Historical Cost--Tale of a False Creed.
探讨会计中历史成本信条的起源与持续，指出其基础可能不牢且后果不公，但该信条仍作为传统会计惯例存在。
Abstract This article discusses the historical cost doctrine in accounting. The origin and persistence of the historical cost doctrine seem to have attracted little attention. There are scattered hints to the effect that, like the origin of double entry bookkeeping, its origin is remote and obscure. And there are hints that some have supposed cost-based accounting to have been the norm, a justifiable norm, since the time of Pacioli. On that supposition, departures from cost-based valuation have been regarded as anomalous. Perhaps that supposition underlies the survival of the cost doctrine and related practices as conventional accounting, not withstanding widespread allegations of their fallacious foundations and inequitable consequences. The art of double entry bookkeeping is not an obvious outcome of day-to-day experience. From experience, anyone may learn the rudiments of trade--the use of money and credit, the nature and ubiquity of exchange at money prices, the ebb and flow of money and other property as gains are sought and wants are satisfied, the legal rights in and against property, and the risks and penalties of error and default. Thus, laborers and artisans would become entrepreneurs--farmers and merchants and lenders--without any knowledge of double entry bookkeeping. Whether the art arose from the imagination of some banker or trader, or some independent observer with arithmetical skill and insight, is unknown. But it is commonly held that it originated in the necessity of a record, an adjunct to memory, of debts owing and owed.