Wilhelm Vleugels, Die Lösungen des wirtschaftlichen Zurechnungsproblems bei Böhm-Bawerk und Wieser (1930)

Wilhelm Vleugels’s monograph reconstructs two Austrian solutions to economic imputation: how the value of a jointly produced good is attributed to its complementary productive factors. His central contention is that Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser answer different, complementary questions. Böhm-Bawerk explains the valuations guiding particular economic decisions and the formation of prices; Wieser describes the functional interdependence of values and prices in equilibrium. Their apparent opposition reflects misunderstandings of scope and assumptions, not incompatible theories. This reconstruction also serves Vleugels’s broader defence of the unity of “psychological” and “mathematical” economics.

The exposition moves from elementary value and cost theory to imputation as a subjective-value problem, then to price formation and actual distribution. Substitutability supplies its connecting principle. A good’s value depends not necessarily on the benefit it presently yields but on the benefit actually dependent upon possessing it, allowing for replacement and alternative uses. Productive goods receive their value from the marginal products they make possible; costs can then transmit that valuation to other products. Vleugels thus preserves the classical cost law as a restricted result while reversing its ultimate explanatory direction.

Economic imputation must first be distinguished from physical causation and moral entitlement. The economist attributes returns to scarce, controllable productive resources, not to every natural condition contributing to production. Nor does explaining functional distribution establish the justice of personal incomes: ownership and noneconomic power cannot simply be derived from the economic laws under examination.

The crucial distinction within imputation concerns utility yielded and utility dependent on possession:

Abhängiger und wirklich gestifteter Nutzen sind nicht ohne weiteres identisch miteinander; für unsere Bewertungen (auch der komplementären Güter) ist der abhängige Nutzen bestimmend, der mit dem von den betreffenden Gütern tatsächlich gestifteten identisch, aber auch kleiner sein kann, was oben schon bei der ersten Anwendung des Substitutionsprinzips erwähnt wurde¹).

English translation: Dependent utility and utility actually yielded are not necessarily identical; for our valuations (including those of complementary goods), dependent utility is decisive: it may be identical with the utility actually yielded by the goods concerned, but may also be smaller, as was already mentioned above when the substitution principle was first applied¹).

Böhm-Bawerk’s cases combine replaceability with alternative usability. Where neither exists, the entire group’s utility depends on each indispensable member; attributing that value alternatively to each is a guide to action, not an additive division of the return. Where replacement is possible, the sacrificed alternative use determines value; irreplaceable members receive the residual. Vleugels defends these rules against the objection that hypothetical losses illegitimately change the situation. Such changes are precisely what practical decisions about acquisition, surrender, and substitution require. An administrative allocation for taxation may remain arbitrary without invalidating this explanation of exchange.

Against Hans Mayer’s objection that Böhm-Bawerk determines factor values only after production has been planned, Vleugels sketches an economy built through successive provisional combinations. Valuations guide planning and are revised as further possibilities become known. Equilibrium is the conceptual endpoint of this adjustment, not its necessary starting condition:

Freilich: für alle theoretische Betrachtung bleibt die Statik ein unentbehrliches Werkzeug.

English translation: Admittedly: for all theoretical analysis, statics remains an indispensable tool.

Here Wieser’s simultaneous equations acquire their proper role. Different products combine the same productive factors in different proportions; equilibrium makes their values jointly determinable. Vleugels extends this account from an isolated economy to an exchange economy, interpreting the equations through equilibrium prices rather than directly through utility. Böhm-Bawerk’s explanation of price formation supplies the intervening step, avoiding the covert presupposition of prices in their own explanation.

Yet the formal similarity between individual valuation and market allocation implies no identity of welfare outcomes. Markets allocate according to purchasing power as well as need:

Das Streben jedes einzelnen nach seinem Nutzenmaximum, wozu die Wahrnehmung des Rentabilitätsinteresses gehört, schließt die Verwirklichung eines Nutzenmaximum für die Gesamtheit aus.

English translation: Each individual’s pursuit of maximum utility, which includes attending to profitability, excludes the realization of maximum utility for the community as a whole.

The concluding discussion traces how a cheaper input can alter production, demand, and prices throughout the system. This returns the argument to its methodological purpose: causal accounts explain adjustment, while functional equations disclose the interconnected equilibrium toward which it tends. The monograph’s significance lies in joining these explanatory tasks without mistaking market equilibrium for collective welfare maximization.