Papers and Proceedings of the Annual Meeting (Volume 7, No. 1)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1922. Excerpt: ... of training accountants. A little investigation disposes of such conclusions. I am heartily in sympathy with Professor Littleton's view on the teaching method to be applied in the case of students who have had no previous training in economics and who take their preliminary work in accounting concurrently with their work in elementary economics. If anything, Professor Littleton has credited the balance sheet approach with slightly more of advantage than I can subscribe to. I base this conclusion upon experience with both methods. If the work dealing with the philosophy of the subject does not at the outset cover more than the time required for two or three lectures, I can see no objection to the so-called balance sheet approach, but any time spent beyond this has too many decided disadvantages to recommend it. PRINCIPLES VS. RULES By R. G. Walker State University of Iowa The antithesis between what has been called in this assignment principles and rules is a fairly familiar one to those of us who take the larger aspects of our jobs seriously. It is the old conflict between what is abstract and covers the whole field, and that which is concrete and in hand--between fundamental doctrines and what one might variously call the prescribed practices, fit-form solutions, and maxims of real life. Not a little time of the previous convention was devoted to discussion along similar lines, and one can not help feeling that its more or less periodic upheaval is a decidedly salutary occurrence. At all events, in a hurried civilization like ours where we are forever wanting to produce before we have acquired the producer's gifts, the question will always be coming up concerning the relative merits or relative fitness from a given standpoint of a general or basic pr...