No Great Depression, Run The Table.

I agree that detailed numbers were not available. But I'm talking about very rough and ready numbers.

For example, any kind of seasoned political pro could have picked up in 1930 that this wasn't just normally bad unemployment of a recession. This was really bad unemployment. And then you take an inexact medium step and see how it works, such as Civilian Conservation Corp, such as any of the other alphabet soup programs. Now, we didn't really get out of the depression till the much more substantial spending of World War II, echoing Paul Krugman's conclusion about the housing bubble and 2009 financial crisis that you can't really do enough infrastructure spending quickly enough to make that much of a difference.

And I still like the analogy of managerial accounting, quick inexact numbers for internal purposes, rather than the exact numbers for external reporting. For example, one goal of managerial accounting is to do a somewhat accurate job of distributing the overhead costs to the goods and services produced. If you just divide the total research and development by the cost of the service provide, you might be overattributing to the cash cows and underattributing to the new services. And we might be able to do it better, in a very inexact way. And traditionally, the success of a business unit has been measured by ROI (Return on Investment). But if it's 12% for a unit, you often have the managers turning down otherwise profitable opportunities because they're not quite 12%. So, some companies have tried what's called residual income, although this has some issues, too.
 
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