The Practice of Depreciation

IN A PREVIOUS article I made a brief and incomplete survey of the theory of depreciation. In the present paper I discuss its practice. One obstacle to practical progress in this field is that mathematically trained minds are seldom well informed on what accountants actually do. The latter are therefore more often criticized for methods which they are not using than for those which they are. Even otherwise valuable contributions thus elicit opposition quite unnecessarily. The inappropriate antithesis tends to discredit the rest of the argument...