Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
 Iwasawa's classical asymptotical formula relates the orders of the  
 $p$ -parts  
 ${{X}_{n}}$  of the ideal class groups along a  
 ${{\mathbb{Z}}_{p}}$ -extension  
 ${{F}_{\infty }}/F$  of a number field  
 $F$  to Iwasawa structural invariants  
 $\lambda $  and  
 $\mu $  attached to the inverse limit  
 ${{X}_{\infty }}=\underleftarrow{\lim }\,{{X}_{n}}$ . It relies on “good” descent properties satisfied by  
 ${{X}_{n}}$ . If  
 $F$  is abelian and  
 ${{F}_{\infty }}$  is cyclotomic, it is known that the  
 $p$ -parts of the orders of the global units modulo circular units  
 ${{U}_{n}}/{{C}_{n}}$  are asymptotically equivalent to the  
 $p$ -parts of the ideal class numbers. This suggests that these quotients  
 ${{U}_{n}}/{{C}_{n}}$ , so to speak unit class groups, also satisfy good descent properties. We show this directly, i.e., without using Iwasawa's Main Conjecture.