Sax – Preiserscheinungen des Verkehrswesens (1926)

Emil Sax’s pamphlet is a methodological and substantive critique of Oskar Engländer’s Theorie des Güterverkehrs und der Frachtsätze. Sax’s target is not theory as such, but a theory whose mathematical exactness depends on assumptions that erase the economic diversity it seeks to explain. Against Engländer’s claims of originality, Sax treats many propositions as already familiar in Verkehrslehre: freight costs shape the spatial reach of sales, lower freight can widen markets, and competing origins create delivered-price boundaries.

Es bedarf der mathematischen Form der Ideenentwicklung auf unserm Gebiet nicht

English translation: The mathematical form of developing ideas is not needed in our field.

This is not a rejection of abstraction, but a demand that abstraction remain tied to observable conditions. Sax accepts simplified models when they illuminate tendencies, yet denies that exact numerical laws can be derived where population, purchasing power, needs, social stratification, and settlement patterns vary across space. Engländer’s “Preiswilligkeitsparadoxon,” his market-radius calculations, and his deductions about Absatzmenge are therefore not rejected because they are formal, but because their precision rests on unreal uniformity.

Die neue Theorie gibt eine genaue Maßbestimmung der theoretischen, hypothetischen Absatzmenge.

English translation: The new theory provides an exact quantitative determination of the theoretical, hypothetical volume of sales.

Sax’s distinction between tendency and exact measure governs his treatment of commodity prices under transport costs. A freight reduction may enlarge the sales area and increase sales more than proportionally, but this cannot be turned into a universal quantitative relation. Where supply is fixed, Sax allows that cheaper freight may even permit a producer to raise price while still reaching a wider market. Yet Engländer’s coordination of price rise, buyer displacement, and quantity remains, for Sax, a construction built on imagined demand distributions rather than commercial reality.

The same pattern appears in Sax’s treatment of competition among producing places and of central markets supplied from surrounding regions. Geometrical market boundaries can illustrate delivered-price relations, but Sax regards this as evident rather than theoretically novel. Once multiple origins, goods, prices, and consumer groups interact, exact construction gives way to contingent economic complexity. In the Thünen-like analysis of city and hinterland, Sax grants Engländer one real contribution: distinguishing ordinary locational rent from rent arising through intensified cultivation near the market.

in der Scheidung liegt der Gewinn an theoretischer Einsicht.

English translation: the gain in theoretical insight lies in the distinction.

Even here, however, Sax finds Engländer’s categories overextended. “Mengenintensität,” “Qualitätsintensität,” and especially “Gewichtsverlustintensität” are made to carry more explanatory weight than they can bear. Drying fruit or distilling spirits is not simply a freight-saving reduction of weight; it changes the commodity and its value relation. Sax also resists the attempt to replace Thünen’s account of cultivation intensity with a general theory of weight-yield, since it relies on equal freight assumptions and insufficiently integrates demand-side price formation.

In the second part, on freight rates, Sax’s criticism becomes sharper. He defends Werttarifierung as an intelligible form of monopoly pricing: freight charges may reflect not only transport cost but also commodity value, market conditions, and the margin between production price plus freight and buyers’ willingness or ability to pay. This does not mean freight should be mechanically proportional to value. Value indicates possible room for differentiation, but actual tariffs are mediated by income strata, routes, market alternatives, distance, and competitive pressures.

Engländer’s competing principle, “Preiswilligkeit für die Beförderung,” appears to Sax unworkable. A carrier cannot know the exact willingness to pay for every commodity between every pair of places, nor can isolated two-point price relations be made into a coherent tariff system. Sax also criticizes Engländer’s shifts between freight rate and total charge, his imagined distance-independent tariff, and his later reintroduction of distance through discounts. The result would be not a rational schedule but an unstable proliferation of exceptions.

Sax’s central objection is that cost cannot be appended after demand theory has done its work. Costs, demand, distance, monopoly power, technical conditions, and alternative routes are jointly involved in price formation from the outset.

Die Rolle der Kosten im Preisbildungsprozeß ist keine ergänzende, sondern eine wesentliche.

English translation: The role of costs in the price-formation process is not a supplementary one, but an essential one.