Alfred Amonn, “Die Probleme der wirtschaftlichen Dynamik”

Amonn’s essay presents Schumpeter’s theory as an integrated architecture organized by the contrast between equilibrium and development, or between

Probleme des wirtschaftlichen Gleichgewichts oder statischen Probleme und Probleme der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung oder dynamischen Probleme

English translation: Problems of economic equilibrium, or static problems, and problems of economic development, or dynamic problems.

Statics does not mean immobility, but repetition under given conditions. A static economy is one in which knowledge, wants, resources, techniques, and conduct reproduce themselves, so that

in jeder folgenden Wirtschaftsperiode genau dasselbe geschieht

English translation: in every subsequent economic period exactly the same thing happens

Amonn translates this into marginalist equilibrium theory: goods and productive services receive values through marginal utilities; exchange coordinates subjective valuations into prices; and under full competition prices tend to equal costs. Since costs ultimately reduce to wages for labor and rents for land, the static system leaves no theoretical place for specifically capitalist residual incomes. Its decisive negative conclusion is therefore:

Gewinne können in der statischen Wirtschaft nicht entstehen.

English translation: Profits cannot arise in a static economy.

This absence becomes the foundation of dynamics. Profit, capital, interest, credit, and crisis are not accidental irregularities within equilibrium; they require a different explanatory principle. Amonn locates that principle in the entrepreneur, who differs from the routine manager by interrupting repetition and introducing

eine »andere (neue) Kombination« der ursprünglichen Produktivgüter

English translation: an "other (new) combination" of the original productive goods

Development is thus not movement in general, since static economies also move through recurring production and exchange. It is the purposive reorganization of production toward a surplus: new tools, methods, organizations, qualities, routes, or markets that promise more output for the same cost or the same output for less cost. The entrepreneur buys productive means at prices formed in the old system, while the new combination may yield returns based on a higher valuation. Profit is the temporary gap between inherited costs and transformed results.

Amonn’s account of capital and interest follows from this same dynamic interval. Because entrepreneurs usually lack the purchasing power required for new combinations, they borrow; the lender’s return is interest, and the money fund thereby functions as capital. Amonn accepts Schumpeter’s stress on credit but weakens any claim that bank credit is logically indispensable. Interest is not an independent productivity income; it is derived from entrepreneurial surplus, a separated share of dynamic gain. When innovations spread, imitation and competition erode entrepreneurial profit, raise input prices, lower output prices, and restore the cost law. Yet the restored equilibrium is not the old one: it has incorporated the innovation.

The crisis theory extends the same argument. Pure statics contains no endogenous crisis, while dynamics in principle moves toward a new equilibrium. Crisis arises in the transition, when innovations disturb interdependent systems of value, price, demand, supply, cost, and return. If many changes are uncoordinated and mutually obstructive, readjustment may fail:

Dieser Zusammenbruch des Wert- und Preissystems einer Volkswirtschaft ist das, was wir Krise nennen

English translation: This collapse of the value and price system of a national economy is what we call a crisis.

The essay’s significance lies in its disciplined separation of equilibrium theory from dynamic theory. Amonn shows that the central phenomena of capitalism can be understood only as transformations of an interdependent value-price structure: equilibrium explains repetition and cost regulation, while dynamics explains the temporary divergences through which entrepreneurship, profit, credit, capital, interest, and crisis arise.