ABSTRACT
The adequate consideration of the standard of living of a person or a family means establishing how much the unit of domestic consumption in question spends upon commodities during a particular economic period. The comparison of the standards of living of two populations – of two nations, of two social classes inside a nation, or of the same social classes in two different nations – would therefore involve examining how the two populations are divided between the categories of the scale of living standards. In other words, the budgets say nothing about how large the percentage of a population is for which they are typical - and it is as a percentage of a population that we want for present purposes to regard the proletariat. Above all, however, the data do not permit comparisons because they do not allow one to ascertain whether they correspond with the same income-classification in any two populations that are being compared.
