Abstract Social Accounts are similar to every accounting system in that their main purpose is the systematic organization of information. The accounts may have many purposes. The different uses may require quite differently organized accounts. The inability to portray the complexity of the real world in a few summary numbers may force the accountant to forego a set of accounts which conforms to the conceptual scheme initially devised and instead make only approximations. Both of these difficulties are present in the social accounts and seriously affect the usefulness of the accounts. The entire field of social accounting has shifted tremendously in the years since the pioneering estimates of the National Bureau of Economic Research in the first decade of this century. From an initial interest in estimating the national income which was an index of the, condition of the economic system, the social accountants have shifted their attention to the ambitious task of describing in detail the structure of the economy. The purposes for which the abstracted accounting system were to be used have broadened, and, though there have been some changes in the accounts, the original motivation still dominates. As a result, the accounts misrepresent the world to those who wish to use them for these additional purposes.
Julius Margolis (Wed,) studied this question.