100 The Stock Market Crash—And After
invention and scientific research, industrial management,
 in labor’s cobperative policy, in the economies
accompanying mergers, in the gains of prohibition,
and in seven years of a stable price level and steadied
purchasing power of the dollar. In all these respects
the experts constituting the Committee on Recent
Economic Changes appointed by Herbert Hoover
have reported a speeding-up of production and exchange
 beyond any period of similar length. The
conclusions of this committee have not been seriously
challenged in any quarter. They have given rise,
however, to extravagant claims which their findings
do not warrant, to the effect that a “new era” differing
 radically from the long upward swing of
progress that has characterized the industrial revolution
 is in progress.
For those who sponsor these extravagant claims
it is well to point out that, in the words of the Hoover
Committee, the “distinctive character of the years
from 1922 to 1929 owes less to fundamental change
than to intensified activity.” But the fruits of jn.
tensified activity are real. In a business sense they
fructify in earnings, and in the increased expectation
of earnings, which is discounted in a manner to increase
 the price level of common stocks. The chapters
 devoted to the elements of this intensified
activity should enable the reader to gauge more accuratelv
 the future situation of the stock market than
any contemplation of the damage wrought by the
panic and its immediate causes would permit.