1992 Accounting Hall of Fame Induction: David Solomons - Introduction

David Solomons has brought a kind of sanity to the accounting literature and to policy deliberations.While always faithful to his principles, which he expounds with admirable clarity and persuasiveness, he has consistently had regard for their operational feasibility.The historical evolution of ideas, policies and practices has always occupied an important place in David's writings. Moreover, few authors can match the ease with which he draws out the essence of ideas and experiences from different national cultures.He is a master craftsman of the English language, with a penchant for argument by metaphor. is financial map-making has been his metaphor of choice.David provides the reader with a broad perspective for whatever he is discussing and the reader is invited to follow his inexorable logic in full knowledge of all that he considers relevant to the debate. In his writings, he is, above all, a scholar and a teacher. Even if does not accept his conclusions and recommendations, he/she nonetheless acquires a precious insight into the issues, the arguments, and the forces driving the controversy. There is always wisdom in what David writes.David's academic career has been at three universities: the London School of Economics (LSE), from 1946 to 1955; the University of Bristol, from 1955 to 1959; and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania from 1959 to his retirement in 1983.His earliest work dealt with management accounting, accounting theory, and accounting education. He was much influenced by Ronald S. Edwards, a LSE industrial economist who had a large interest in accounting. In the late 1930s, Edwards had written a series of memorable articles in The Accountant, in which he dealt with costing history and, in a 13-part article written in 1938, produced perhaps the first treatise on asset valuation and income determination in the British literature, in which he defended the increased-net-worth concept of taking into account Bonbright's notion of to the owner. David has called Edwards one of my principal mentors during my LSE period.David's first major article, in 1953, was a pioneering essay on costing history, and during the 1950s he revised Sidney Alexander's famous tract, Income Measurement in a Dynamic Economy, which, like Edwards's work, was an argument for the increased-net-worth concept of income. However, David's pivotal works, in my view, came after his move to the U.S. in 1959.In 1961, David concluded, ruefully, that it was not operationally feasible to isolate changes in expectations from Alexander's economic income, thus rendering it of little use as a satisfactory measure of enterprise performance. He thereupon issued his famous prediction that so far as the history of accounting is concerned, the next twenty-five years may subsequently be seen to have been the twilight of income measurement. Twenty-five years later, he acknowledged that his prediction had not been fulfilled, and that perhaps his forte was not as a seer, In 1966, he published a major paper on Bonbright's to the owner formulation for valuing property, and gave it impetus in the debates over current value accounting by restating it in an inequality notation. David's paper, which was published in the second edition of Morton Backer's Modern Accounting Theory, directly or indirectly influenced the Sandilands Committee, the FASB, and the standard-setting bodies in Australia and New Zealand, all of which, in form or another, embraced to the owner (also known as to the business or deprival value) in their dicta on current cost accounting issued during the 1970s.In 1965, at the request of the Financial Executives Research Foundation, David wrote his first book, Divisional Performance: Measurement and Control, in which he reported on a survey of 25 major companies and presented his own recommendations on how best to evaluate and control decentralized operations. …