TABULAR STANDARD. A proposed stand ard of value which should obviate difficulties due to changes in the purchasing power of money. The proposal involves the preparation, by public authority, of a table of relative values of cer tain selected commodities after the fashion of an index number, and the permissive use of this table as a legal standard in contracts involving deferred payments. A tabular standard has been briell• defined as an official index number. Its compilation would require a commission or other body with power and facilities to collect price statistics. Having decided what commodities should be employed as basis for the standard, the commission would then calculate a yearly or monthly index number according to some accepted method. (See article INDEX NumnEns.) The statistics would of course be public, and any one who chose could verify the calculation. The rise and fall of prices would either he expressed in percentages, o• an arbitrary unit would be adopted, whose changing values, expressed in money, would indicate the same thing.
The practical operation of the tabular stand ard is simple. 'When a person makes a loan of say $100 for one year. the contract entitles him to receive the same number of dollars (usually w•itlh interest) at the end of the specified time, but it does not insure that. the $100 which he lent and the $100 he receives will have the same pur chasing power. if prices have risen in the in terval. his $100 will buy less, if prices have fallen it will huy more. In so far as changed purchasing power is not compensated by a change in rates of interest. debtors are likely to he burdened by an appreciation, creditors by a depreciation. of the value of money. Suppose, however, the tabular standard to he employed, and that A sell' a piece of property to B for $12,000. of which n is to be paid at once, and more at the end of each succeeding year. The $3000 cash is of course paid as such. But after a year the tabular standard might show the purchasing power of money to have fallen 10 per cent. Expressed in tabular units, if at the time of sale a unit was worth $10, it would now be worth $11.11, giving the proportion 10.00:11.11:: $3000: $3333.33. which last figure is what B will have to pay. If at the end of the sec ond year a unit of the tabular standard was worth $9, 11 would be called on for only $2,700. 'Whether he pays more or less in money, the sum will always have a uniform value in terms of the commodities on which the standard is based.
That many advantages would be gained from the use of a tabular standard has generally been admitted. Two serious practical difficulties stand in the way of its introduction. First, the conservative attitude of business men toward any change of this sort; second, the difficulty of agreeing upon the precise mode of calculating the standard, and especially upon the precise commodities which should be selected as basis. Gen. F. A. Walker and others have questioned with good reason the practicability of the stand ard for the frequent short-time transactions of ordinary business, but for contracts of long dura tion, and for correcting injustice to recipients of fixed salaries, there seems no ground to ques tion its suitableness.
The first conception of a general index number, or tabular standard, however, appears to date from 1798, when Sir George S. Evelyn read be fore the Royal Society a paper on "Endeavors to Ascertain a Standard of Weights and ;Measures" (Philosophical Translations, vol. lxxxviii., pp. 175 et seq.). Evelyn's selection of articles is open to criticism, as was pointed out by Arthur Young in 1511. Joseph Lowe (The Present State of Eng land, London, 1S22), referring to both Young and Evelyn, proposes the actual introduction of a tabular standard, and discusses the modes of calculating it. (New York edition, 1524, p. 2S7, and Appendix.) His is the first practical treat ment of the subject in English. In Germany the principle of the tabular standard had been sug gested about 1S05. in application to rent pay ments. (Horton, Silrer and Gold, 1577, pp. 39, 157.) G. I'. Serope, in a pamphlet of 1833, and in Principles of Political Economy (London, 1S33, pp. 405, 424), again proposed the standard. G. P. Porter also treated the subject, and gave a table, in his well-known Progross of the Nation (London. 1535 and 1547). The matter was finally brought to prominence by W. S. Jevons, in an essay of 1865, and more forcibly in his Money and the Mechanism of Exchange (1575, chap. 25).
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Consult the Reports of the Bibliography. Consult the Reports of the Committee of the British Association on Meas vri-ng Variations in the Value of the Monetary Standard (British• Association. Reports, 1887, 1SSS. 1E+89, 1800; the most important material in English) ; also Price, Money and Its Relation to Prices (London, ISM) f Walker, Money (New York, 1878) Report of the Monetary Commis sion. of the Indianapolis Conrention, 1S9S.