ABSTRACT
Mr. Church's comments on the author's paper on "The Relation Between Production and Cost" are very interesting. With regard to the first item—that it is only partly correct to make a product bear only that part of the burden needed to produce it—the author cannot see that he proves his case, or even tries to do so. With regard to the second item, he bases his statement of difficulty in carrying out this principle on the theory that the people use the ordinary “percentage” method of distributing “burden.” The cost accountant necessarily looks backward: it is the duty of the engineer to look forward. It is the engineer who can look farthest into the future that is most useful today. A cost accountant who assumes to do this work must not only be an engineer also, but must be in the first rank of engineers.
