388 PONTIFICIAE ACADEMIAE SCIENTIARVM SCRIPTA VARIA - 
~ R 
Thus, if I could briefly answer to the LEONTIEF point, I would 
say that there is no reason to believe that people are more intelligent 
now than they have been yesterday. 
In addition, as far as a cumulative effect is concerned I have 
shown in my 1963 Cambridge paper that, subject to very general 
and appealing conditions, it is impossible to expect an indefinite 
increase of real national income to result from an indefinite increase 
of real capital. 
THEIL 
Regarding the problem of the accuracy of statistical data, there 
's a difficulty which econometricians have to face and which is due 
to the considerable margin of uncertainty that economic statisticians 
aave to face. For example, it may happen that the « best » estimate, 
given the statistical evidence, which an economic statistician can pro- 
duce implies a capital-output ratio which is excessively large com- 
pared with most published capital-output ratios. We should not 
oe surprised when in such cases the statistician decides to replace 
ais « best » capital by a lower figure and thus contributes to a too 
nomogeneous picture of the stock of published capital-output ratios. 
In the same way, if the economic statistician knows or feels that 
he knows that the marginal propensity to consume is about 0.8, and 
if he finds for a particular year that the consumption change is very 
far from 80 per cent of the income change, he may decide to adjust 
his figures. This is in my view one of the reasons why our picture 
of published correlation coefficients tends to be too optimistic. 
ALLAIS 
These different observations are very interesting and I think 
they should be discussed in the general meeting. 
First, as far as the estimates of capital are concerned, it is cer- 
11] Allais - pag. 202