MATAURA NEWS

Southland Times, Issue 20200, 10 June 1927, Page 4

MATAURA NEWS

WORKERS’ EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATION. (From Our Correspondent.) The usual weekly meeting of the W.E.A. was held in the Coronation Hall on Wednesday evening. Mr Alderson occupied the chair and Mr Price, of Gore, was the lecturer. The attendance was again poor. This is most unfortunate as the courses of lectures being given on both Literature and Economics are really excellent, and are well worth the little trouble entailed by attending them. The lecturer, in his address, dealt with the subjects of “Value, Money, Banking and the Cost of Li\ing.” Value, he defined as “the objective exchange value.” Nowadays we think of value in money. In the early days we effected exchange by means of barter, but this was very inconvenient, depending as it did “on the double coincidence of want and possession.” And, frequently, too, the arranging of terms presented grave difficulties owing toe “indivisibility” of the articles being bartered. “When speaking of ‘value’ we nearly always run into ‘money,’ and thus we come to ‘price.’ ‘Price’ is of two kinds —‘market’ price and ‘normal’ price. Market price is the price we pay at any given time and varies from time to time, while ‘normal’ price is the mean of the variations of the market prices.” The laws of supply and demand were then dealt with and clearly explained by means of graphs, and then the lecturer went on to deal with returns, of which there are three kinds, constant, diminishing and increasing. Constant, returns are obtained when production is constant —neither rising nor falling in quantity, while diminishing returns are obtained when the result is a decreased return per unit of expenditure. These returns &re most frequently met with in connection with farming. The bonanza farmers of Canada were mentioned here as an illustration. A farmer would work his land until the returns were insufficient to adequately repay him for his work through the exhaustion of the soil. He would then be faced with the necessity of going to the expense of manuring his land or going further west and settling on new land. The bonanza farmer choose the latter. Increasing returns were met with mostly in connection with business—usual!" the bigger the business the less it cost to produce, but this only held good up to the point where the business would become unwieldy through its size. Dealing with money, the speaker gave its uses as (1) a medium of exchange, (2) a common denominator, (3) a standard of value, and (4) a store of value. To be of use money must also have the attributes of acceptability, stability, homogeneity, cognoscibility, durability, divisibility, portability and coinability. P equals MV. plus MI.VI over T. One would hardly think that such a formula as the foregoing, harmless as it looks, could have much to do with such a serious matter as the cost of living, but our lecturer said it has. Whose fault it was he didn’t say, but he explained it thus:—P equals price, M equals money in circulation, V equals velocity of circulation, MI equals other instruments of currency such as cheques, etc., in circulation, VI equals velocity of the said instruments in circulating, and T equals trade. Further elaboration is quite unnecessary. At the end of the lecture a short discussion took place when the usual courtesies were extended to the speaker and the chairman and the meeting closed. HOCKEY. Two games of hockey were played on the Mataura Recreation Ground on Wednesday afternoon. The first game was played between the Mataura B and the Hokonui B, and resulted in a win for the former by 2 goals to nil. The second game was between thtf Mataura A and the Hokonui A, with the result that the latter won easily by 4 goals to nil. The Hokonui team had both speed and combination superior to the home team, who seemed to be lacking, particularly in combination, and several reasonably good chances were lost through lack of support. FOOTBALL. A match between the Mataura fourth grade and the Gore High School resulted in a win for Mat aura bv 24 to 6 on Wednesday afternoon on the Recreation Ground here. The boys played a nice open game full of incident, aud it is to the credit of the High School boys that they did not slacken in their efforts, though they were playing an uphill game. In the scrum each side seemed to be getting a fair share of the ball and the passing was good, though in this department of the game the Mataura team was the better of the two.