'Success Indicator' Function of Income Concepts Argues Its Further Development.

Abstract The corporate device for organizing productive forces, while a monumental success in permitting coordinated economic activity on a vast scale, has caused some serious problems even with the plenitude of goods and services that gives us our so-called "affluent" society as of January 1963. The factors that have spoilt the in-come concept merely mirror the problem of our society, a society which has a long established tradition of "drifting," a great reluctance to face disagreeable facts. Professional people, on the other hand, are trained to seek out the facts, agreeable or otherwise, and to point the way to a solution if they can. Obviously a reconstituted income concept, that is, one that reveals to the fullest extent possible significant clues about management's performance, will not solve all of the problems mentioned above. But it is the only accepted measure of enterprise performance available today. At the present, therefore, accountants should be concerned with making such improvements in their "success indicator" -the income concept-as they can.