Die Ansichten von Mr. White, Mr. Bilgram, Professor Macvane und Mr. Hawley

Originally published in 1896, this is a single-author polemical article. Böhm-Bawerk answers four American critics of the Positive Theorie des Kapitals—Horace White, Hugo Bilgram, Professor Macvane, and Frederick B. Hawley—after having treated Clark and Walker elsewhere. The structure follows those names, but the argumentative scope is broader: incompatible criticisms become an occasion to restate the logic of capital and interest.

Wenn man nun alle diese Kritiken miteinander vergleicht, so kann man die interessante Beobachtung machen, daß sie nichts miteinander gemeinsam haben, als daß ihnen irgend etwas an meiner Theorie mißfällt.

English translation: If one now compares all these criticisms with one another, one can make the interesting observation that they have nothing in common with each other except that something about my theory displeases them.

Against White, who makes interest depend on the intelligence of “captains of industry,” Böhm-Bawerk draws the essay’s first major line: entrepreneurial profit is not normal capital interest. Talent and luck explain exceptional gains; they do not explain why ordinary capital owners, at equal ability, receive more with more capital. As with land rent, skill may alter the result, but the normal return requires an objective basis on the side of the asset.

Die Talente und das Glück der seltenen captains of industry haben mit dem zu tun, was man Unternehmergewinn nennt, aber nicht mit dem normalen Kapitalzins.

English translation: The talents and good fortune of the rare captains of industry have to do with what is called entrepreneurial profit, but not with the normal interest on capital.

Bilgram’s objections shift the discussion to value, costs, and the contrast between present and future goods. Böhm-Bawerk denies that the Austrian school ignores costs; it recognizes several cost concepts, each useful for different analytical tasks. Against Bilgram’s focus on borrowing, he says the decisive market is wider than the loan market: workers sell the immature good labor for mature subsistence goods. For interest theory, it is enough that the market resultant favor present goods, not that every individual do so.

Aber für meine Erklärung des Zinses kommt es nicht darauf an, daß alle, sondern nur darauf, daß so viele Leute die gegenwärtigen Güter höher schätzen als die zukünftigen, daß auf dem Markte die Resultante von Angebot und Nachfrage zugunsten der gegenwärtigen Güter steht.

English translation: But for my explanation of interest, what matters is not that all, but only that so many people value present goods more highly than future goods, that on the market the resultant of supply and demand stands in favor of present goods.

Bilgram also argues that producing both mature and immature goods disproves any preference for mature goods. Böhm-Bawerk replies that intermediate goods are not preferred as such; they are necessary stages toward larger or possible consumption. This is why the suggested English terms “mature” and “immature” can be useful: the crucial distinction concerns service to present or future wants, not mere physical presence.

Wir erzeugen unreife Zwischenprodukte nur dann und deshalb, wenn und weil wir sonst entweder gar keine oder weniger reife Genußgüter erlangten.

English translation: We produce immature intermediate products only when and because we would otherwise obtain either no mature consumption goods at all, or fewer of them.

Macvane receives the most respectful and extended reply. He accepts the general productivity of roundabout methods, but doubts the law that further extensions of the production period yield diminishing increments. Böhm-Bawerk stresses that his numerical table is illustrative only; the claim is a bounded tendency, not exact measurement. He also separates his law from the familiar doctrine of diminishing returns to land.

Das von mir behauptete Gesetz hat einen ganz anderen Inhalt als der Satz von den abnehmenden Bodenerträgen.

English translation: The law I have asserted has a quite different content from the proposition of diminishing returns from land.

The distinction is substantive. Land’s law adds labor to a fixed natural agent; Böhm-Bawerk’s law holds labor constant and varies waiting time across production generally. Exact statistics are hard because a production period is scattered through many divided stages, but industrial experience still shows that more capital per worker raises output without doing so indefinitely. Against Macvane’s further doubt, he argues that wages shape technique: cheap labor favors direct methods, while high wages make machinery and longer detours profitable.

Macvane’s last objection—that future goods cannot literally have value—draws Böhm-Bawerk back to Austrian subjectivism. Value is not a physical attribute waiting for the object’s material arrival; it is a judgment of welfare-significance. People value absent and future goods, revise those valuations as time passes, and make real contracts for goods not yet produced.

Aber der Wert ist, wenigstens nach der Auffassung, die wir österreichische Ökonomisten jederzeit darüber gehabt und kundgegeben haben, eine Erscheinung, die im Psychischen und Subjektiven wurzelt.

English translation: But value is, at least according to the conception which we Austrian economists have always held and expressed, a phenomenon rooted in the psychical and the subjective.

Hawley is treated briefly because Böhm-Bawerk thinks he criticized the whole work without properly reading the positive volume. The alleged confusion of interest with profit is dismissed: pure interest must be distinguished from risk premium, lender’s effort, and entrepreneurial gain. The article’s lasting relevance is this compressed clarification under pressure. It presents Austrian capital theory as a theory of normal interest grounded in the market premium on present or mature goods, objectively productive but limited roundabout production, plural cost concepts, wage-shaped choice of technique, and a subjective theory of value broad enough to include future goods.