14 COST OF LIVING IN THE UNITED STATES 
The measurement of the actual cost of living has in turn 
been adapted to meet special needs. The first adaptation 
may be said to depend on the wage requirements. For a 
man’s wages, up to the present time in this country, the 
assumption has been that it should cover not only the cost 
of his own support but that of the support of a family as 
well; for a woman, the standard thus far has been a self- 
dependent woman living apart from a family group, without 
home responsibilities. Both of these standards are coming 
in for more and more question, but this problem will not be 
discussed in the present study, since it has to do with the uses 
to which the cost of living data are to be put and not to the 
data themselves. 
The second adaptation of methods for measuring the 
actual cost of living relates to the standard of living. One 
type of budget? attempts to determine, for a given group in 
a given place at a given time, the cost of maintaining a 
minimum American standard of living at the local prices of 
goods and services consumed; the other attempts to measure 
a somewhat higher standard of living, regardless of existing 
conditions, on the theory that these existing conditions do 
not meet satisfactory requirements? 
Tue ActuaL Cost oF Living 
Family Budgets 
Studies of family expenditures antedate studies of the 
retail price level. This is because the earliest interest in 
budgets was due to the fact that they afforded material for 
studying certain phenomena related to the family life and 
economy of given social groups. Thus, in 1901 the United 
1 See, for example, Margaret Loomis Stecker, “Family Budgets and Wages,” 
American Economic Review, September, 1921, pp. 447-465; Paul H. Douglas, “Is 
the Family of Five Typical?” Fournal of the American Statistical Association, 
September, 1924, pp. 314, 328; also, principles urged at the first conference of trade 
union women, called by the United States Government in 1918, Monthly Labor 
Review, November, 1918, pp. 150-191. 
2 Budgets of the cost of living are a plan for balanced expenditures; the term is 
used loosely to mean any itemized measure of the actual cost of living. 
3 The problems connected with making family budgets and the budgets them- 
selves have been so extensively discussed in the National Industrial Conference 
Board's Research Report No. 41 as to require only the briefest summary here to 
make the present account complete. Cost of living budgets for wage earning women 
are onlv touched on. pending further more exhaustive study of the subject.