Abstract The importance of understanding income and profits is readily apparent when one regards them as means to ends which men hold desirable. Statements are made and questions asked everywhere concerning the nature of income and profits and their interrelationships, the amounts and kinds of goods and services actually produced and the amounts and kinds which should and could be produced, the causes of increases and decreases in production and profits and the manner and ratio of the distribution of production among men. It appears that in the U.S., there are yet no good statistical analyses or measures of income with which with confidence to answer these questions. In the accounts of profit-making corporations, partnerships trust estates and so on, the amounts designated by accountants as profit or income may in most cases correspond in a rough fashion to what economists would term profit and as a practical matter it seems acceptable and harmless to consider them as such. What is harmful is the habit of thinking of profit as income and of wages, rent and interest as costs.
H. G. Kimball (Sat,) studied this question.