Mahr (1964), Der unbewältigte Wohlstand

Mahr’s Der unbewältigte Wohlstand treats affluence not as a settled achievement but as a problem modern economies have failed fully to master. Its governing concern is the instability created when rising incomes, employment expectations, enterprise strategies, and state responsibility become mutually reinforcing. Prosperity intensifies effort and consumption, but it also produces new vulnerabilities: workers seek higher earnings, firms normalize aggressive practices, banks react defensively to public anxiety, and governments are drawn into permanent responsibility for employment.

Daher bemühen sich auch die Arbeiter nach Kräften, eine erhöhte Leistung zu erbringen, um ein größeres Einkommen zu erzielen.

English translation: Workers therefore also strive with all their might to achieve higher output in order to obtain a larger income.

This sentence captures one of the book’s central tensions. Welfare and abundance do not abolish economic compulsion; they reorganize it. The worker’s pursuit of higher income becomes part of the productive mechanism of prosperity itself. Mahr therefore does not present Wohlstand as passive comfort, but as a dynamic social order in which rising expectations press individuals toward intensified performance.

The same logic appears at the level of firms and markets. Mahr’s discussion of American practice suggests that questionable or once exceptional business conduct has become generalized across forms of enterprise. The problem is not confined to monopoly power alone; competitive firms too adopt methods that reshape economic life.

Heutzutage ist eine solche Vorgangsweise in Amerika häufiger geworden, sie wird nicht bloß von gewissen monopolistischen Firmen geübt, sondern auch von Konkurrenzunternehmungen.

English translation: Nowadays such a practice has become more common in America; it is exercised not only by certain monopolistic firms but also by competitive enterprises.

Here the book broadens its critique from isolated abuses to systemic adaptation. Affluent capitalism spreads practices through competition as well as concentration. The result is an economy in which prosperity is accompanied by institutional imitation, strategic pressure, and a weakening of older assumptions about market self-correction.

Mahr also emphasizes the limits of conventional monetary management. In conditions of fear, liquidity preference, and public distrust, technical instruments lose force. Lowering reserve requirements may not stimulate credit if banks themselves prefer safety and high reserves.

Aus den gleichen Gründen bleibt auch die Senkung der Mindestreservensätze wirkungslos, zumal die Banken mit Rücksicht auf das ängstlich gewordene Einlegerpublikum aus eigenem Antrieb möglichst hohe Reserven halten.

English translation: For the same reasons, a reduction of the minimum reserve ratios likewise remains ineffective, especially since the banks, in view of a depositor public that has grown anxious, of their own accord hold reserves as high as possible.

This passage is important because it shows Mahr’s distance from purely mechanistic policy thinking. Economic instruments operate through institutions, expectations, and confidence. Once the public becomes anxious, banks internalize that anxiety, and policy levers fail to produce their intended effects. Prosperity remains “unbewältigt” because the system’s psychological and institutional reactions cannot be mastered by technical adjustment alone.

The political consequence is a strong theory of state responsibility. Mahr presents modern governments as compelled to intervene whenever employment declines. Full employment is no longer merely an economic preference; it has become a political obligation attached to the legitimacy of the modern state.

Demzufolge sind die Regierungen einzugreifen gezwungen, wenn in irgendwelchen Bereichen der Volkswirtschaft ein Rückgang der Beschäftigung einsetzt.

English translation: Governments are consequently compelled to intervene whenever a decline in employment sets in in any sector of the economy.

The formulation is strikingly categorical: governments are “gezwungen.” Prosperity thus creates a new dependency between society and state. Once mass employment and rising living standards become normal expectations, downturns cannot be treated as private or local misfortunes. They demand public action, expanding the scope of economic governance.

Yet Mahr’s argument is not narrowly technocratic. He registers the human and cultural costs of adjustment, especially where economic structures displace or marginalize people whose capacities are not easily absorbed by the dominant productive order.

Man mag dies bedauern, denn vielfach handelt es sich um Menschen von hohem Bildungsniveau mit künstlerischen und wissenschaftlichen Neigungen.

English translation: One may regret this, for in many cases these are people of a high level of education with artistic and scientific inclinations.

This note of regret complicates the book’s economic diagnosis. The affluent society may generate wealth while failing to honor forms of life, education, and talent that do not fit its prevailing incentives. In this sense, Mahr’s “unmastered prosperity” names both a macroeconomic problem and a cultural one: abundance expands possibilities, but also produces pressures, exclusions, and dependencies that the institutions of the time have not adequately resolved.