Martha Stephanie Braun, Die Wirtschaftstheorie der Gegenwart

Martha Stephanie Braun’s journal review essay examines the published volumes of the international Festschrift for Friedrich von Wieser, edited by Hans Mayer with Frank A. Fetter and Richard Reisch. She treats its eighty contributors as evidence of renewed international cooperation in economics after the war. Her assessment combines confidence in marginal analysis with discriminating criticism: theoretical progress depends on conceptual precision and explanatory power, not merely on allegiance to a school. Because the second volume, devoted to price and monetary theory, remains unpublished, her concluding judgment is expressly provisional.

Braun first explains the intellectual value of a collection whose contributions largely consolidate existing research:

Sie sind aber in anderem Sinne für den Fachmann viel reizvoller als Lehrbücher; denn sie bringen oft über den gleichen Gegenstand Abhandlungen verschieden gesinnter Autoren, sie überlassen die Auffindung der Lösung dem Leser.

English translation: Yet in another sense they are much more stimulating for the specialist than textbooks; for they often present essays on the same subject by authors of differing views, leaving the reader to find the solution.

Disagreement makes the collection useful for specialists and gifted beginners alike. Braun particularly values its inclusion of opponents of the marginal principle, despite its commitment to demonstrating that principle’s effectiveness. Reading the first volume’s national surveys, she finds substantial convergence beneath differences of formulation. She associates advances in applied theory with established traditions of marginal analysis, especially in Italy, the United States, and the Nordic countries, while noting the international importance of mathematical and graphical methods.

Her discussion of the third volume follows its division of income into wages, interest, rent, and entrepreneurial profit. Questions of definition lead into questions of causal explanation: Fisher separates invested sums from income; wage studies reconsider inherited theories; Wicksell refines Böhm-Bawerk’s account of interest. Supino’s distinction between discount and long-term interest exposes an inadequately investigated problem, even though Braun considers his solution overstated. Unexplained money-market phenomena leave room for economic-policy dilettantism. Studies of rent and profit, meanwhile, gain explanatory force by allowing for changing economic conditions and negative returns.

The fourth volume supplies Braun’s most sustained critical engagement. Against accounts locating crises principally in unequal price adjustment, she insists that recurrent cycles require an explanation involving credit:

So wichtig es auch scheint, sich die Ungleichmäßigkeit des Tempos, in dem sich Preissteigerungen in den einzelnen Produktionszweigen vollziehen, vor Augen zu halten, so irreführend ist die Ansicht, die Konjunkturen entstünden unabhängig von der Organisation des Kreditwesens.

English translation: However important it may seem to keep in view the uneven pace at which price increases occur in the individual branches of production, the view that business cycles arise independently of the organization of the credit system is misleading.

Her distinction is between unavoidable disproportions in production and the historically specific cyclical movements associated with modern credit institutions. She also separates monetary cycle theory from any necessary commitment to stabilizing an arbitrarily constructed price index. Thus she finds the collection’s treatment of business cycles less advanced than contemporary research warrants.

International trade and public finance receive greater praise. Schüller’s attention to differences in production costs provides a defensible framework for tariff negotiations without removing the damage caused by protectionism. Viner’s refinements of trade and purchasing-power-parity theory, together with Cabiati’s analysis of international capital movements, are singled out as outstanding. Their importance lies in connecting theoretical distinctions to postwar problems of currency instability, banking policy, and unequal short- and long-term interest rates.

In public finance Braun follows debates over taxation’s limits, tax shifting, progression, and extraordinary expenditure. She welcomes Strigl’s distinction between taxes entering costs and burdens falling on prices that diverge from costs, but rejects Lindahl’s loose transfer of individual valuation to collective decisions:

Mit der vagen Analogie zwischen Bewertungen einzelner Wirtschaftssubjekte und Bewertungen des Kollektivums ist nichts gewonnen.

English translation: Nothing is gained by the vague analogy between valuations by individual economic agents and valuations by the collectivity.

This objection crystallizes her methodological standard: analogy must not substitute for identifying whose valuations and which mechanisms explain an outcome. The final essays on socialism reveal, for Braun, the continuing absence of an adequate account of its newer economic theory. Her qualified endorsement rests chiefly on advances in international trade and public finance. The review’s enduring interest is its selective mapping of theoretical progress: international pluralism is productive when disagreement yields sharper concepts and better explanations of concrete economic problems.