Lindbergh Urges World Air Code

IMPOSSIBLE TO DEVOTE too much attention to overcoming obstacles to international flying!”

So speaks Lindbergh, “aviation counsel to the world,” of what is most needed for development of air travel and commerce in the shrinking distances around our globe.

His plea for securing a uniform standard of regulations for international flyers by all nations is welcomed by an overwhelming chorus of press approval.

“Land boundaries mean nothing to a bird,” says the Hartford Times; “they should mean nothing to the bird-man”:

“There is to a large degree the same natural freedom to flying that there is to radio. Both are borne on the wings of the air. Each is man’s successful attempt to release himself of the limitations of time and place. Lindbergh is right in stressing the point that artificial barriers have no place in this achievement of flying.”

World Aviation Code continued here…

Hoover Helps the Home-Builder

TO FIND A WAY TO MAKE IT EASIER for the average man or woman to obtain a home”—that, in the phrase of the New York World, is the object of the White House Conference on home-building and home ownership recently called by President Hoover.

Pointing out that this is the twenty-fourth commission appointed by the President, and the eleventh to operate with private funds, the Washington correspondents go on to explain that the organization will deal with the problems of home-planing, home-building and home-financing, but will recommend no legislation. Government officials and representatives of nineteen national organizations will comprise the membership.

Judging by the amount of editorial comment, the entire country is keenly interested in this new project of the President’s.

“Particular attention is to be given to high charges attending second mortgages and to cost of homes in an effort to work out an easier financial situation, something akin perhaps to that behind the automobile industry,” notes Carlisle Bargeron, of the Washington Post.

By this conference, as the President himself tells us, he hopes to “inspire better organization and remove influences which seriously limit the spread of home ownership, both town and country.” Then he tells us more about his plan:

“The conference will be organized by a planning committee comprised of representatives of the leading national groups interested in this field, under the chairmanship of Secretary Lamont. This planning committee will in turn set up nation-wide subcommittees to determine the facts and to study the different phases of the question. …

Reducing Housing Costs continued here…

Why Cheap Silver Cheapens Wheat

TWO price phenomena that attract world-wide attention are the very low price of wheat and the world-wide decline in the value of silver.

This is a great deal more than a coincidence, one statistical observer is inclined to think.

The Cambridge Associates of Boston have prepared a chart, here reproduced, which shows that in recent years, “not only major but even minor movements have synchronized between these two commodities to an extraordinary degree.” And we are told that “the reason is not far to seek”:

The great centers of population in the world are located, as every one knows, in the Orient.

While these people do not depend on wheat for subsistence to quite the same extent that we of the Occident do, it is nevertheless a fact that this grain does play a large part in the lives of the people of India and other parts of the Orient.

Therefore, when silver, which is their standard, goes down, their buying power is seriously affected, since wheat is produced almost exclusively in countries on a gold standard.  Therefore, a large part of the potential wheat-buying strength of the world is pitched at a considerably lower key, and the great wheat countries of the world—notably the United States, Canada and Russia—are faced with a surplus.

Source: The Literary Digest for August 23, 1930

“Cash-and-Carry” Spreading

THE BETTER TO MEET the competition of the chain stores, the Independent Grocers’ Alliance—the organization’s name is self-explanatory—is advising its members to adopt the cash-and-carry and self-service systems. The New York World tells us that some two thousand of the members of the Alliance have already complied with the request, and most of the others are expected to do so. Comments The World:

The Alliance has made the interesting discovery that the average purchase is actually larger when the customers wait on themselves; with free access to the shelves they seem to find the goods more tempting, or perhaps they do not arouse the same degree of sales resistance in themselves that a clerk may do.

If the average purchase is larger, it is also effected at less cost to the store. Under the old style of merchandising, the expenses of selling and delivery tend to increase with the volume of the business, but with self-service the expense ratio declines as the volume of sales increases.

There will always be a place for the store with its service and delivery system, but the self-service store is a useful variant which will contribute to reducing the present high cost of merchandise distribution.

It will exist alongside the service and delivery store just as the cafeteria exists beside the regular restaurant. In each case there is plenty of room for both.

Source: The Literary Digest for August 23, 1930

The Frequency of Droughts

NO PART of the United States or Canada is entirely exempt from drought, and no agricultural season passes in which it does not afflict some parts of these countries. There has never, however, according to Charles Fitzhugh Talman, been a drought over the whole or the greater part of temperate North America at one time. He says in his Science Service feature, Why the Weather? (Washington):

“Among the numerous elaborate climatic charts in the great ‘Agricultural Atlas of the United States,’ issued by the United States Department of Agriculture, there are two showing, for all districts, the frequency of dry spells of specified intensities during the twenty-year period 1896-1914. Whoever consults these charts is likely to be astonished at the high incidence of drought in the humid regions of the United States east of the Mississippi. Southern New England, for example, with a normal annual rainfall of about forty inches—double the minimum amount required for ordinary crops—experienced every two years on an average, during the period mentioned, a dry spell of at least thirty days’ duration, during which no day brought as much as a quarter of an inch of rain.”

Source: The Literary Digest for August 23, 1930