- 
ployer members of the then functioning National War Labor 
! The Massachusetts Commission on the Necessaries of Life reports that in con- 
structing its index of the cost of living over 400,000 mathematical computations 
were made. Massachusetts, Commission on the Necessaries of Life, Report, 
Boston, 1920, p. 112. 
2 i Review of the U. 8. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Washington, March, 1918, 
pp. 74-75. 
® The report on Philadelphia was published in the March, 1918, Monthly Review 
of the U, S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; the report on New York, in April, 1918, 
Reports on subsequent places appeared in the June number of the Monthly Review 
and in the August, September and October numbers of the Monthly Labor Review. 
See pp. 63-65 of this volume.